Day 4: Friday, May 15, 2009
End of the work week (to everyone else...just means less phone calls and emails for me), so it was back to my favorite undead subject. Before finishing the head, I wanted to attack the problem of putting the wounds on the body.
Since Mego closed up shop in the '80s, the action figure world was pretty much dominated by hard-sculpted toys with limited articulation. More poseable statue than action figure, it started with Kenner's 3-inch Star Wars abominations and continued into the larger formats established by the brilliant artisans at Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. Hyper-detailed, amazing works of art, they could be sculpted into anything, tools made directly from the sculpts, and articulation cut directly into the plastic.
Not so Mego. Megos were, let's face it guys, dolls for boys. They shared a common body form, with heads, footwear and accessories to differentiate them.
My partner on the EMCE Toys business, Paul "Dr. Mego" Clarke, recreated and improved upon the original Mego body years ago. A sturdy, poseable body:
Unlike the head sculpt, I couldn't just dig into the body, and completely resculpting the torso and thigh would have meant getting an expensive steel tool and subsequent plastic runs made in China. Not willing to spend the equivalent of a downpayment on a small house, I had to think differently.
The solution was to approach this like a makeup appliance. If this was a zombie film that required an actor to look the way we illustrated on 5/8, we couldn't very well cut into him (well, not if we liked him, anyway). So, we built up some Sculpey over the lower part of the ribcage and abdomen, laid in some rough ribs and guts and tore up the surrounding area.
After I smoothed out the ribs, plumped up the exposed organs and texturized the surrounding flesh, I applied some Sculpey to the thigh and sculpted in some tears, bites and pulped musculature.
Ultimately, these pieces would have to be cured and molded so the resulting casts could be glued smoothly onto the contours of the individual bodies in production. I had no idea how to approach that, so at this point I put the bodies aside and figured that I'd leave it to Paul to come up with a way when the time came.
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