Where does he get those wonderful toys?

I'm assuming that most anyone who would be reading this is familiar with my weekly photo comic, Minions at Work. MaW is created (mostly, some occasional photo manipulation is used to) using 1/6th scale action figures, sets, and props.

The other day, I got this note from Minions reader Phil M.:

I love your comics. I was wondering, where did you find all the scaled down items? most of them look like the correct scale for the "minion" you have. I have never seen trash cans, golf carts, etc.
Just wondering...

Fair, question, but one I figured only a fraction of Minions readers would be interested in. So rather than cluttering up their space with what would have to be a lengthy post, I decided to answer over here, at my seldom-used hobby blog, where it was more likely to be seen by interested parties (and where interested Minions readers would be able to find it).

So, just for starters, let's take a look at the latest cartoon (you can, by the way, click on any of these to view a larger version):


Okay, the pat answer to Phil's question is, "everywhere." I've spent several years obsessively building up huge collection of figures, set-pieces, props, and accessories. Some are made. Some are found as action figure or doll accessories. Some come from the most unlikely places.

So what I'm going to do is use some cartoons as examples, talk about where the various items in them came from, and use that to offer more general advice about where you might find things of your own.

Let's just kind of go left to right and discuss things as we find them.

Number Two is talking on a pretty nice phone. The phone is a modified kitchen magnet I found at a kitchen store. I had to do some cutting and modification to make the hand-set removable.

Since the set is non-magnetic, I stuck it to the wall temporarily using a putty-like reusable adhesive clay sold for mounting posters and the like. You can find it in most any office supply stuff, and it's good for a million and one things when making dioramas. It doesn't dry out, so I keep blobs of it stuck to the side of a cabinet adjacent to my "Minions" workbench/studio, ready for immediate use. Like I said, it's reusable, so when I pull down the blob holding the phone to the wall, it will go back up there for reuse.

In the foreground there are some sandbags. Those are accessories that come with "Power Team" military action figure play-sets. Since most of my Minions use Power Team bodies, I've bought a lot of those over the years. The bags are actually hollow plastic, and open on the back, and so only look good from the front. I almost threw them away at some point, but I'm glad I didn't.

Not only are they handy for giving a set that pseudo-military "lair" look, but the hollow backside is great for hiding battery-powered LED "puck" lights, which I often use to as blue fill-lights in my photo set-ups. Actually, there's a light hidden there, but I forgot to turn it on before shooting. Whoops.

The rats fighting on top of the bags are toy-store items, sold as part of line of clear plastic tubes carrying various plastic animals. Some tubes are sold with nothing but various colored rubber rats, and I've bought a bunch of these. Again, handy around the lair, and I use mostly the black ones, which most of the rats in the tubes are white or tan. Save those for the lab-scenes.

The broken table and green storage drum are also Power Team items. The table isn't broken. It just snapped together in the first place, so I just snapped it back apart to make it appear smashed. It will be good as new next time I need it.

You can't see it well here, but the cell door is scratch-built. It's made from foam core, cardstock, toothpicks (for bars in the window), craft store hinges, and a padlock-charm found in a bead store.

1/6th scale doors are hard to come by, and I should make some more in various styles.

The wooden crates were found in thrift stores. Crates like these are used as containers for gift-soaps, bath products, little jars of jelly and jam, and other such things. I think the fad for these may be over, but there are still zillions of them cluttering up grandma closets everywhere.

The trash cans also came from thrift stores. They're at once surprisingly common, and hard to find. They're made as promotional items and sold to garbage and recycling companies, usually imprinted with their logos. The idea is you use them for pencil cups, paper clips, and the company's number is on your desk next time you need trash service. I've managed to pick up maybe half-a-dozen different ones in various colors. I don't know ANY place to pick these up at retail, but if you really want one, calling up the various trash companies in your area might turn one up. Good luck explaining WHY you want it.

Okay, let's move onto another prop-intensive cartoon.


Phil mentioned the Minionmobile, so I had to include it. The Minionmobile is obviously a golf cart. It was sold as part of some die-cast vehicle line a few years back, and it's actually more like 1/8th scale, not 1/6th. The roof was way too low for a 1/6th figure, so I had to extend the metal rods that support the roof and raise the seat to allow for more leg-room. You can see details on how I did it here. It doesn't look bad, and actually, I think the "clown car" aspect adds a subtle bit of humor everywhere it appears.

