The Cabinet of Dr. Talibane- (UPDATE 1/30) 1/6 Echo Base Trooper, Han Solo in ATST

[TaliBane]

Decided to abandon my falling Palps (my wife said it was a silly idea for a custom ) and just make him a custom lightning Palps. I'm repurposing some lightning from another figure so he can have both hands blasting and I will do a small bottom light in the stand to light up his face and hands.

The outer cloak and hood are wired so I'll be able to get a nice billowing/wind-blown look.

Still not sure if I'll grab one of the cheap HT Palps heads from eBay (to see if I can get a somewhat different look to the HT sculpt's leery smile just using paint work) or stick with this modded Hasbro. It looks quite different to the HT face - which will be displayed nearby - and a bit more angry so that's a plus, but the detail isn't quite as sharp as a recast HT.

Really wish I could find a recast of the angry SSC Palps head, which were on eBay years ago. Slightly comical look but I think I could make that work with painting.

 

[D.R.37]

That Sandie bucket is amazing

 

[TaliBane]

Thanks DR - it was an interesting challenge partly because it's made of a (not all that great) cast of the front face of my Solo Bones bucket combined with another different helmet for the back half.

I'm currently making one of the funky ROTJ style buckets, partly because the HT ROTJ stormie helmet just didn't really capture the ROTJ look at all. The curse of the SW stormie helmet continues.

 

[agonistes86]

Awesome stuff, Tali.
That sandtrooper just became my new benchmark for when I start my own!

 

[Cagoda]

Lightning Palps is definitely a better usage of that figure, he looks great!

 

[D.R.37]

Dude seriously, EVERY helmet is off in some way Usually a few mm too long in places which doesn’t sound like much but is inches in 1:1

That’s crazy so you just used Solo’s face? …HT back?

…looking forward to seeing your ROTJ “squished” version.

 

[TaliBane]

Awesome stuff, Tali.
That sandtrooper just became my new benchmark for when I start my own!

Wow, that is high praise!

The belt and chest armor is modded Hasbro because I couldn't find those HT or SSC armor pieces and it's too thin to cast (for me.) And the HT armor I was able to find were stormie not sandie, so I had to scratch build stuff like the knee diamond and ab armor differences.

I do think it's funny that the "look sir droids" trooper is the one sitting on the Dewback in the iconic Dewback pics, yet the Dewback is in the distance behind him when he's saying his iconic line. So the second white pauldron trooper - the real onscreen movie Dewback rider - gets forgotten while the other guy gets both close-ups.

Lightning Palps is definitely a better usage of that figure, he looks great!

The modded Hasbro head looks a lot better in-hand versus in pics but it would be cheap and easy to have a HT recast instead (with expression subtly changed with paint), so it's tempting.

Dude seriously, EVERY helmet is off in some way Usually a few mm too long in places which doesn’t sound like much but is inches in 1:1

That’s crazy so you just used Solo’s face? …HT back?

…looking forward to seeing your ROTJ “squished” version.

I bought a (not-great ) recast of the HT sandie helmet off eBay years ago, made of a weird plastic-resin hybrid. I used the back of that and then the Bones recast for the front - hard to make the two helmet halves match because the HT is bigger. The half recast provided a good neck joint for the hybrid helmet.

I'm using the front half of that HT recast for the front of my ROTJ helmet (using heat to distort the cast) and a cast I made of the back of one of my HT stormie helmets for the back of it. I've removed the brow to make a new one that can sit low over the lenses.

The only thing I really can't do is make the lenses "bubble" style if I want to use clear green. I thought about casting the lenses on my HT ANH helmet but then they'll just be opaque/painted. I really wanted to use dark green clear plastic, so they'll be flat. The bubble vs flat lenses thing isn't hugely noticeable in 1/6 in-hand anyway.

 

[D.R.37]

Innovative and very cool! The things we do to get close to or achieve 1/6 prop accuracy. I love it

 

[Chakaman]

I agree Paul.

Duncan, great attention to details my friend.

 

[TaliBane]

Finally finished the sandcrawler power/gonk droid (well, still have two more lots of weathering, but I'm burned on this one ) I started out with the gonk kit, but ended up throwing 3/4 of it away and scratch-building most of it. The feet are a styrene build.

The legs are sort of "bendy" articulation so it can be posed quite a bit but unfortunately I used too much metal so the fig weighs a lot (in hand the fig feels and looks like a fully real metal object) and so you can't get too crazy with the leg poses. I built a custom stand to support more leaning-over poses.

Next up for me is the ultimate Tatooine mega-build: the print of the Dewback 3D sculpt I helped supervise has just arrived (it is huge... ) It's intended as something as close to accurate as practicable to the Tunisia shoot prop, but with adjustments based around what the intended onscreen creature was.

Sandcrawler gang...

 

[Chakaman]

Gonk looks great!!

Looking forward to seeing your Dewback.

 

[D.R.37]

Good stuff!
Also looking forward to seeing the custom beast come together

 

[TaliBane]

Power Droid may be the least interesting SW fig you could ever build (PD was a major pegwarmer back in the late 1970s, an era without many pegwarmers,) but thanks!

I do plan to build the Hoth version, plus a third one for my 8D8 to torture.

 

[Cagoda]

Wow that is super cool! What’d you use for the bendy legs?
And post dewback pics ASAP please!

