The Toy Story movies have really helped to re-introduce plastic army men as a fun and imaginative toy.
My son really enjoyed this Toy Story bucket of soldiers from the official merchandise range.
It is top quality with plenty of soldiers, a variety of poses and the added bonus of 2 parachutists.
In the movies, the 200 animated little green army men toys are often seen being sent on missions by Woody and the gang. Led by Sarge they spy on new toys, rescue Buzz, find Woody’s hat and try to stop Andy’s dog getting through the bedroom door. And their ‘Leave no man behind’ motto is a good message for kids to learn.
The toy version is a replica of the bucket seen in the movie. Unfortunately it only contains 72 of the 200 troops but this is still plenty for some army fun. They are stuck to bases just like those in the movie so your child can stand them up or copy the animated walking sequence (just imagine trying to walk with wooden planks strapped to your feet for how to do this).
There are 72 Toy Story green army men that are accurate versions of those in the movie.
They are 2″ tall so larger than a lot of plastic army men.
They are fixed to base plates so stand up easily.
There are 12 different poses (see pictures below). There are 7 soldiers in each of the 10 main sculpts and 2 individual parachutist sculpts.
There are 2 figures with working parachutes. The strings are already fixed through a ring on the top of their helmet. They are made of more flexible plastic (presumably to withstand the impact of being thrown about).
The soldiers are not painted and have no articulation.
All the soldiers have weapons which are molded as part of them.
Pros
Quantity: 72 is a nice number of soldiers to have – there are not too many and not too few. There are plenty to use to re-enact army missions.
Quality: The build is far superior to the cheap sets that you find in dollar stores. They are sturdy, stand up well on their base plates and feel good. The plastic is softer than cheaper products so less brittle and less likely to break or snap.
Number of positions: having army men positioned in 12 different stances allows for a good variety of battle scenarios.
Size: The 2″ height is perfect for little fingers to hold, play with and position. (I love comparing things to apples so you can get a feel for how big they really are!)
Detailing: The level of detail on the soldiers is much higher than I was expecting. Uniforms and even facial features are clear.
Molds: The soldiers are well made and do not have any of those scratchy join seams and bad edges that are typical of toy army men. They are smooth with no sharp edges to cut your foot, if you tread on them, or your child as he plays.
Durable: They are sturdy and have stood up to all kinds of play. They have been dropped, trodden on, squashed etc and are still in great condition. They are suitable for both indoor and outdoor play (see our ‘on location’ pictures below).
Imagination: these toys will stimulate your kids imagination. They will soon get other toys involved in their imaginary battles too – cars or tanks, Legos for buildings and even things like Transformers for aliens to fight.
Parachutes: The inclusion of 2 parachutists is a real bonus and spices up the army role play. They are great to throw down from the top of the stairs and really do work (obvious disclaimer – just watch young kids playing on the stairs).
The bucket: I love the bucket. It is perfect to keep the soldiers tidied away at the end of the day. There is also a handle so it can be carried around easily or taken to other people’s houses. The bucket is sturdy and the lid stays on. It can also be stacked in a toy cupboard or stored in a toy box without getting damaged.
Cons
They don’t come to life like they do in the movies!
They are more expensive than generic plastic army men but you get what you pay for. They are not cheap as you are buying official Toy Story toys (complete with Certificate of Authenticity. But you do get a lot of soldiers of a great size and quality as well as a readymade storage bucket.
The parachute strings get tangled too easily but I’m not sure what the manufacturers could really have done to avoid this. They are also hard to throw up into the air and get to work – you really need to drop them from a height.
Toy Story Army Men Review
For kids into playing army or those into Toy Story toys, I would highly recommend this set of Toy story army men. They are a great quality classic toy as well as being movie replicas.
You can also find other Toy Story army toys such as the Lego Army Men On Patrol Set and Sarge’s Helicopter.
Having heard good things about the S107G Syma RC Helicopter, I thought I ought to check it out.
I was a bit worried when the box turned up as it says for kids aged 14+ and Ben (my son) is only 10, albeit going on 35.
Opening the box did nothing to allay my fears as the actual helicopter looks very fragile in real life. Being a micro helicopter, it is also pretty small so sits happily in the palm of your hand.
As such my husband had the first go as I thought Ben might smash it into bits before I got a chance to take some video. I should have known better as hubby managed to crash it straight away anyway. Luckily it is very durable so survived and Ben then got his turn where a few more crashes later, it is still in one piece – phew.
