SMALL PRINT:IN AN era of high-tech play things and futuristic games, toy soldiers may be waning in popularity, but they endure. After generations of play, a Manchester-based design company has decided to inject a little realism into the toys.
The company Dorothy has made a set of toy soldiers called Casualties of War, which depict the little green men as amputees in wheelchairs, begging on the street, engaged in domestic violence, and most shocking of all, one soldier sitting on an armchair about to shoot himself.
The collection is based on a series of articles published in 2009 in the
Colorado Springs Gazette
about the challenges facing American soldiers when they returned home, and another investigation in the
New York Times
in 2010 about the high suicide rate among soldiers from California. Although not for sale, the soldiers represent a chilling adaptation of a commercial toy.
Toy soldiers are almost as old as war itself, with the first miniature figures found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and perhaps most famously, the 210 BC Chinese Terracotta army featuring 8,000 figurines, discovered by farmers in 1974. As for twisting them artistically as this latest project has done, toy soldiers are no strangers to art as well as play. Perhaps their most famous artistic incarnation was when the Chapman Brothers used 5,000 miniature Nazi soldiers to create their piece
F**king Hell
, which was destroyed by a fire in 2004 and rebuilt as a second installation
If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would We Be
.
The most expensive toy soldier ever sold was the 1963 prototype for what would become GI Joe. It sold at a Texas auction in 2003 for €140,000.
