Blackstar Classics - Filmation Blackstar Custom

Before the He-Man cartoon was conceived, Filmation created the shortlived Blackstar animated series, which would become a strong influence on the He-Man show, both in terms of world building and concepts, art style and animation as well as voice actors (Blackstar's nemesis Overlord was voiced by Alan Oppenheimer who would go on to be the voice of Skeletor). Certain animation sequences from Blackstar were recycled for He-Man and Blackstar himself was referenced through a subtle tribute in the form a golden statue of his likeness as an easter egg in scene. It would therefor stand to reason that I had to include a Filmation style Blackstar in my line-up of Filmation MOTU characters. I won't go further into Blackstar's story, I already did that for my 30mm version of him here. First, on to the eye candy, before I enter into some detail of the process to create this Blackstar.

 Blackstar had a bunch of companions called Trobbits, a sort of play on "tree hobbits". The ones that were released with the '80s toys were very much true to their Filmation appearance and are a good size to go with the Classics figure. Only 6 out of the 7 were released though, so I will need to do a custom to complete the gang someday.

The construction of the figure uses parts of two different figures (though could have been done with one instead), a fes resin items from custom bits creators and some handsculpted/modified items. 

The breakdown is as follows:

- torso, loincloth and boots are from a Super 7 Ultimate Filmation He-Man;

- arms, hands and legs are from a Super 7 Filmation Triclops (though the ones from the He-Man figure could also be used;

- starsword and necklace are available in resin from Dark Dimensions Toy Empire, they also do the belt if you don't want to scratchbuild it;

- head is a resin cast of a Filmation Classics He-Man, with the hair resculpted with greenstuff and eyebrows thickened;

- belt buckle was sculpted by a mate, with some modifications by myself.

Regarding the construction, it's fairly straightforward from there. A few points of note:

To get rid of the curve in the lower side of the belt, I carefully sliced underneath the existing belt edge, starting from the middle, without removing it. Once you reach the sides where the edge is straight, just reglue the edge in a straight line and cut off the excess in the middle. Easy. I left a gap in the middle in the width of the belt buckle, so it would sit flush. If your blade is sharp enough, you can then tidy up the newly exposed bit of loincloth and continue the creases all the way up to the new belt edge.

Regarding the hair, it was built up in sections and layers, not all in one go. This is a minimalistic Filmation style, so you don't have to go very fine, broad strokes will do it.

The rest is paint. For this one, I painted the whole body, which is something I normally will go out of my way to avoid, as it means you always have to be careful for wear around the articulation. This is also why there are parts of two figures in there. My original plan was to use Triclops' body for this, as he already has a darker skintone. Several obstacles arose during construction however. First of, when you remove his armour, there is a rectangular block of plastic protruding from his chest and back that the armour slots onto. I carved that off and sanded it smooth. There was still a discoloration visible due to the colour of the plastic underneath, so I ended up repainting the whole torso. When everything was painted, it was type to put the head in place. I hadn't done so before starting as it being a resin cast, I was afraid I might not get it back off. First test, it sat on top of the neck like some sort of christmas decoration and he looked ridiculous. Turned out the Super 7 Triclops torso was more bulky and had a broader, taller neckstump than the other figures I had. So even after hollowing out the head more and getting it down as much as it could without carving up the neck itself, it was still sitting too high. In addition, due to the bulk of the chest, the necklace was also sitting too high and not flush with the shoulders/chest. So, with a somewhat heavy heart, I decided to pull it all back apart and use the He-Man torso instead. This meant switching out the modified loincloth again, as well as the arms and legs to keep the somewhat darker skintone. Luckily damage was minimal and I didn't have to repair much. The downside of the He-Man torso is I had to repaint it, as well as the shoulders this time, so in the end I painted the Triclops arms and legs as well to get an even colour. I left the hands bare though, as those need to grip weapons. So, long story short, this ended up being a lot more work than planned due to the Triclops body not working out in the end. If I were to start from scratch, I could just use the complete He-Man body as a base.

To conclude, a couple pictures of the two great heroes together. He-Man here is the Mattel version, which I now notice also has a darker skintone than the Super 7 one. 