This is a micro coaxial Syma RC helicopter. It is hobby grade so is one step up from a toy helicopter. This basically means you can replace parts that get damaged or if you want to make modifications.
The best bit for beginners is that it has a built in Gyro. This stabilizes the spin and ensures it stays on course going in the direction you want.
The remote control has 3 channels so you have control over height, speed and direction. A 4 channel helicopter would have additional control over bank/roll.
You can turn it 360 degrees as well as up and down.
There is no assembly required but the remote control does need batteries.
It is made from a mixture of plastic and metal and is designed to withstand crashes.
The range of the remote control is 30ft.
You can choose from 2 frequencies allowing you to fly 2 helicopters at once.
The infra red remote does not work well in sunlight so this is an indoor toy.
Other Syma Military Models
For something that looks a bit more like its from the range of toy army vehicles, take a look at these other Syma helicopters:
So was it really as great as many hundreds of reviewers had promised? Yes it was! Watch it in action on our video or read the transcript at the end of the review.
Pros
Costing around $20 this Syma helicopter is great value for money.
It is lots of fun and the control functions are easy to learn. The sensitivity of the controls does take a bit of getting used to though. If you’re too heavy handed you’ll crash into the ceiling or floor very quickly. Small adjustments are all that is needed.
It is quite quick to get up and running, especially if you have pre-planned the initial charge.
The Syma S107 battery charges via a USB cable to your computer. You can also charge it up from the battery powered remote control which I can see would be good if you were out and about with it, although I imagine it would deplete the batteries pretty quickly. If you don’t have your computer on all the time, you might consider buying an AC plug to USB adapter.
Whilst not indestructible the helicopter is more durable than it looks. It has had some big crashes and other than tweaking the tail blade a bit it has survived. There is a metal casing that protects the innards which seems to do its job nicely. The blades seem to take care of themselves and don’t break. I think being lightweight with a sturdy frame and only moderate power means that it cannot crash too heavily.
The Syma S107 RC helicopter only flies for 6-7 minutes at a time but I actually think this is a pro because if my son had played with it for a few hours non-stop he probably wouldn’t have gone back to it for a few days but now when its charging he keeps checking on it so he can go and have another 6 minute fix when it’s ready.
The in built gyro means that the helicopter does not spin out of control so it can be controlled and flown very precisely. It is versatile, flies well in the direction you tell it to and is very responsive to the remote control. It is very easy to keep in a hover without moving forwards when you’ve had a bit of practice. All in all it is ideal for novices.
There is an adjustment knob on the remote to correct slight directional issues (see image of Trim Control below). In other words if you push the forwards lever but the helicopter veers off slightly to the right or left you can adjust the knob to get the helicopter back on track.
It is fairly quiet when flying.
If the worst does come to the worst, Syma S107 parts and spares are readily available. You can easily find rotor blades, tail blades, connect buckles, USB charger, tail parts etc so there is no need to throw the whole thing in the bin. They are also very cheap.
I messed up and bought a product on Amazon that said “colors may vary“. As such we got yellow when my son would have preferred red. You can get red, yellow and blue, so double check which one you are buying.
Out of the box it needs to charge. Of course us adults understand this, but a 10 year old does not. So if you are buying this as a gift, you might want to charge it, then stick it back in the box and wrap it at the last minute.
The Syma S107G helicopter takes 40-50 minutes to charge and this will last for 6-7 minutes of flying. Again to a 10 year old this seems terrible but it does keep him keen for the next flight.
It only works indoors as direct sunlight interferes with the remote control. You also need to avoid AC, heating or fans indoors as the airflow affects the flying. Depending on where you fly the Syma S107 indoors, you may want to cover up furniture so that it does not get scratched.
The plastic charging socket on the helicopter itself is twinned with a plastic mate on the USB lead. The resulting fit is not as tight as I’d like although it seems to work.
The Syma S107G manual’s translation into English is pretty bad. Here are some gems – and no it is not my bad typing – “When the helicopter flies steadity, you can showly push” – ha ha!
It needs 6 AA batteries for the remote control – blimey! That depleted our supplies.
You need quite a bit of space indoors to fly it more easily, especially at first. Somewhere where you have no precious ornaments and the like is probably best.
Things I Think You Might Find Useful To Know
It is quite tiny. Check it out compared to an apple below. It measures 22cm long, 3.8cm wide and 9.8cm high. The rotor diameter is 19cm.