The clips in the back are designed to hold golf bags, which were missing on my example of the golf cart (I saw it in stores, but mine came from a thrift store again). So, instead, we have a GI Joe anti-tank missile launcher back there, and a scuba tank from an 18" knock-off action figure sold at Wal-Mart a few years back. (I bought some on clearance with idea of making giants or monsters out of them.)

While this golf-cart may be hard to find (check eBay), there are alternatives. Wal-Mart sold an RC Yamaha Rhino 4-wheel ATV last year, and there's a golf cart in the current "High School Musical" fashion-doll line that has possibilities.

The traffic cones are Power Team items again, and I wish I had more of them. They're great little props.

The high-tech curbs are rails from an Imaginex building set I think. More thrift store finds. The nukes are actually launchers from a Quest Aerospace Micromax model rocket starter set. I bought a bunch of these on clearance a few years back, mainly for the rockets and motors. The launchers I didn't have much use for, until I noticed how much they did look like some kind of nuclear storage canister or warhead. Now they show up regularly in Minions at Work sets.

Now onto something that shows a whole variety of prop-sources:


Going left to right again:
The wonderful console is part of a "Muppets in Space" action figure playset from a few years back. I got a bunch of these very cheap on clearance, and they're just full of great parts and set pieces. The console was plenty big enough, but it was too low, so it's removed from its original base and mounted on an inverted plastic cup sold as a desk organizer.

You can see the edge of an arched doorway in the back. This is actually one of those "sold on TV" gizmos called a "Can-A-Round." They're white plastic tracks designed to allow you to slide cans of soda and beer around to the back of your fridge. Or something. Seems like a stupid idea to me, but when painted gray, they look like high-tech girders and bulkheads. I have two or three sets, and I use them all the time.

The back wall is foam-core board (office supply or craft store) painted silver. It's decorated with PVC plastic pipe from the hardware store, held on with metal clips, screws, and nuts, also purchased there. The louvered vents are sold as under-eave vents for home roofs. Lots of goodies can be found in the hardware store, if you browse everywhere, and thing of things in terms of form, not intended function.

The equipment rack in the background is another one of those wooden gift crates I mentioned earlier. I painted it black, and stuffed it with a variety of military field radios (Hasbro GI Joe, Power Team, 21st Century toys), again, repainted and detailed using hardware spray paints and craft acrylic paint.

The chairs are all fashion doll items. Fashion doll lines are good sources for furniture and household items, though they often need repainting (lots of pink). Barbie, Bratz and My Scene lines are all good sources of stuff.

The table is thrown together. The top is just a piece of scrap wood put in as packing material in an "assemble it yourself" bookcase I bought a while back. The pedestal bases are a couple of curtain hardware things I spotted at the thrift store (form, not function, again). The top is held on with more of that poster putty stuff.

The top of the podium is a doll-house item. Standard doll-houses are 1/12th scale, half the size of 1/6th, but a lot of usable items can be found at doll-house suppliers. This was a desk-top lectern though, so I had to build the base myself, using wood scraps, and decorative molding strip (hardware store). Craft paint tied it all together.

The map and stand are from a Power Team set again, as is the green crate.

The briefcase actually was sold as a novelty gift item. It has a manicure set inside! But the latches, handle, and all the hardware work fine, and it's in pretty good scale. I've also seen these sold as business card holders. Business and desk-top novelty items and premiums often yield interesting items. In addition to the trash cans and briefcases, I've also picked up some cool office chairs, beach chairs, desktop computers, and other goodies sold as novelty or promotional goods.

The red table is another wooden crate. The yellow thing on top is part of some toddler playset. I found it at a thrift store, liked the shape, and made a few modifications to the "screen" on the side, replacing animal stickers with green cardstock (so I can easily Photoshop in computer displays or whatever).

The phone is our magnet again from the first cartoon. I've got a lot of novelty magnets that are useful props: computers, desk phones, pay phones, blenders, coffee-makers, dustbusters, clothes irons, toasters, lunchboxes, crates of fruit, pots and pans, toaster ovens, microwave ovens, aquariums, lunchboxes, gumball machines, wine bottles, all sorts of stuff. It pays to spin through the kitchen store every once in a while.