 

[okieh 2]

Gonk and the whole group on the other picture are really great!!!

 

[TaliBane]

Thanks guys - I am in the pincer grip of a home renovation project but will hopefully post a few pics of my Dewback WIP. Below is a pic of all the parts just tacked together with a random sandie onboard. What's good is the print feels like lighter weight and durable rotocast plastic (because it's a new type of resin print,) less fragile as older resin prints are.

This sculpt took forever to get right - not 100% accurate in all places but close. I made a few changes to the Dewback prop - eg the prop has very stumpy and thin legs, and the (overscale iguana) tail scales don't - at all - match the head, and the rhino body had no scales at all. The prop's latex skin failed to adhere to the wood frame before filming even began (creating huge wrinkles where the legs met the body) so I had to take a look at Fred Pearls' original rhino body to figure out what it "should" have looked like.

I don't think any company has quite gotten the Dewback right. Kenner did perhaps the best conceptualization of all back in 1978, though I like the Sideshow headsculpt. Ironically, despite it being the first image I ever saw of SW (in the novelization,) I wasn't able to get a Kenner Dewy back in the day - only when I started collecting in the mid 90s.

It is possible I'll be able to offer some Dewback prints for sale, though printing at this size ain't cheap.

And Cagoda for power droid leg articulation I used part of an old desk lamp's "bendy" arm (the kind with segmented stainless steel loops for lamp arm bend/positioning) bolted to an aluminum frame. The bendy arm has to be pretty tight to support the figure.

I pretty carefully matched all the finer power droid details (sandcrawler gonk actually has a 1970s telephone "curly cord" around its mid-section that I don't think anyone ever noticed before) and I will hopefully be able to post pics of the back and other side soon. I added some leaking oil/grease on the back.

 

[okieh 2]

Thanks guys - I am in the pincer grip of a home renovation project but will hopefully post a few pics of my Dewback WIP. Below is a pic of all the parts just tacked together with a random sandie onboard. What's good is the print feels like lighter weight and durable rotocast plastic (because it's a new type of resin print,) less fragile as older resin prints are.

This sculpt took forever to get right - not 100% accurate in all places but close. I made a few changes to the Dewback prop - eg the prop has very stumpy and thin legs, and the (overscale iguana) tail scales don't - at all - match the head, and the rhino body had no scales at all. The prop's latex skin failed to adhere to the wood frame before filming even began (creating huge wrinkles where the legs met the body) so I had to take a look at Fred Pearls' original rhino body to figure out what it "should" have looked like.

I don't think any company has quite gotten the Dewback right. Kenner did perhaps the best conceptualization of all back in 1978, though I like the Sideshow headsculpt. Ironically, despite it being the first image I ever saw of SW (in the novelization,) I wasn't able to get a Kenner Dewy back in the day - only when I started collecting in the mid 90s.

It is possible I'll be able to offer some Dewback prints for sale, though printing at this size ain't cheap.

And Cagoda for power droid leg articulation I used part of an old desk lamp's "bendy" arm (the kind with segmented stainless steel loops for lamp arm bend/positioning) bolted to an aluminum frame. The bendy arm has to be pretty tight to support the figure.

I pretty carefully matched all the finer power droid details (sandcrawler gonk actually has a 1970s telephone "curly cord" around its mid-section that I don't think anyone ever noticed before) and I will hopefully be able to post pics of the back and other side soon. I added some leaking oil/grease on the back.

Wow, really cool !!!
Looks fantastic

 

[D.R.37]

Very cool!

 

[Cagoda]

That Dewback is essentially what I'm looking to do with Ephant Mon! Seeing that is super inspiring, that's a wonderful sculpt. It will look so cool all painted up.

 

[TaliBane]

That Dewback is essentially what I'm looking to do with Ephant Mon! Seeing that is super inspiring, that's a wonderful sculpt. It will look so cool all painted up.

Yeah I'm so looking forward to your Ephant!

The paint is a bit of an issue with the Dewback - I'm trying to hunt down as many hi-res color-accurate pics as I can (many pics of the ANH era have that distorted color issue - Jawa and Tusken robe colors are a good example.) The Dewback has historcially been produced (all the way back to Kenner) as a green, or mostly green, creature whereas the prop actually appears to be more of a dusty taupe-grey color (see attempt to match that color in the auction pic below) but with a definite hint of green.

The prop had an unusual, almost iridescent rainbow-ice-cream color scheme (mostly light greens and blues) when it left the Pearl studio but must have been painted over with more earthy colors sometime later, presumably on location. Though in clearer pics you can see the original (purplish blue!) color is still evident painted around the eyes and on the lip beak on the on-location prop, and maybe that hint of green is the original paint beneath showing through.

These are a couple of interesting Dewback color samples - neither are the actual prop, the one on the left is a repaint that attempts to match the ref pics of the "back-up head" seen hanging on the wall of Pearl's studio in the pic on the right (it was auctioned by the Pearl family a few years ago.) The paint on the right was done by Fred Pearl, so it is probably an indication of vaguely how the colors originally looked on the prop.

This Dewback has been an unbelievably complex creature to get right, partly because the prop was pretty "cobbled together" from such radically different parts (oversized iguana tail, rhino body and newly sculpted head, the joins covered with fur or the later-removed neck frill) and also because the Dewback was iconically photographed from low angles, making the creature in most people's minds far larger than the prop actually was.