Battery care – this is the most important bit of advice I can give you.
Never fly the helicopter until it is completely flat. Time yourself and limit the flying time to 5 minutes.
Allow the battery to cool down for 5 minutes between charging and flying (so after flying and after charging).
Unplug the helicopter from charge as soon as the red light comes on. (The lights are a bit confusing – basically when you plug the cable into the computer the light comes on. When you plug the helicopter into the other end, the light goes out. When the helicopter is charged, the light comes on again!)
You can see how the controls work on our video above but this picture also shows them:
The left hand lever moves the helicopter up and down vertically.
The right hand lever is directional, so front, back, left and right.
The smaller knob in the center is the trim control. This corrects the flight path of the helicopter if it is veering off to one side when you are supposedly flying straight ahead. Only small adjustments are needed if any.
The hardest thing I found was that the direction works relative to the helicopter. So it is advisable to stand behind the helicopter and then forwards is forwards as you would expect. But if you then turn the helicopter back round to face you, the forwards lever will now bring it back towards you. My natural instinct was to point the lever towards me (ie backwards) but this sent the helicopter backwards into the wall – oops!
Avoid hovering the helicopter too close to the ground on take off and landing as the air currents affect the stability. So go up quickly but immediately release the throttle or it will shoot into the ceiling.
Start off slowly with these practise exercises so you can get used to it and don’t damage it beyond recognition straight out of the box:
move up and down and left and right;
go in circuits (left and right);
perform figure of eights.
When you are about to crash, which at some point you definitely will be(!), kill the throttle to prevent damage.
Pick the helicopter up by the main body not the blades or tail.
You will notice the battery power depleting as you get close to the end of the charge. Initially when the battery is full, the helicopter takes of rapidly (too rapidly sometimes!), but as the battery drains the helicopter will not be able to fly as high and when it is about to run out, the helicopter will barely get off the ground. But as noted above, you should not run the battery down this much if you want it to last a long time.
Fun ideas
Obviously flying around the same room all the time might get a bit boring after a while, so set up some obstacles, activities or helipads from books or stools etc. As you can see on the video, we have a martial arts mat so we set up mini tests where we had to take off from one mat, fly to the edge of the room, turn around and land on a different mat.
As you get more experienced you can come up with your own more advanced flight skills competitions or just fly room to room.
Syma S107 Mods
We’re not really at the stage of needing to modify or repair anything yet but if you are then KillBuckets.com has a few great mod tutorials. These include:
Become a Syma S107 mechanic with this step by step teardown.
Remove the throttle return springs to allow for thumbs-off flying.
Replace the LiPo Battery.
Replace a flybar.
Overall
The Syma S107G helicopter would be an ideal learner level helicopter or one to practice with before spending your savings on a more expensive model. It will stand up to a bit of abuse while you learn to fly!
This is a video made by me and my Dad on how to fly the Syma S1076 [Edit: the box looks like S1076 but it’s actually S107G] Gyroscope system.
Before you fly the helicopter make sure that you get to know the controls properly. On the left you have the up and down key. This will basically lift you off the ground and hover you above the ground. Try not to push it too far up or you may go into the ceiling or if you’re outside who knows where you’ll end up. That’s the left hand key.
Here is an example of how to hover the helicopter so just pretty much using the up and down control as previously shown this is the helicopter taking off and hovering around the room. There are a very few slight adjustments to direction to stop it veering off but as you can see this is pretty much only using the left hand key. It takes a bit of practice to keep it at a certain level otherwise it does tend to go up and down but once you’ve got the hang of it you’ll soon get used to it. And that’s just using the left key.
Secondly you’ll need to get to grips with the directional control. The directional control works as you’d expect. Forwards is forwards. Backwards is backwards. Left is left and right is right. This is one of those controls that can move in any direction so it doesn’t have to be perfectly right or left or forwards or backwards. So do practice with this before you actually set off with your first flight.
Here is a small hop forwards. And here is a small hop backwards. Here we can see the directional commands in operation – the simple left manoeuvre followed by here we go a simple right manoeuvre. You can see its very straight forward.
If you find the helicopter veers off in one direction to the left or to the right then this is what the central control here is for. If you turn it to the left it will actually stop the helicopter from veering to the right and vice versa for the other direction. Use this carefully as only a small adjustment may be needed.