Okay, one more, in part to see how the same props get used again and again in different ways. This is Cap'n Rehab's submarine.



The porthole in the background is some kind of fiberboard ring I found in the floral section of a craft store. I have no idea what it's used for. I spay painted it gray, put in some scrapbook paper for the "reef scene" outside, and stuck it to the wall with more putty.

The ship's wheel was a wall hanging I bought at a tourist-trap gift store (I live in a beach town). The metal base for it (which you can't see) was made from a brass candle holder and some copper-pipe fittings from the hardware store.

In the foreground, there's the Muppet's in Space console again. Behind Number 9, you can see one of those rocket-launcher "nukes" again. The red barrel is a repainted Power Team item. The lamp thingies on top is actually an old, novelty salt-and-pepper set. I think I got it for $2 at a junk shop.

The arched doorway is made from our friend the Can-A-Round again. The door in the middle is cardboard and some textured scrapbooking paper I got at a craft store.

The high-tech crates came with figures in the GI Joe "Sigma Six" line.

The rubber duck around Cap'n Rehab's neck was part of a set of novelty earrings I spotted while following my wife into an accessory store at the mall. (Really guys, if your wife or girlfriend is at all crafty, it pays to follow her into bead, craft, and fabric stores now and then. You can go in by yourself, but the strange women who work in these places seem to have a talent for asking embarrassing questions.)

The little Nautilus desk model in the foreground was an accessory for a smaller scale Captain Nemo action figure I bought on deep clearance a while back. (I had no interest in the figure, but he came with a ton of cool accessories. I've also seen cool, usable for 1/6th accessories in other small-scale figures. Wrestling figures, the entire Muppets line being examples. (I got a cool mop and janitor's rolling bucket, a footlocker, some books, and food items with Muppets figures.) But for things like desk models, look for smaller die-cast toys. Nothing spruces up a military office like a model fighter plane, missile, or tank on the desk, and they're all over the die-cast section of the toy store. I've also found similar things in gumball machines and museum gift-shops.

I could keep doing this, but this post has gotten pretty long already. General hints:

Develop a "one-sixth eye." Develop the habit of looking at things in scale. Potential props are everywhere. For instance, I noticed one day while taking the protective cap off a "sports bottle" style bottle of drinking water I got at the theater, that it looked like a miniature Tupperware style bowl. I collected a few and added them to my box of kitchen and food items.

For specific ready-made 1/6th items, check fashion doll toy lines, but also look for novelty items elsewhere, sold as novelty clocks, souvenirs, key-chains, lighters, pencil sharpeners, magnets, desk accessories, business give-aways, jewelry, charms, etc. In addition to toy and hobby stores, you should also be browsing craft stores, bead stores (lots of interesting charms, bits of metal hardware, clasps, etc.), kitchen stores (especially for magnets and other novelty items), gift stores, souvenir stores (in my experience, the junkier the better), museum gift shops, zoo gift shops, and office supply stores.

Finally, you'll notice that a lot of my stuff comes from thrift stores. Thrift stores, garage sales, junk-stores, swap meets, rummage sales, are full of useful prop items. Just use the 1/6th eye. A wooden jewelry box is a desk. A pencil cup is a waste basket. A novelty metal cocktail skewer or letter-opener is a sword.

This stuff is literally everywhere, and often the coolest items are cheap or free. It's all a matter of having the eye, and the creativity, to find them.

Minions! We got minions!

It's been a while since I posted here. Sorry about that. We had a new front door installed last week, and that's put me on a bit of a home improvement kick. I put up new curtain-rods in the living room (and curtains, that my wife picked up), installed new fire alarms, and have been doing some serious reorganization of the clutter, much of it Joe-related.

You see, while I was in deadline hell over the last year-and-a-half, one of my few escapes was retail therapy. I'd go out and hit the local Goodwill, looking mainly for Joes or 1/6th scale props and accessories. Several times a week, I'd find something and bring it home. Once I got home, it was straight back to work, meaning that the thing I'd bought just got tossed somewhere. I also did trades and shopped on-line. Same deal. Get it home, put it -- somewhere. Ignore it.

