He-Man PJs

This is a strange photo. I'm in my pajamas and a Disney Goofy hat, while playing a mandolin in my sister's bedroom. Why am I posting it on my action figure blog? Well, I'm wearing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe pajamas. The shirt features Whiplash and Battle Armor He-Man. I don't even remember wearing these as a kid, but laughed when I noticed it looking throw a photo album.

The Creeper - DC Universe

Time to take a look at the DC Universe Creeper figure. Of all the DC heroes Batman is my favorite. So when I was buying an entire wave of DCU figures to build the collect and connect Bane, The Creeper was not a horrible forced purchase. I'm not a huge fan of the Creeper, he's one of my least favorite Batman villains. At least I know who he is, and have other characters that interact with him. He's got a strange look and several weird versions of his origins.

His head sculpt could almost be reused for a Joker figure. The green hair and unusual skin color helps to highlight the similarities. He has a very skinny and lanky build. He also features his signature mane. I don't even know what to call it, a pelt? His hands also look like they are ready to claw someones face off. They have an unusual pose to them. Almost like they are positioned to look like he can climb walls. I don't know if they are new parts of him or reused.

I have no real complaints about the figure, his sculpt and paint are all nicely done. I probably would have skipped him, had he been in any other wave. I don't buy a lot of DCU figures and he's not a top priority character for me.

Home Made Star Wars B-Day Card

One year for my cousin's birthday I made him a home made card. At the time he was really into Star Wars. I took a picture of a bunch of action figures and photoshopped him and his siblings into the picture as Jedi. He really liked it, and even returned the favor. He made me a card for my birthday that year using a picture he took of his Obi-Wan and Emperor figures lightsaber fighting on a railing at his house.

Dominic, who is shaking hands with Luke in his X-Wing outfit, is now out of high school. So, this was a while ago. I'm better at Photoshop now, but I still get a kick out of the pictures.

Toy Room Preview #2

My house is a real fixer-upper. I have been slowly working on doing a lot of different updates to parts of my house. The toy room at this point really just needs carpet. Unfortunately to save some money I'm waiting until the upstairs is ready for carpet at the same time. I previously showed off some shelves I put in the closet to house the GI Joe playsets. I also finally have some of the shelves I bought from Blockbuster video set up. The toys on these shelves will not necessarily be what is displayed on them with the room is finished. I recently got some vintage Master of the Universe toys and so I decided to throw the new stuff along with what I had before on the shelves so I could enjoy them.

Here you can see the shelves in the closet have been finished off with stripes of wood on the fronts to make them more ridged. They have also been painted white. These displays aren't really final, but I added a few vehicles to the shelves. The Mobile Command Center is on the top shelf. The Triple-T is parked in the service bay and the Mad Dog is next to it. The second shelf down houses the original GI Joe Head Quarters. The third shelf down has the Tactical Battle Platform as well as a bunch of aquatic vehicles. Including the Hydrofoil, Water Moccasin, Devil Fish, and Killer Whale Hovercraft  On the floor is the Gantry/Crawler to the Space Complex. The Defiant Space Shuttle and Booster rocket is still in a closet up stairs. The He-Man Space Ship Eternia is leaning against the wall next to the Space Complex. The Space Ship Eternia is from the early 90's He-Man line often refereed to as the New Adventures of He-Man.

 As a kid I had a huge collection of vintage MOTU toys. I eventually sold them off along with my Thundercats to buy more vintage GI Joe and Star Wars toys. Over the years I've occasionally picked up a couple of MOTU figures at yard sales. A few weeks ago a bough a decent lot on ebay. I bough several shelving units from a local Blockbuster when the went out of business. I planned on using them in my toy room. I wasn't sure what would fit exactly when I bought them. It depends some on what other display shelves I build or use in the room. They are decent shelves for figures, but pretty shallow to try to display vehicles on.

Vykron - MOTUC

Vykron was the MOTUC exclusive figure for the San Diego Comic Con in 2012. He is based on three prototype figure that were cobbled together by customizing other Mattel toys during the design process for the vintage Master of the Universe line. The SDCC set contained one body and accessories to dress the figure up in three different costumes.