In this clip we’re looking at the left and right adjustment control. I’ve left the sound on on this clip so that parents can see exactly how loud the copter is. Here we can see the copter is actually rotating to the right so we’ve corrected it and now it’s staying just about perfect. So you will need to take some time to get this control exactly right. It’s the control at the centre of the console itself. Just play with it until you get it perfect and you’ll have hours of fun using this. As you can hear the helicopter isn’t very loud and your child or yourself in fact should have hours and hours of fun with it.
Finally this last clip is to show you how my son who is 10 years old after probably an hour’s worth of flying can control a helicopter in a very very small room. So you can see how easy it is for your child to get to grips with this. As you can see he’s just spinning it round here but keeping it very central and moving it backwards, forwards, left and right within a space of probably around 15 x 12 feet. Just do be careful when you first learn to fly this because once it’s hit a wall a couple of times it might not be coming back again.
We’d like to thank you for spending your time to see this review of this Syma Gyroscope and hope you have hours and hours of fun with it as we already have. Thank you very much.
Whether your child just wants to look the part for army role play in the backyard or whether you need to add the final touches to their kids army costumes if they are going to an army themed party, you may need some ideas on how to apply camo face paint.
I was in this exact situation last week so having bought some army face paint I did a bit of research.
Colors needed
You can have some fun with colors and even mix up the camo style that your kids try for different occasions. In the military, camo colors are supposed to match the
terrain so consider using the following colors to give specific looks:
Woodland: Brown (light and dark), green (light and dark), black, perhaps beige.
Desert: Sand, light green.
Snow: White, loam.
Just make sure you buy a range of colors in a few shades and you’ll be able to come up with something.
Where to apply
Camo face paint is supposed to be applied to the face, ears, neck and arms, ie, any area of skin that is exposed. Obviously as your children are not actually going on operations, you do not need to go to these extremes unless you want to.
As my son is washing-shy and was likely to rub his arms near walls or soft furnishings I just painted his face.
The theory
The great thing about applying camo face paint is that you don’t need to be an artist. It is the most forgiving design as it is not supposed to look like anything. There are however a few rules to follow if you’re going for an authentic look.
Basically you are trying to make the face not look like a face. This means highlighting shadow areas and darkening shiny areas. You are also trying to remove the natural lines and features of the face (ie, horizontal eyes and mouth, vertical nose).
So for:
Shiny areas use dark colors: eg, forehead, nose ridge, chin, cheekbones.
Shadow areas use light colors: eg, under eyes, under nose, cheek hollows.
Elsewhere use middle colors: eg, temples, side of nose.
Now you know which colors to use, you need to apply them in irregular stripes and patterns. Going back to making the face unrecognizable as a face, you do NOT want to circle the eyes or put a stripe down the nose as this just highlights the natural shape of these areas. Instead you want to disguise prominent features as follows:
Eyes – draw vertical or diagonal lines or shapes across them.
Nose – draw a horizontal line or shape across it.
Mouth – draw vertical or diagonal lines or shapes across it.
How
If you have makeup sponges these probably make it easier to apply the face paint. Two are recommended – one for brown colors and one for green colors. Put dark shades on one end of the sponge and light shades on the other.
I didn’t have any sponges so had to use my fingers but this seemed to work OK too.
My attempts
I have never applied face paints in my life (as you can probably tell!) but my son was happy with it. Here is what I did:
These are the shades I used.
I started with a brown base layer.
I then added the dark brown shades …
… and the lighter green shades.
I thought it wasn’t dark enough so I added in some black and tried to do the lines vertically across the eyes and mouth and horizontally across the nose.
Here’s the look with the papier-mâché army helmet we made a few weeks ago. I think the nose stands out too much but this was my first attempt!
When we wiped the main colors off with a soft tissue I had another go with stripes. Whilst not applied according to military theory, we both liked this look best.
When trawling through the myriad of military face paint options out there, be sure to look for those that are hypoallergenic, FDA compliant and water based. This way they go on with a bit of water if necessary and come off easily with water.
I was worrying about how to remove face paint easily before I started as my son has an aversion to washing his face at the best of times. Anyway I was pleasantly surprised to find that a sink full of warm water mixed with a bit of baby wash only took a few gentle wipes with a flannel to see it gone. Phew!
Try it and send me a photo
So next time your child wants to dress up with their kids army gear for a parade, party or holiday, you know what to do!
Please send me a photo of your handiwork and I’ll add it to the gallery to give other parents inspiration. Thanks.
And don’t forget you can continue the camo theme by making over your kids bedroom with kids camo bedding.