And one final shot: the hero of Sagar with his Trobbit companions take up their place in the display case:

MOTU Classics - Leo Skeletor

The vintage  Leo Skeletor is, as most of you will know, the rarer India release with dark blue skin and black accessories. I'm not the first to do a Classics custom of him and I won't be the last. As customs go, this one wasn't very labour intensive. The main body is a Webstor body for that dark blue skintone. The accessories (chest harness, loincloth, staff and sword) were cast in flexible black resin by Barbarossa Customs. His stuff is great, so go check it out. Boots and feet got painted black. the head was a spare Skeletor head that was repainted. For the paintjob on the face, I took my inspiration from the excellent packaging art on the ReAction figure.

MotU Origins - Oo-Larr custom

While waiting patiently for the new Origins MotU range to come out in the fall, I've been itching to use the bodies I had from the Masters of the WWE Universe and some spare parts from my customs box to create some characters that aren't all that likely to get original figures and one such is Oo-Larr. This character is the original minicomic He-Man, before he became He-Man and before the Filmation cartoon changed his origin story.

I happened to have an incomplete Classics Oo-Larr I picked up cheap, missing the head and spear. I decided to steal its loincloth and bare feet. Classics feet are a bit big for Origins, but for this figure, they are just right enough to work.

I hollowed out the inside upper edge of the loincloth and shaved down one of the WWE crotch pieces, glued the new loincloth on to it and filled the gap with putty and then covered that with some brown paint. The loincloth is a bit wide, being made for Classics waists, but that actually works well for this figure, as it's a primitive rough fur thing. The main body is the Ultimate Warrior figure, for its bronzed skintone, with the chest tattoo removed and the shins are from the Cena figure, repainted along with the feet to match the rest of the body. I did make some minor changes to the insides of the feet to make them fit better on the Origins pegs and while it works well enough, it's still an imperfect solution. Regardless, they're not falling off if I don't provoke them, so there's that.

The Ultimate Warrior happened to come with Classics Oo-Larr's spear, molded in yellow, so I used that with a trim to shorten it and some paint. The head is a resin cast of the SDCC Origins He-Man head made by Ken Coleman. I may replace it with an actual one when He-Man comes out, but this one works just fine for now. I did convert an actual vintage head to fit the neck peg, but decided in the end the new head with the longer hair works better for Oo-Larr. I kept paint applications on the head and spear simple to stick to the toy look of the figures.

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.

MOTU Classics - Custom Anti-Eternia He-Man in alternate colour scheme

Let me start by saying I don't feel there is anything wrong as such with the nearly all black colour scheme on the official AE He-Man figure, but I have always found the alternate colour schemes depicted in some fan art which use more red and sometimes grey, make for a more contrasting figure that is ultimately more interesting to look at. So it only makes sense I ended up doing a custom version that incorporates all these elements.

The base figure is another copy of the Chinese AE He-Man bootlegs. I used a spare set of Faker boots because I figured the purple would be a better base colour to paint red and if some paint rubs off, it would be less jarring. The loincloth, belt and wrist guards were repainted. The harness and weapons were moulded in red by Barbarossa customs, then painted, leaving the handles bear to avoid paint wear in that spot. I prefer to have the accessories as close as possible to the paint colour, so that eventual wear will not stand out (much). I also painted the hair to be slightly lighter and painted yellow in the centre of the eyes instead of the original white.

The original artwork that inspired the alternate colour scheme the most:

Thundercats Classics - Ma-Mutt Custom

Ma-Mutt is the faithful pet of Mumm-Ra, and the only living thing that evil fiend cares for. Ma-Mutt Resembles a demonic bulldog. While seemingly a pet, he displays an incredible, almost human-like intelligence, carries out his masters plans without questions and is ferociously loyal. He has the ability to fly as well as grow in size to gigantic proportions. Ma-Mutt ca also be used to to project Mumm-Ra's holographic image anywhere that he desires.

Mumm-Ra in his weakened form, with his faithful pet, Ma-Mutt

I started this one a few months ago, before Super7 revealed there would be a Ma-Mutt included with their upcoming Mumm-Ra the Everliving. I guess that means I'll keep this custom as my Classics Ma-Mutt for now and then when I get the official one, this custom will become my 5.5 inch collection's Ma-Mutt instead.

The model is a bootleg copy of the Staction Ma-Mutt that came with their Mumm-Ra. I picked a few of them up locally when I was last in China. The quality of the copy is good, but the paintjob is very basic. I repainted it to match the cartoon colours.

Here he is in my temporary display, with my custom Classics Mumm-Ra the Everliving (who I guess will become my 5.5 inch scale Mumm-Ra once the bigger Super7 version arrives) and the Classics shriveled Mumm-Ra: