While I am quite fond of historical tabletop (or at least I used to be, I haven’t played one for quite some time) I’m normally not too interested in historical tin figures in themselves. For once, they are, as their name tells, made (casted) out of tin or pewter, which makes conversion a complicated thing (especially as I for myself am unable to create molds of my own). Second, they are strictly modeled on historical uniforms, which makes painting them in any “fantastic” (self-created) pattern quite silly… still, of course, there are great manufacturers like the Perrys (including such rare armies as korean troops) and, of course, Warlord Games the only company featuring larger quantities of nice plastic historical miniatures as well as the most british Tilly that I know. All of them make me wish for starting collecting historical miniatures, but they are not classical tin soldiers anyway…
I did start by casting my own soldiers as a child (unfortunately, I gave my molds away some years ago, when I desperately had to made some gift… sometimes I am remorseful about that but probably I would never have used them anymore anyway…) and later I started out playing historical Wargames (mostly Avalon Hill games and the like, but you may also count german veteran tabletop Armageddon which I played with 15 mm historical Samurai and Viking and Roman soldiers) before I came to Warhammer and the like…that’s all some long time ago… like 20 years or even more.
As a result, I never really sought out museums or other places featuring tin soldiers… I do enjoy a diorama made up of pewter figures, of course, but I never visited a place before just for that…
Not that there are too many… Personally I know only two museums/places devoted to miniatures (probably more, but I’m just too tired to find out). There’ll always be the Warhammer World (I personally prefer this old site to the current one) in Nottingham, the… well, what IS the Warhammer World actually? Some mixture between a museum, a Hall of Fame and of course a hall where to play… actually, I’m not too sure I’ll have to visit there. Of course it would be nice to see all the miniatures, painted by the ‘Eavy Metal team, in reality which I already know from the Web or the White Dwarf or books… but then, I’m not sure I would like to see what I would see. The photos I know from the Warhammer World look far too professional, too much like the Corporation it is and too little like the hobby it should be… but of course I always hope one of my friends would travel there one day and buy me some goodies at Bugmans Bar or something…
One might argue that in fact every Games Workshop shop is also a showroom and more or less a little museum of Warhammer miniatures on its own… but whenever I enter such a shop (and I do sometimes visit at least two of them), I feel in a hurry to just buy and leave… I feel too old to play with the kids and too absorbed with my projects to ever enjoy the chattering of the redshirts…
Which leaves for Germany only one real place full of toy soldiers: the ‘Deutsches Zinnfigurenmuseum’ (German Tin Soldier Museum) on the Plassenburg in Kulmbach. It is one of those museums who are probably led by underfinanced people who don’t care about the internet, which is why there is not one official homepage for it – only a small german subpage on the homepage of the city of Kulmbach… which is funny, because the Plassenburg – one of the largest and most well-preserved Renaissance fortresses in Europe and Germany – houses quite a lot of museums which all have their own homepages (here, here and here), which might be some kind of old-fashioned (and certainly they are not available in english anyway, except for this one), but at least they are available…for that Tin Soldier Museum one has to refer to the German Wikipedia or to the homepage of the town of Kulmbach and both don’t really tell you much except that it’s the worlds largest museum of Tin Soldiers with more than 300 000 little guys on display – and that it’s got a great shop…
But now the funny thing: on the Homepage of Klio (an association for friends of Tin Soldiers – rather for collectors, not the wargamers) there is now an advertisement on display for their new temporal exhibition in the Tin Soldier Museum, called “Manga, Fantasy, Science Fiction – a special exhibition of the fantasy study group”.
As I just see, that Fantasy Study Group has its own Homepage… they don’t really write much about the exhibition, but they do provide a larger version of their flyer/poster.
The exhibition will be on the Plassenburg from 03.04.2011 – “March 2012″. The poster itself offers only little content besides those basic facts (and there are no further information on the Homepage, one probably has to buy the fanzine that association produces), but the Games Workshop-Logo did of course caught my eye at once.
Well, of course one can only expect a strange exhibition, if you think that the poster shows a really strange assortment of miniatures: in the centre (above some kind of dryad) I can see a badly sculpted Katsuragi Misato from Neon Genesis Evangelion, a red Dragon and C-3PO, the small photos below show one Games Workshop Eldar and some scarcely clad women (which, of course, nourishes the well known fact about non-hobbyists that all people interested in miniatures MUST be perverts somehow). OK, there is one exception with that chinese lady in the lower left corner, but when I see 10 miniatures on that poster, of whom five are female, five are monsters AND of that five women two have full frontal nudity and one has excessive cleavage and one is clearly submissive, that’s no good sign…
German News portal Brückenkopf, which is usually very well-informed, writes something about GW-displays, something which was clarified by one of the organisators down in the comment-section:
[too tired, so it's just Google translation]
“There will be approximately 450 individual dioramas, using sculptured and flat shape-tin miniatures, and three 1 m wide playing fields, not to mention the two large dioramas “Helms Deep”with about 500 figures measuring 1.40 x 1.40 meters and Minas Tirith with about 1600 pieces on a board of 3 x 4 meters. Of course, these dioramas are equipped with GW figures (otherwise it wouldn’t be possible).
As you can see that this visit would be worthwhile. What I mean by dioramas you can already see you once on the homepage of the group: http://www.ag-fantasy.de”
Actually, the galleries are here. Impressive paintjobs, but terrible taste with some of the painters IMHO… but, of course, who am I to judge?
Even more important: only Lord of the Rings and no Warhammer 40K? So, what’s that Eldar doing on the poster?
I have to admit, I feel adventerous here. Not that I expect much of that exhibition, but taking a trip might still be fun – sure I will be going down to Kulmbach in April and take a good look at everything… of course I will bring a report here…