This stuff if the cholesterol of our household circulatory system. My wife didn't know what to do with it, her attempts to do something with it just made things worse (lots of poorly packed boxes of unsorted stuff), and then we got into double deadline-hell mode with both of us on book deadlines (me on Conan and Mechwarrior, her on Alias). With Chris also working a full-time office job, housework around here has become more rumor than fact. For the most part, we couldn't even afford the interruption to pay somebody to come do it. So the place is a disaster area, mostly thanks to me and Joe. The worst areas have been my office and the dining room, which have become catch-alls, and look more like warehouses than rooms in a house.

So, we've given away some over-large furniture to make some maneuvering room, bought a new, smaller dining set that I haven't had time to assemble yet, and I'm just tunneling through the clutter. I've made huge strides in the office ("look, there's floor under there!") and the dining room, and I'm finding stuff I'd forgotten I'd bought. Through a process of sorting and repacking, I think I can probably halve the volume, and hopefully I'll get the construction materials out of the garage so I can put most of this stuff out there where it belongs, not in our living space. That's my goal for the summer anyway.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't take a few minutes out to play with your Joes. As one pauses, looks around at all the work to be done, one starts to think, "I could really use some mindless, expendable, and interchangeable minions..."



What world-dominating super-villain, be they Goldfinger, Darth Vader, or Cobra Commander, can get by without minions? Darned useful they are, and as any hero can tell you, they make better targets than ducks in a shooting gallery. But minions are hard to come by in the 1/6th world. Oh, there are some troops in Hasbro's 12" Cobra lines, but it was hard to put together enough of them to really be effective as minions. Maybe better you should make your own.

Here's the thing about minions. Minions don't need to be cool. In fact, a bit of dorkiness is a good thing for the drones that keep your secret missile silo or nuclear reactor going. They don't need the best gear, because most of the time they're seen only in passing, or from a distance, or in a crowd, or flying through the air because the missile silo/nuclear reactor just exploded thanks to our hero. What's more important is that they be somewhat uniform. Heck, if they had much in the way of individuality, we might actually have sympathy for them as we blow them away, and that's not a good thing in this formula.

So, my suggestion when making minions is to look around and figure out what it is you have too many of, and especially what you have too many of and don't like or will never use. Not realistic? Looks goofy? Doesn't matter. If you've go multiples, it's minion material!

First, you need base figures. Just about anything will do, and you could use the cheapest Action Man knock-offs you have laying around, but I went a different way. I had an number of G3 Power Team bodies with black gloved hands and less-than-wonderful head-sculpts. The gloves were a good minion accessory, and there was a good chance I'd be hiding their faces anyway. So my minions sacrafice nothing in the way of articulation.

As for the rest, during my clean-up, I realized that I'd bought a lot of storms Shadows at Goodwill. I mean a lot. At the moment, I count eight nude storms Shadows stacked up in my office closet waiting for some unknown future project (or trade).

Why so many? Well, ask Rudy. Hasbro made huge numbers of those Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow two-packs and they were sold as loss-leaders. For the last six to eight months, those have been cycling out of kids rooms and into thrift stores. Mind you, you may find an occasional Snake Eyes, but they don't show up in equal numbers. At some point the kids pick their favorite, and Storm Shadow has to go. Good move kids. What kind of idiot ninja dresses in white anyhow?

So anyway, enough were dressed that I have five or so jumpsuits, and several of those still had their gun-belts, so that became the basis of my minion uniform. For boots, I picked the basic, early release Power Team, black combat boots. I just don't like the looks of these, but for minions, they're fine. Finally, all but my "officer" get black balaclavas, another thing I have lots of and rarely use. Minion often have their face covered anyway. Beyond that, several of them have been issued gas-masks of various sorts so as not to be killed by the fumes from the rocket fuel/reactor coolant.

The minions are still a work in progress. My officer could still use some kind of head-gear (maybe headphones, I like his widow's peak and hate to cover it), and none of them are armed (still looking for my box of pistols, though I suspect this will be a good use for over-sized Hasbro .45s). I may add a few other accessories if I can find the right stuff in bulk, and it would be nice if they all had matching gas-masks.

So, got any minions? Want to make some? Send me pictures, and I'll post them here.

