For today's post I felt like doing some Tim Mee. That reminded me that a lot of my material with the reach of this feature is stuff I already covered in other posts. On the other hand, a reprise can be nice, so I decided to go with something that's already appeared often, the Tim Mee battle mountain. Here's a few more pics of it with the Truckstop Queen.
For the history lesson, the battle mountain was first made sometime in the 1970s, possibly to imitate the even more enormous Marx "Battle of Navarone" playset. It was sold primarily with Tim Mee's army men, and also surfaced in dinosaur playsets. Surprisingly, no evidence exists that it was associated with Galaxy Laser Team, one of Tim Mee's most successful lines and certainly the most notorious in hindsight. This has fed my suspicion that it was retired relatively early, possibly around the time Legendary Battles came along in 1986. There can be little doubt that other manufacturers copied the design, with or without Tim Mee's permission, but by the 1990's, it would have been an uphill battle to sell them. With the army man-scale playset format largely extinct, and the army men themselves pushed back to bargain bags, it would have been too much and not enough. Still, it was big and durable enough to have soldiered on as a set piece for out-of-scale Star Wars and GI Joe figures.
For my personal experiences, I first heard of this one during the 2010's wave of Tim Mee reissues. I was interested, but I didn't see any immediate value. One thing that kept it in mind was that I saw one regularly for a while at a grocery store play area near a previous workplace. The store closed, and I moved on to another job. Then about a year ago, I had bonus points and a gift card balance to spare, so I finally ordered the battle mountain. My first impression was that it was huge. As seen above, it's slightly bigger than generic Godzilla, though still shallow enough to fit on top of a stacking book case. It also had enough variety of surfaces to hold a range of figures. Here's a pic of the thing from behind.
The downside I quickly discovered was that it's not that stable, to the point that I was getting pelted by space guys for a while. What I settled on was keeping a few figures on the mountain at any given time, and setting up larger groups temporarily if I wanted a pic. I suppose that was a big part of how the blog was born. Here's a demonstration pic with the Truckstop Queen, Bossk, the clubtail patchisaur, a Marx 3 inch space guy, a Legendary Battles ogre/ troll, a bansai bear not previously covered, and some GLT figures, including the mini/ prototype commander.
For the wrapup, I decided this was the best place to say a little more about the one I saw in the grocery store. As mentioned, it was not for sale but in a play area for families of employees, exactly the natural habitat for items like this. I can't say if it was a Tim Mee original, but it was a dark brown color, certainly different from the reissues I had seen online. The area was near the front of the store but cordoned off from casual viewing, as would be expected, and I never saw it in actual use. I stopped going to the store as often after my own work hours changed. I finally stopped in a few more times as the store was closing down, but I can't recall trying to figure out what happened to the toys in the play area. Was it thrown away, sold, or given to someone to take home? There's no way to know, but the odds are if it escaped the junkyard, it and others like it will keep turning up. And while we're at it, here's one more pic of the Truckstop Queen.
Honestly, this way was easier.
That's all for now, more to come!
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