Thundercats Origins - Lion-O Custom

As it says in the title, this post features a custom Thundercats Lion-O figure, Origins style. I've seen some people add the head and weapons from a Mattel Classics Lion-O, and the belt from the Bandai figure to Origins bodies and while that works well enough, it's not the way I wanted to go. The Classics Thundercats figures are a bit expensive to raid for bits and I feel the heads are slightly too big, with a bit too much detail and shading for the simpler Origins toys. As a matter of taste, your mileage may vary of course.

In theory, the Funko Thundercats are exactly the Thundercat toys I wanted to be able to buy back in the day when I was a kid playing with my original MotU figures. And while I can understand and respect that people love them, I feel they are for the most part a bit chunky and crude, not as nice as some of the other knock offs done back in the day by the likes of Remco, Sungold or Olmec. So when Mattel announced the Origins line and their WWE crossover, the idea started to germ to use the Funko figures as cheapish custom fodder to steal all the unique bits and details from and add them to the new Origins style bodies. That way, I would finally have the unified MotU and Thundercats collection I dreamed of, that would all be part of the same range. Not having to go places in the weekend due to current events, I finally had some time to start on this. I will get a bit more into what parts were used further down, but let's start with some pictures of the finished figure first.

Origins Lion-O with his accessories (despite what I stated earlier, I ended up swapping out the oversized Funko sword for the more appropriately sized Classics one):

Some posing, with sword and claw:

So far for the eye candy. Since we're going to get a properly sized Mumm-Ra the Everliving Classics figure from Super7, my earlier custom Funko-Bandai mash-up I made for my Classics collection, will likely become my Origins Mumm-Ra. The size difference with Lion-O seems spot on:

I will post a few intermediate WIP shots below, to give you an idea of the various stages this went through. I started with disassembling the Funko figure to see what parts I could use. To my relief, the belt was a rubbery plastic pieces and not part of the hard plastic crotch, so that was going to make the job of converting it to a MotWWEU crotch much easier. I decided the Ultimate Warrior skintone was dark enough to work, so picked that as the base body. I went through the work to carve out the inside of the neck on the original head so it would fit over the Origins neck stump, but decided in the end that it looked too fat and too cartoony to use.

Having noticed the hair and face were 2 separate parts, I considered the possibility of using one of the spare WWE heads and decided the Cena head had the most facial traits in coming with Lion-O. So I proceeded to carve down the sides, top and back of the head and glue it inside the Lion-O wig. The gaps around the face were then filled in with putty and blended into the hair. The resulting head, once painted, would hopefully look like Lion-O instead of Cena in make-up and the added benefit was I had the required cavity for keeping the Origins neck articulation. A quick paint application seemed to indicate this would work reasonably well. Incidentally, I found Vallejo's Color System Panzer Aces "341 Flesh Base" is a perfect match for the skintone on the Ultimate Warrior figure. 

Having take care of the head, I would need to get to work on the chest piece. I initially considered making a press mould of the detail on the Funko torso, to transfer that to the Ultimate Warrior torso with greenstuff. The Funko body is a lot bigger and wider though, so I decided to go for broke and sculpt the armour edges and shoulderstraps myself. I did this in several stage, to avoid destroying the piece I sculpted on one side while doing the other one. It's not perfect, but with a coat of paint, it would do the job well enough. I hoped.

In between working on the torso, I also worked on the boots and crotch/belt. For the boots I used Triple H boots, because they have the middle flap sticking out on top. I cut that down to a triangle and used that as a base to blend in the curved angular top of Lion-O's bootfront. The laces were carved off and sanded as well. As for the belt, it was too wide of course, so I carved out the excess material in the center and removed a section from the side to shorten it before gluing it to the crotch piece. A bit of putty to fill the gaps and then it could be painted. At this stage, it all started to come together and with some preliminary base coats I was starting to think: yeah, this is going to work.

I did some other minor paintwork that I didn't take pictures of: the lighter colour on the hands and lower arms, picking out some details on the claw, I don't have intermediary pictures of that and anyway, you can see them on the finished figure. I did keep my paint applications simple, to stay in line with the simple Origins toy look. Only exceptions are a slight bit of shading along the nose and a wash on the hair as the Funko hair is a bit too smooth looking otherwise.

There you have it. This was a bit of a long winded post, but I figured I might as well write this down while I remembered it in case someone asks later. I will be doing the rest of the Thundercats figures as well, but I will likely wait on the release of wave 1 of MotU Origins as there are some body parts I'll want to scavenge from those.