Alright, here we go again…
My original post was lost during one of the board snafus quite some time ago, I think. Meanwhile, I forgot where online I stored the pics…and I had some data retrieval problems from where I had them at home… Anyway, to make a long story short, I’ve re-uploaded my pics where I know they’ll be for a long while, so…here (for the umpteenth time) is my Inflamor custom!
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-torso-pose.jpg
The Inflamor was tops on my list of “characters who were too cool not to make the cut as figures”. He’s another one of those wonderful characters that help make the world of Thundercats so interestingly diverse and unpredictable. Plus he was no pushover (like the Mutants far too often tended to be). Maybe I liked him so much because he reminds me of the talking skeleton from The Last Unicorn…I dunno. Anyway, he’s one of the few characters I liked well enough to spend the time trying to make a good custom of him. I put this figure together around '99 or so. He was made from two figures that were readily available at the time: a Curse Of The Spawn (upper body) and a Frankie Raye Nova from the old Toy Biz 6” Silver Surfer line (lower body). The lower body didn’t require any work, really…just had to take out one or two sections of Nova’s jointed “hair” and remove it from the figure. It formed the perfect tapered lower body and had a spiffy base to keep the figure stable.
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-front-first.jpg
The upper body required more work though. First, I separated the figure at the waist, and removed all the “bone” armor stuff from the upper body. This left a few unsightly holes in the body…so I filled them in with A+B Poxy Putty (save for the one in the small of his back…I could live with that one). I tried to sand as much of the Spawn-esque detail off the figure (to give it a more “animated-style” appearance), with limited success. In the end, I decided I could live with much of the muscle texture detail as well, figuring the paint would wash a lot of it out.
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-torso-right.jpg
The big reason I went with the COTS figure was that the basic face/cranial structure was already incredibly similar to the Inflamor…which I figured would minimize the amount of work I would have to do. I figured a bit wrong though. I did significant work to the head, again using A+B Poxy Putty to make the skull more rounded (i.e., give it more body) as well as to form the nose, cheeks, and jaw. I also carved out the mouth, as it was a solid block between the upper and lower teeth on the original figure.
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-head-front.jpg
Hardest part in making this figure was getting the paint to look right. At first I tried spray enamel, but the yellow turned out too thin. Removed that, and tried undercoating with white, then going over in yellow spray…still didn’t work. So with a white undercoat and a half-ass yellow spray overcoat, I got some Citadel yellow and started brush-painting him in flat yellow. This finally achieved the effect I was looking for. Citadel paints were also used to finish up the eyes and teeth, and the head stripe was done with Testors enamel.
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-head-top.jpg
So…there ya go. As you can see, he looks just a tad scrawny next to Lion-O, but he fits in pretty well overall with my other Thundercats figures.
http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz214/CobraCommandOnline/Inflamor/inf-liono.jpg
so when Bandai brough out their Red Effect Flame sets, I had to grab one to stick with the Inflamor. While the set doesn’t blend all that well with the existing flame base, I may mod the old base to better fit in with these effects. Still, pretty neat.