Moving past Angry Joe Day

Well, Angry Joe Day 2006 was a great success. Thanks to everyone who participated, either by entering the contest, donating prizes, or just in spirit. The plan for now is, if Joe isn't back on retail shelves by March 1, 2007 (and right now, there are no prospects that he will be), then we'll do this again next year.

Remember, this isn't just me, this is all of you. Feel free to take Angry Joe Day and make it your own. Find your own ways to celebrate. Start your own contests, whatever. All I ask is that you keep it in the spirit of fun in which it is intended. We don't want to piss Hasbro off, we just want to remind them that there are people out here who still care, maybe make them smile, and hopefully one day have somebody in charge say, "what the heck, let's give it another try!"

I also wanted to take a moment to talk about "Tanker" Dave and his great 1/6th vehicle contest. If you haven't gone over to his site to check out the winners, you should. Dave asked me to help with the judging, and let me say that it was hard. The quality of all the entries was very good, and the top finishers were just amazing. Congrats to them all, and a big thanks to Dave for sponsoring the contest.

Well, the good thing about the AJD photo contest is that it saved me from a month of posting much of anything of my own. The bad thing is that it's been forever since I posted anything of my own. Time to change that. Several new items have arrived here lately.

Most significantly, I found some thrift-store trains for my friend Eric, who buys, sells, and restores toy and model trains. When I called him, Eric reported that he'd seen some Joes from an estate being unpacked at a place he knew, and that he was going back that day. He was a little vague about what they might be (he really doesn't know GI Joes), only that they were 12," old, and some had fuzz. He set off to the store to see what he could do.



I live 60 miles across a mountain range from Eric, so I couldn't just bop over there to see what he'd found, and in fact, I wasn't able to pick them up for about a week. What I found was a grocery bag with five, nude, fuzzhead Joes in various states of disrepair. Several had pretty good fuzz, one had intact kung-fu grip hands, and among them was a decent looking talking astronaut with a semi-working talk-box. There was also a bag with an assortment of uniform items (some AT, some home-made, some undetermined) a few accessories (the silver astronaut boots, a mystery tape-recorder), and a bag full of incomplete (but mostly dressed) Megos. I don't recall exactly what I ended up getting these all for after we were all done, but I think it was about $25!

You see two of the guys in the picture. The sweater and shirt are GI Joe from the bag. The pants are from the bag and may be from the same Jungle Survival set as the shirt, but they have a zipper, not a snap. I'm speculating that mom put the zipper in, since some of the other uniform items included were (nicely) home-made. The faded camo pants are childhood vintage from my spares-box. The boots are all modern.



This is may Talking Astronaut, pulled apart for cleaning and repair of the talker. I still haven't figured out how to remove those nasty stains on the body, but they shouldn't show when he's dressed (I need a white jumpsuit though). I seem to be making progress on repairing the talking mechanism using instructions I found here. I'm really looking forward to getting him fixed and back-together.

I am a total novice, by the way, at the business of cleaning and repairing old Joes, so any tips and advice would be appreciated.


Finally, while I was in "the big city" to pick up my new-old Joes, I hit a few Goodwill stores in search of 1/6th stuff. The first store (one where I almost find something) came up empty. The second turned up only a Storm-Shadow from the two-pack minus missing everything except his uniform. I was standing in line at the checkout when I happened to look up near the front of the store, where some baby strollers and similar items were displayed, and was amazed to see a Hasbro M8 Scout-car!

I jumped out of line and trotted over. It was missing the turret and cover for the crew compartment, but that was okay. It saved me from any temptation to keep it stock, and not convert it into an AT vehicle. Question was, how much? My wife was waiting in the car (working on her ALIAS novel on her laptop like a good writer with a deadline) and I'd already spent Joe money that day, so I didn't want to press my luck.

I rolled it around, looking for a price tag. Finally found it under the nose. $3.99! Score! Well, she might justifiably use the "where will you put it?" complaint, but price would not be an issue.



