Re: Talibane's Customs and Bashes - FOZEC, JABBA'S "TWIN GUARD" TO LANDO!!
Guys, guys c'mon - I heard Kenner just made a figure of my twin buddy, Fozec... follow my vibro blade!
What's funny about Fozec is that he was specifically designed by the filmmakers to explain how Lando could hide in Jabba's Palace (like that there are other skiff guards EXACTLY like Lando and audiences wouldn't believe it otherwise,) which is a kind of funny-weird idea. So Fozec shares a bunch of "twin" elements with Lando - right down to the actor being a black man with a stylish 'stache.
The armor (forearm, shoulder and chest,) armor straps, cumberbund/loincoth designs are all identical to Lando, though done in different colors.
What I love about a lot of SW costumes is the reuse - Fozec has a Biker Scout elbow armor piece splayed out on the top of his head and painted silver, glued onto a cast of Lando's helmet. Because Sideshow's Scout armor sculpt is a bit off, I decided to just make a version out of styrene. Both Lando and Fozec's wrist armor is just a cast of their chest armor that has been curled into cylinders. They also took some shears to the skirt/flair of lando's helmet to cut some scallops for Fozec's helmet.
What was really tricky in painting Fozec is that his armor seems to have been painted by the same production assistant who "ruined" most of the Biker Scout armor with random puffs of black weathering spray paint on the day of shooting (a funny story a ROTJ producer tells) - Fozec's chest armor looks pretty unconvincing onscreen, almost appearing as if a toddler scribbled ochre and grey colored crayon onto the white armor, but I decided to match it anyway.
Fozec's pole weapon is super, super tricky to get good ref pics of. A few years ago Hasbro mentioned they were doing a Fozec fig, so I thought that would reveal some good details but the fig is still yet to see release. I managed to dig some decent enough pics from some very rare bts pics.
Anyway, I knew this fig wasn't going to be a foreground fig (he's going up behind my SSC Jabba) so I didn't go the full way with this, for example using an old HT body and just using most parts from parts bin rather than hunting down perfect matches, though he's pretty close to accurate.