Grenadier Models produced a line of historical miniatures under the name "Western Gunfighter" that were approved for use with TSR's Boot Hill.
I'm not certain when these miniatures were first released. I can find evidence online that they were at least advertised by Grenadier in 1978. Whether they were released in that year (or earlier), I can't say with any certainty. Even so, 1978 is prior to the release of Boot Hill's second edition in 1979, which is interesting. In addition to this large boxed set, there were also a number of smaller blister packs.
I've never seen any of them in the flesh, only photographs, so there's not much more I can say about them. Did anyone reading this own or see them?
Sometime in the very early 1980s, after I'd bought the Boot Hill boxed set, I saw an advertisement for these miniatures and was intrigued. But I never actually saw them in any store either. I assumed they were of 'generic' characters, but I wondered, because, if memory serves, the rulebook included game stats for famous 'real' western personalities, and an article was published in Dragon enumerated game stats for famous fictional western heroes, including the Lone Ranger, Maverick, and the Man With No Name. I had no idea who 'Maverick' was and had to ask my dad. In a memorable coincidence, at that time he would watch The Rockford Files on TV from time-to-time (re-runs maybe?) and I would sometimes watch it with him. So I knew who James Garner was. But of course, I was familiar with an aging, heavier, slower moving person.
ReplyDeleteRockford ran from 74-80, but it was in syndicated reruns for years afterward. Still holds up pretty well today IMO. It was one of the better TV shows of its era, and offers an interesting historical window into the US of the late 70s for folks who didn't live through it (or were just very young).
DeleteGarner was in his early 50s for most of its run, so yeah, not quite as spry as he was on Maverick in his 30s. Another decent show for its era, although Rockford is a fair bit more realistic about its setting's time period. Helps to be contemporary when it comes to historical accuracy as time passes and the contemporary becomes historical. :)
There were at least a couple of small ranges of Western figs on the market before Boot Hill ever came out, meant for use with miniatures rules sets - although just using plastic toys or more traditional "tin soldier" figurines was probably more common. Some of my first miniatures wargaming back in ~1975 involved skirmishes using some homebrew game that the older locals (I was still a kid of single-digit age) had created.
ReplyDeleteThat said, this boxed set and the rest of Grenadier's "Western Gunfighters" range were probably created to take advantage of demand dur to BH 1st ed. Most of the figs were were sold singly, although there was also a completely different second "Western Gunfighters" boxed set slightly later on with somewhat better sculpting and casting quality. Must have been almost a hundred unique sculpts all told.
I never saw either boxed set in stores although I remember some figs from them at swap meets way back when. They were pretty typical quality for their era, which is to say not great and cast in lead-alloy metals. Interesting historical curiosities, though.
I do recall seeing some of the individually packed WG figs in a long-defunct toy store around 1980. They were packed in plastic baggies sealed with stapled-on header cards, something that was already going of style in favor of blister packs by then - but I'm not sure if that wasn't something the store did themselves, since the headers were hand-written. That was a pretty common retailer "fix" for faulty blister packs, some of which were prone to leaking their contents due to bad glue and rough handling in the early days (and, honestly, well up into the 2000s from companies with shoddy quality control).
To save anyone hunting for them, AFAIK none of the Western Gunfighter figs are still in production. Unlike many ex-Grenadier minis Mirliton over in Italy don't have them in their catalog. Doesn't necessarily mean they don't have the molds somewhere, although they likely aren't useable at this late date. They turned up some Shadowrun figs for me on request about fifteen years ago that they'd just never gone looking for (which were probably supposed to have been destroyed when the license ended, cough, cough) but at the time the molds would have been about 20 years younger than any hypothetical WG ones, and molds don't last forever even when they're just sitting in storage.
ReplyDeleteDick since you are such an authority on these things;
ReplyDelete1-who designed the star frontiers minis from the early 80’s?
2-is the sathar cutter the upf minelayer or an actual ship is it just a print error ?
Thanks! Dick
@Francisco Verdugo Afraid I can't be much help with either question, although if someone else can I'd love to hear from them.
DeleteFor #1, AFAIK TSR never credited any sculptors with the minis sold under their logo back then, and despite the uptick in nostalgic insider books and posts in recent years I've yet to see one from a former TSR employer that knew for sure who did the work. The subject of their casting operation is a mystery to me, and I can't even say if they did the work themselves on the premises somewhere or if it was quietly contracted out to some unknown third party. I suspect the latter simply because someone would probably have remembered an in-house casting operation on the scale Star Frontiers would have required if it was tucked away in the corner of the warehouse somewhere, but that's just a guess. Haven't read all the historical memoir stuff by any means, so it's possible I've missed a revelation that some more dedicated TSR fan may hve seen.
For #2, well, that's been a much-debated question for many years and I don't think there will ever be a definitive answer. The mini obviously looks much more like the artwork of the UPF minelayer than any Sathar ship, and the Worms don't even have a cutter ship class listed in Knight Hawks. That doesn't mean they couldn't have cutters, or something that the UPF calls a cutter - all Sathar ship classes are just UPF designations we don't know what they calls them internally. The only exclusive human-tech ships are assault scouts, which canonically use advanced drives the Sathar haven't replicated. And the mini does seem a little small for the stated hull size of the minelayer - but many of minis seems a bit wonky size-wise, so that doesn't mean much. Last I looked the fan community is divided on the subject, and Frontier Explorer did fan stats for a hypothetical Sathar cutter.
I lean toward the "error on the blister pack and catalog listings" theory myself, with a UPF minelayer figure getting bundled in instead of some other small cutter mini that might have been intended to show up in a module (much like the privateers minis, which aren't in Knight Hawks either). But that's just me, and they definitely didn't sell an actual "minelayer" blister pack at any point.
Dick this js still best answer even after google ing the topic extensively. Thank u so much i knew ud come thru Dick!
DeleteNo problem. There's probably at least one Star Frontiers community out there on Facebook that might have more definite info, but I pretty much stopped using social media years ago so I can't offer any road signs to find them. I'm at best a casual Star Frontiers fan-historian compared to folks who do the fanzines.
DeleteI painted the full set a few years ago. Surprisingly characterful miniatures considering how small and somewhat rough they are. One of them is definitely The Man With No Name but I'm not sure about any other intentional resemblances. Maybe I'll take another look tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteMostly pictured on the Lost Minis WIKI. https://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Western_Gunfighters
ReplyDeleteThat's a link to the whole WW range, including figs that were sold in individually. The ones from the box are here by themselves (along with the box):
Deletehttps://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Wizzards_and_Warriors_-_Large_Boxed_Sets#WW03
Just to add the confusion, there's also an entirely different "Western Gunfighters" boxed set that came along later and isn't actually part of the WW range:
https://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Special_Subjects_Box_Sets#4901
Grenadier's production history is pretty convoluted at times. :)
Thank you both for these various links to the photos of the actual miniatures! I very much enjoyed seeing them! James' recent posts on Boot Hill (all of which I saw for the first time in recent days) captured my lingering impression from 40+ years ago nearly exactly: that this early version of Boot Hill wasn't really an RPG (like AD&D of Gamma World, which I already owned and played at the time), but more of a 'gunfighting scenario' game. I pulled out my copy after having read these posts and among my (very limited) Boot Hill 'stuff' was a photocopy of a short article from Dragon magazine recognizing this limitation explicitly, and proposing a simple way to add a few new abilities to each character to expand the game into more of an RPG, beyond the gunfights. I never bought subsequent editions of Boot Hill after this boxed set in the early 1980s. So I'm left slightly curious about whether any version of these simple suggestions was incorporated in subsequent editions.
DeleteDon't know how many people will see this on an older post, but I was doing some noodling around and discovered a trio of interesting short articles in the old Space Gamer magazine, all from 1983. Their "Metal" miniatures column has some gossip about TSR's attempts to enter the miniatures business themselves (including rumors about buying Heritage and the abortive attempt to take over Grenadier that wound up ending the two companies' cooperation) in issue 60 (February 1983), followed up by an interview with Kevin Blume of TSR addressing those rumors and TSR's plans in issue 63 (May/June) and further interview with Andy Chernak of Grenadier about the TSR breakup, the deal they'd been offered, and their future plans in issue 64 (June/July).
ReplyDeleteChernak's interview is especially interesting, in part because of what very bad light it casts TSR in and in part because when asked, he states the only definite positive factor of no longer being associated with the D&D name is that "those people" are no longer harassing them at conventions and through the mail. It's clear from the context he's talking about the torch-waving Satanic Panic nuts, so it wasn't just TSR that was catching flack from them in 1983.
Blume's interview is awkward and contains at least two outright lies that I could identify. You can also see some real tensions between the Blumes and Gygax (who had publicly called for a boycott of Origins and cast GAMA as competitors to GenCon) leaking through. Gary wouldn't be around much longer, of course. It also includes a section where Kevin discusses how TSR would like the industry to adopt self-regulatory ethical standards, citing (of all things) the Comics Code Authority as a model of what he'd like to see.
For those unfamiliar with the history of the CCA I recommend a wiki read. The idea of TSR somehow coercing the industry into something so creativity-stifling and cynically aimed at removing business rivals from competition is just chilling. All it would have taken was for the MADD/BADD/Satanic Panickers to dig up a fake "expert" on par with Doctor Wertham and parade them in front of Congress and it might well have happened.
Anyway, worth a look if you're interested in a contemporary view of TSR's entry into the minis market, as well as the kind of shenanigans they were up to both there and with the still-new GAMA and with SPI as they neared the height of their success in the 80s. Ironic that the company would be forced to license Ral Partha to do AD&D minis less than five years later, and within a decade were sliding rapidly toward the WotC buyout due to their own terrible business decisions.