Oh, and let me leave you with one last bit of kitbashing. I was doing some reorganization today, and spotted this guy in a box looking 85% as you see him here. I barely remember throwing him together a few months back. He was just a bunch of stuff thrown together with no real plan. The major armor pieces are from a Hasbro 12" "Batman Forever, Mr Freeze" figure, the same one who provided the head for my infamouse "Der Governator" figure. The base figure is a Max Steel Ultra Action body with a HOF Storm Shadow (I think) head in a black jumpsuit of unknown origin. Tonight, I swapped the black combat boots he'd original been wearing for some sci-fi looking Max Steel boots, added the arm armor, and fiddled with his headgear (he's actually wearing an Action Man helmet over a Spy Troops hard mask over Storm Shadow's molded mask.

No, I can't tell you who or what he's supposed to be, but he looks kind of cool.

Angry Joe Day Entry, Brad Checkett

In Brad's three-part entry, Joe is looking for new ways to fill his spare time. Says Brad, "After no longer serving in the Armed Forces Gi Joe is spending his retirement in his backyard carving little pieces of wood. As you can see he has a lot of carving to do."

Angry Joe Day Entry - David Eden 3

David says of this one: "I would like to send the folks at Hasbro down to you-know-where to meet THIS guy!"

Angry Joe Day Entry - David Eden

The first of several entries from David Eden. Here's what he has to say about this one:

"Me Intruder and me very angry that Has-been cancelled Joes. Who me gonna wump now? Squidgy little Joes not worth it!"

No More Mister Nice Atomic Man

I while back I scored a deal on some silver Neo Henshin Cyborgs and used one of them to make an updated "Mike Power, Atomic Man" kitbash. It was pretty cool, but I haven't done much with it for a while (I'd still like a real Mike Power shirt for him). But then the Cy-com guys using Henshin Cyborg bodies showed up at KB Liquidator, and suddenly Mike had access to a whole new range of "special mission" upgrades and attachments. Here he has the lower legs from a Cy Colossus, and the gun-arms from two of them.

Oh, yeah. Who's laughing now? Bring on the Intruders!

(Remember, with any of my posts, you can click on the small image for a MUCH larger version. One reason for posting to the blog was to be able to post large pictures with no loss of detail.)

Breaking out the luggage

A few more space photos from the archive. This is a cart/trailer that I made inspired by the "Modular Equipment Transporter," a two-wheeled equipment cart used on Apollo 14. It's made from some toy vehicle wheels, some drawer organizers, the handle from a craft-store shovel, and some assorted hardware.

It's appropriate to feature this "space luggage," as I'm leaving tomorrow on a trip to Southern California to visit my son. I'll be gone about a week, and it remains to be seen what (if anything) I'll post while I'm gone.

If I don't post, I'll be home before Christmas, with plenty of time to post a retrospective of some of my favorite 1/6th holiday shots.

See you then.

- Steve

Ethics are for LESSER men!

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Near the top of my list of "things I really regret that I haven't gotten around to," is to do something major with "Angry Frank."

Angry Frank is a villain I came up with to oppose the Adventure Team, a Lex Luthor to their Justice League. The idea came from a Soldiers of the World figure that attracted some notice a while back. I really liked the head-sculpt, and many people thought it resembled an young (and angry) Frank Sinatra. I thought he'd make a good villain, and I decided to make him kind of a businessman. My bash wears a suit from a Star Wars Cantina band member over a white tee-shirt. I was going for a kind of retro-Miami-vice drug-lord thing. He wears an AT-style shoulder holster, but while he sometimes carries an automatic, he just as often uses it to store his flip-phone.

As I see it, Angry Frank is the head of a shady business empire that skirts the edge of legality. But though Frank carefully hides the connections, he's also in charge of a vast criminal empire too, and not just any kind of crime. Angry Frank Inc. is the evil flip-side to the Adventure Team. He deals in poaching, sales of endangered species, stolen artifacts, toxic-waste dumping, smuggling, and unethical and illegal science.

I see Angry Frank as a guy with money and power, but no taste, and a massive insecurity streak coupled with an explosive temper. Angry Frank hates it when people tell him he looks like Sinatra. That's a very quick way to get a gun pointed at your head. Of course, with Frank, there are lots of ways to get a gun pointed at your head. He's irrational when he's angry, and even his own goons know enough to stay out of his way. His mansion is decorated like a low-rent Explorer's Club, and he has no idea that his Miami-Vice look is outdated.