Check out the AFA Animated Review below. I picked up three sets because I wanted to be able to display all three versions of Vykron at one time.

Cobra IMP - GIJoe

This is a photo from my 6th birthday. My cousin Rick gave me the Cobra IMP. This tank features 3 large missiles that can be taken apart to drop land mines on the battle field. I actually got two IMPs that year for my birthday. We took one back to Toys R Us, but I don't remember what I picked out. The little yellow rings that were supposed to be land mines looked a lot like Cheerios. One time as a kid I was fooling around and had one on the tip of my tongue, I said something to my sister about  eating Cheerios and then accidentally swallowed it. I was so bummed out that my IMP was no longer complete. I made my sister promise she wouldn't tell my mom. I thought I'd be in trouble for swallowing my toy. I was old enough to know not to put that kind of stuff in my mouth.

It's amazing how much things change in 24 years. Obviously all the kids in this photo grew up, but the farm house in the background has been torn down and replaced with a McMansion and all the little pine trees along the driveway are now huge and grown together to the point were you can't see past them.

Captain Nihilism

During Brian's freshman year at college he was required to tell a story using 12 pictures or less for one of his Electronic Media and Arts courses. He decided to make a brief comic using photographs. Kevin and Derek came to visit Brian that weekend and were features in the comic along with a college friend Jesse. Kevin  plays Captain Nihilism, while Derek and Jesse portray street thugs. Kevin bought his famous Superman t-shirt (as seen in our shows Animation Creation and Action Figure Adventures) at Brian's request inside the mall that the photos were shot around. This graphic was originally posted to our old website, Obscene Newg .com

 Kevin created a Captain Nihilism custom action figure using parts from several GI Joe action figures. Unfortunately at the time, it was basically impossible to find baseball hats that fit 3 3/4 inch action figures. This forced Kevin to abandon his usual head sculpt for a head that was already wearing a baseball hat.
The action figure head belongs to the African American baseball player GI Joe, Hardball.  The painted flesh tone takes away from the look of the figure. The arms used for this figure had short sleeves and gloves. Some wrinkles were sculpted on the lower part of the arms. The end of the gloves were painted to look like the cuff of the long sleeves. Then flesh tone was painted on the hands.  The figures belt was sanded off and then painted to look like the figures shirt is not tucked into his pants.. Several shades of blue were used to give his pants a nice denim jean look. The Superman Logo was carefully hand painted on the figures chest.

 Here's Captain Nihilism beating up some street thungs. It looks like 

action figure Derek has had his butt kicked by Captain N. like real Derek.

Since Hasbro has released the Rebel Fleet Trooper figure that comes with a cap it 

would be possible to redo this figure with a Ripcord head and removable hat. 

This would help give all the "Kevin" action figures a more unified look.

Eternal Darkness - MOTU Cel

I love animation in all it's forms. As you can tell from my other posts, I love stop motion animation. I also love traditional animation. I have a pretty large collection of animation cels and more than half of them are from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. These two cels come from season 1 episode 46, "Eternal Darkness".

The cloaked character is Dark Dream and his little friend is called Tabor. Dark Dream is more powerful when it is dark so he wants to cause Eternal Darkness by magically causing an eclipse. Tabor is pointing out that Prince Adam is getting away.

 

You can see this part of the episode .here. The image is made up of two 

different cels which where shots against a background for the the show.

I donated several cels including these two to The Toonseum, a cartoon and comic museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They have a gallery named after He-Man producer Lou Scheimer. He is a Pittsburgh native.

Thundercats Bank - Burger King

In 80's Burger King ran a Thundercats promotion with their kids meals. There were several Thundercats "prizes" that children could receive. I don't know for sure what all of them were, but there was a ring that features a lenticular sticker, a Snarf straw holder, and a small cup/bank.

As a kid, I used this bank for years. I always kept my allowance and birthday money in it. the cup features Tygra and Cheetara on the outside of a while cup. The red lid features a slit for the money and has the Thundercat cat head logo molded into it. The cup is dated 1986.

