The mass-produced plastic toy soldier appeared in 1938 when Beton Toys, an American manufacturer, introduced a set of molded composition soldiers at a price point accessible to most American households. The figures were not purely plastic -- they were made from a mixture of sawdust, glue, and pigment under pressure -- but they established the format: small, cheap, numerous, sold by the bag.
True plastic army men arrived in the late 1940s when high-density polyethylene became available at commercial scale. The material was ideal for toy soldiers: flexible enough not to break when dropped, rigid enough to hold the pose of a firing rifleman, and cheap enough to produce in quantities of fifty or a hundred per bag. The army green color -- a rough approximation of Army Field Drab, the official U.S. Army uniform color of World War II -- became standard almost immediately.
Tim Mee Toys was founded in the late 1940s in Chicago and became one of the defining names in American plastic toy soldier production. The Tim Mee figures were sculpted with attention to correct poses: a rifleman prone, a standing soldier firing from the hip, a radio operator, an officer with a raised pistol, a bazooka team. Each pose was designed to be immediately recognizable at small scale. The figures were 54mm -- a standard scale borrowed from European metal figure collecting -- which meant they could be mixed with other manufacturers' sets without obvious size discrepancies.
The American toy soldier industry was enormous through the 1950s and into the 1970s. Louis Marx and Company, founded in 1919, became the largest American toy manufacturer of the postwar era partly on the strength of their army men sets and playsets. Marx sets included vehicles, buildings, and accessories alongside the infantry figures, and the larger sets retailed for a dollar or two at the height of the format's popularity -- accessible to virtually every American household.
The decline came gradually. First, the manufacturing moved offshore as American labor costs rose relative to Asian alternatives. Then the cultural interest in military play shifted as the Vietnam War changed American attitudes toward military iconography. By the 1990s, most of the original American toy soldier manufacturers had closed or sold their molds.
Tim Mee survived by being acquired by a series of toy companies and eventually by a collector who restored the original molds and resumed American production. The figures sold today as Tim Mee army men are made from the original 1940s-era molds, in the original green and tan colors, at the original 54mm scale. They are one of the few products in the toy market that can be called unambiguously unchanged in 75 years.