In contrast to his red-hot temper, his right-hand "man" is, literally, cool as a snake. "Mr. S." is a mysterious killer with dark, scale-covered skin. He dresses in black leather, wears ammo-belts crossed over his chest, and carries an M-60 as a hand-gun. But while he is dangerous and without mercy, Mr. S. is also calm, cool, and collected. He doesn't kill without reason, and sometimes actually serves to moderate Angry Frank's more irrational impulses.

Mr. S. is a "Bio Constrictor" from the Max Steel line. He wears the leathers from an old Toy Biz "Ghost Rider" 12" figure. His weapon and ammo-belts are Hasbro cheapies, and the grip on the gun fits perfectly in his oversized hand. When I first came up with the character, I only had one Bio Constrictor, but now I have seven of them, each uniquely kitbashed, giving Mr. S. both a gang, and a family.

The Snake gang refer to each other as "brothers," but it's not clear that they're literal brothers, or even if they're human. Given some of the stuff Angry Frank has been mixed up in, they could be the result of illegal weapons programs, chemical mutations, the result of illegal weapons mutations, aliens, evolved dinosaurs, or even demons or lost-gods released from some ancient artifact or lost tomb. When anyone on the Adventure Team makes a crack about their appearance, they act hurt, and chide our heros for making fun of their "deformity," but that seems to be the least-likely reason for their appearance.

I've got some general ideas for the personalities of some of the various Snake Gang members, but not all. The one with yellow hair is a loner, partial to the isolation of rain-forests. The one with the gray-streaks is the respected elder of their gang/clan/family. He's a martial-arts user with a sense of honor that often runs contrary to his younger fellows. He could almost be a good guy. Almost.

Angry Frank has other minions as well. He has a mad-scientist who keeps his own head in a jar, a cyborg mercinary, and an updated 12" Intruder that he keeps as a house-servant.

The sad thing is, Angry Frank has never even met the Adventure Team in a photo shoot. It's time. It's well past time.

Dinosaurs: Still fun

I happened to catch a few minutes tonight of the movie Jurassic Park as it was running on Sci-Fi channel. I was surprised at how poorly it held up. The central characters were all so annoying and stupid you wanted the dinosaurs to eat them.

Of course, that didn't matter at the time, because -- it was all about the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, they don't hold up too well either. The once state-of-the-art CGI dinosaurs now look rather unconvincing, and their designs are already far behind the scientific curve (current evidence supports that most, if not all, of the dinosaurs portrayed would have had feathers).

Of course, any attempt to keep up with science is probably doomed anyway, which may be part of why Peter Jackson has gone strictly retro with his dinosaurs in the King Kong remake. These are strictly 1939 dinosaurs done with 21st century technology.

Old, new, accurate or not, one dinosaurs make great toys, and the Jursassic Park toy line is without a doubt exceptional. Collectors pay high-prices for them on eBay. Fortunately, I got most of my large collection at thrift stores, paying pennies on the dollar.

Another interesting thing about dinosaurs is that the same body plans often get played out at different sizes in different species. So, even though a Jurrassic Park dinosaur may be far from 1/6th scale (I'd say they're closer to 1/14th or so), they can always serve as 1/6th stand-ins for their larger cousins.

The king of Jurassic Park dinos is the bull T-Rex, and I'm lucky enough to have three of them now. I used one of them as a "juvenile allosaurous" in my "Scotty Travis, Dinosaur Hunter" photo-story a while back. Still one of my favorite shots.

Scientifically accurate? Not hardly. Fun? Sure!

Bad Dog

Returning today to one of my more recent group posts, though likely seen here in greater variety and detail than you could see previously.

This "Hulk Dog" is from the second wave of "Incredible Hulk" movie theaters. In the movie, of course, the gamma-ray mutated hounds were huge, but in the case of this 6" scale figure, it turns him into a decent-sized 1/6th dog.

The front and rear legs are jointed, and the head (which turns side-to-side via a cut-joint) is rubbery, so the mouth can bite and hold onto things reasonably well. Sure, he won't pass for a "normal" dog, but in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, he's great. In this case, I figure my bad-ass kitbashed character has probably been letting his pup drink from the sludge ponds at the toxic waste dump where he hides out.

A studded leather or chain collar would finish this guy off nicely. I may have to add one at some point.

Another good example of how you shouldn't limit your 1/6th shopping to 1/6th scale characters.