After a quick search I found the commercial for the promotion. Apparently the only prize I didn't get as a kid was a light switch cover plate.

Updated Custom Toys for Animation Creation

If you've read much of this blog you probably know that my friends and I are into making stop motion animation videos using action figures. The first series we did was called Animation Creation. Each episode consisted of a series of short animated stories or music videos. At the end of each episode custom action figures delivered a commentary about how we made the show. These commentaries took on a "universe" of there own and the final episode of the series took place in the "Animation Creation Universe" were we are famous animators with thousands of screaming fans.

After that show was over we moved on to a second series called Action Figure Adventures about living toys trying to escape the room they live in. While this was going on we often bounced around ideas of doing a second season of Animation Creation. One of the features of the new season was going to be all new action figures of us. This time they were going to look more like we do, and less like characters we played in a live action video project we did. Just like the earlier figures these are made by mixing and matching parts from GI Joe figures and repainting them.

Derek is one of the two main animators and hosts of the commentary portions of Animation Creation. Derek often comments on the music used in the animations. His updated figure features him wearing bell bottom jeans and a green t-shirt. I was going to add a Green Lantern symbol in glow-in-the-dark paint to the shirt. His hair is sculpted from scratch and this time I made it long enough to actually cover the screw hole in his back. Lets hope he rubber band inside him holds up.

 Parts used for Derek...

Head: Duke v3 ( same head was used for his other figure)
Torso & Arms: Bazooka v1
Waist: Big Brawler v1
Thighs: Frostbite v1
Shins/Feet: Shipwreck v1

Derek comes with his dog Macie. She is made from an Order figure. The hears were removed and re-sculpted down instead of standing up.






Brian was one of the first guest animators to appear on the show. His character was often troublesome to the rest of the characters. In one episodes he labels one of the animations as"scraping the bottom of the barrel". Brian was going to take an an even more villainous roll in the second season. There is a good taste of his trouble making way in the 10th episode of Animation Creation.  His new figure is wearing jeans and an orange "dump" t-shirt. Brian's appearance changed the most from when we made "Wanderlust" until we were working on AFA. He had gotten rid of the deadlocks and grown a beard. I custom sculpted on the hair and beard. I changed the action figure head used for Brian between the two versions of his figure because his appearance had changed a lot, and I wanted a "later" GI Joe figure that used the ball joint neck that works with the chest I has chosen. The torso for both Brian and Derek needed to be sanded down to remove the #14 detail.

 Parts used for Brian...

Head: Footloose v1 
Torso: Bazooka v1
Arms: Chuckles v1
Waist: Spirit v1
Legs: Thunder v1


 Kevin (myself) is the second main animator and commentary host for Animation Creation. I often make comments during the commentary about the toys and action figures used to make the show. Boy, I wonder why? This time around I feature darker hair and glasses which is more how I look on a regular basis. I also used sculpty to try to make my torso look more pudgy and less muscular. I am wearing jeans and a Saw t-shirt. Greg (another contributer to AC) made and gave me a shirt that looks like this for my birthday one year because I teach high school Woodworking.

 Parts used for Kevin...

Head: Ripcord v1
Torso: Big Brawler v1
Arms: Chuckles v1
Waist: Big Brawler v1
Legs: Pathfinder v1

Kevin's hat comes from a Rebel Fleet Trooper from the Star Wars Vintage Collection Line.

The next figure to be made was going to be Greg (another frequent guest animator) but the 2nd season project wasn't going anywhere because of how long AFA took and so I never made the figure.

The Kevin figure was used in a safety video I made with the help of Derek, Brian, and Greg for use in my Technology Education classroom. It starts out a little slow as I explain the safety testing procdure, but it gets to the safety rule around 2:44. As I get into the rules it gets funny.



By now, these toys don't really look like us anymore. Derek and I both have facial hair and Derek never wears t-shirts anymore. I can't remember the last time Brian wore his Dump t-shirt.