There are a few things about my memories of my childhood that don't add up.  First, while my favorite toys by far were plastic figures, and my favorite plastic figures by far were the ones that I now know were made by Marx, I never had a concept of Marx playsets. Even though I got at least one Marx playset every Christmas throughout my childhood, because they were ordered out of the Sears catalog, I associated the sets as being from Sears. I remember studying the Sears catalogs, but I never had any idea of how many playsets Marx actually made.  (It just doesn't make sense, but it's my experience.)  I think I believed the sets were only available at Christmas because that was the only time Sears carried them.  I was born in 1956.  I know I got a Ben Hur set which came out in 1959 and was only available for a couple of years.  I know I got an Alamo set which came out in 1960.   I'm sure I got a Battleground set , a Roy Rogers Ranch, a Farm set and a Cape Canaveral set.   After that all I remember are the Allstate boxes.  Fort Apache.  Blue and the Gray, Iwo Jima,   Then later I remember the Heritage sets and the picture box Fort Apaches and Battlegrounds that were in the Toy stores, and then the carryall sets.  (I was too old for them by then, but what can I say?).  I also can remember the display boards up high in the two local toy stores in Glendale.  (Any one remember the Toy House on Brand and Pfeiffer;s Toys on Glendale Ave.?)  But I never remember seeing playset boxes on the shelves.  And I never saw bags of Marx figures until the late 60s when I found the bags of "100 Germans" and "100 Japanese"  and "100 Americans" at a Gemco store. I do remember the blister cards of dinosaurs at Thrifty Drug Store, but again, I didn't really associate them with 'Marx".  Also, except for a few old 'Foreign Legion' figures one of my friends had, I don't think I ever saw any 60mm figures.  How could I live through that time and have missed so much? 

Any way, one of my favorite memories, even though it is now very faded and indistinct, was going over to the the Babcock brothers house up the street and playing in their side yard with their Civil War sets.  I'm thinking they must have each gotten a Giant or Centennial set, because we had a heck of a set up. (I remember the cool trenches we dug and the stretcher teams moving through them.)  As long as I've been  collecting Marx playsets as an adult, I think I've been secretly wanting to recreate that great day.  And so I've picked up Civil War figures over the years.  When I first started collecting in 1990 or 91, individual figures went for $3.00.  Centennials went for between $5.00 and $8.00 each.  I bought some.  Then came the discovery of the Marx dump and suddenly the figures were only about a buck a piece.  I went a little crazy.  I saw a picture somewhere of someone using the long coat cavalry from the big Fort Apache sets as Union cavalry, and I knew I had to get some of them.  (Those guys are pricey...almost $10.00 each). Recently I found myself sneaking in bids on Marx Civil War stuff on eBay, even though I sure didn't need any more figures and it had been a couple years since I took any of what I had off the shelf.  I decided it was time make the set up I have been dreaming of for years.

I find that actually playing outside in the dirt is a little too undignified and public for my ego to handle these days, so I did the next best thing. I gathered everything I would need for the set up and spread out one of my big Diorama Drapes on the floor of the Living Room...

I added a road and a river....

 I then put some books and boxes under the drape to make some hills...

and started setting up the stuff I've accumulated over the years. 

These pictures are the record of the fruition of this crazy and foolish nostalgic compulsion.

Overall, I think there are over 400 origiinal Marx figures in this set up. I probably have another hundred figures I could have used.  If I were to use the stuff from the boxed sets I have, I could have added another hundred or so.   If I stooped to using Heritage figures, well, let's not go there. 

Several years ago at OTSN I found a bunch of  silver colored repros of the Britains Caisson and cannon sets.  They've sat in a box for years until this project got me motivated to paint them up in Marx colors.  I love the feel of urgency these sets convey. 

I added another smaller drape and piece of road to get a few more figures into the set up. 

The set-up evolves......Look Closely....What has changed?

I do love conversions!

One last footnote....The creative juices are flowing.   I just came up with a way to make better looking flames and explosions,  I think I might do the Conte ACW set up I've been dreaming of....