Days of Future Past

There were a few other notable action figures of the 60s that I consider worthy to be compared to GI Joe. One of these was Mattel's Major Matt Mason. Matt Mason was a 6" rubber astronaut figure with "bendy" joints in his otherwise hard-rubber limbs.

The figures themselves were attractive, but unremarkable. The wire inside those bendy joints was infamous for breaking, the visor on Matt's removable helmet was fragile, and for all his wonderful gear, Matt didn't even come with a life-support pack, and therefore had to hold his breath during his several-year stay on the Moon. What made Matt excel as an action figure, in some respects eclipsing GI Joe, was his amazing assortment of gear and vehicles.

The largest of is accessories was the Space Station, a huge, three-story, tree-house in space. The top was enclosed by translucent blue panels, and featured a command chair, storage shelf light-up center console, sink, and two-burner stove. (no microwave oven for 60s-centric Matt!)

Beyond that, Matt had an amazing variety of gear: several battery-operated vehicles, with treads, wheels, and legs, space-probe launchers, weapons, and two varieties of powered exoskeletal armor. This brings me to one of my favorite accessories in the line, the Supernaut Power Limbs.

You can see the original toy in the center inset of the picture at right. Matt (or one of his friends) was strapped into a large backpack that formed the center frame of the device. His feet snapped into foot rests on the inside of the jointed, telescoping, legs (shown retracted in the picture). The two arms were clearly designed for construction. The one on Matt's right, had a serrated claw, and the one on the left had a scooping bucket. The arms were designed so that a child could hold onto the levers at the top of the arm, remotely move the arms, and open and close the "hands" using push-button levers next to the handle. As a bonus, the backpack had a small crane arm and hoist with lifting hook.

Now, this was an idea just ahead of its time. In the 60s, General Electric tried to build a working exoskeleton called "Hardiman," seen at left. Unfortunately, Hardiman was never completed, other than a single arm (that could lift 600 pounds, but thanks to feedback circuits, would allow an operator to pick up an egg without crushing it). Walking, unfortunately, was more of a problem, and then there was the question of how to power it without a long extension cord.

But in the late 60s, the hope was alive, and the Supernaut Power Limbs were a pretty good model for what a real exoskeleton might be like. Now, if you think that the SPL suit looks a lot like the Power Loaders in the movie Aliens, I find it difficult to imagine this is an accident. I'll just bet if you could go back in time, you'd find young James Cameron (or one of his production designers) had a pile of Major Matt Mason toys.

Of course, if you've studied the first picture closely, you have some idea how this relates to 1/6th scale.

Back when I was first getting into the hobby, my first major custom project was to create 12" analogs of the old Major Matt Mason figures, and a few of their toys. Perhaps a few of you remember pictures of the mammoth 12"-scale version of the Space Station I was building from PVC pipe. Like GE's Hardiman,was ever a case of my reach exceeding my grasp. The station ran into more and more problems the closer if came to completion, and work on completing my 1:1 scale office took precedent. I eventually disassembled the station, packed it away, and there it remains. If I get back to the project (and I might) I anticipate I'll start most of it over from scratch.

I did create some decent 12" versions of Matt Mason, kitbashed around Lanard Ultracorps space suits. Late in the project, I found a good-sized stash of Robotix construction toys at a thrift-store. This line is ideally suited to creating sci-fi props for use with 1/6th figures, from things as mundane as shelves and tables, to -- well -- Supernaut Power Limbs.

This was actually a fairly easy project, done in an hour or two, but I think it looks pretty good. It stood about two and a half feet tall, I believe. The legs and arms in this version are fixed (If I did it again, at least the arms would move). The claws, however, were electrically operated from switches on the backpack, which also contained the batteries. One nice improvement over the original, is that the astronaut had some head and face protection in the form of a transparent shield that lowers down from above. Another nice addition is that there were two functional spotlights on either side of the astronaut's head (it's a little difficult to see them in this somewhat fuzzy flash picture).

Like the Space Station, this has since been disassembled and packed away, but with this picture, I could recreate it in just a few minutes, and I now have more Robotix parts, to do an even better job. It might even be possible to add electrical operation to the arms as well.
Impractical or not, some ideas are just too cool to let die.