Custom Kaiju: Sculpey Hedorah

Rather than another review, today's post is about another of my forays into Sculpey, uh, "art."  A few years back I got some inspiration by looking at old vintage vinyl kaiju toys (like Muruchi), and thinking that perhaps I could replicate the look using my sculpting and painting skills.  Thinking hard about monsters that would be tough to screw up, I settled on Hedorah, a perennial favorite of the Godzilla fandom.  Hedorah is the "smog monster" from the 1971 film Godzilla vs.Hedorah.  An extraterrestrial alien, Hedorah is capable of forming directly from pollution and toxins, and so he has a sludgy, gloopy, dark body.

While making this Hedorah, I was thinking of all the crazy proportions and colorful paint sprays one sees on old vinyl toys, and also of ways of replicating the simple articulation that usually went along with them.  After some cogitation and a few hours forming a globby body, I had something ready to paint.  I went for a dark base, and then started dry-brushing various metallic colors over the surface.

Very little articulation actually made it into the final piece, but the arms can actually rotate at the shoulder.  

Hedorah's got a long "tail," but it really could just be the goo from his body dragging behind him.

You might notice something odd about the eyes here.  There is a gloss coat and a bit of paint on the pupil and white ring around the cornea, but they are otherwise just the original Sculpey color.

I made the eyes out of glow-in-the-dark Sculpey colors!  The photo isn't really all that great as my camera does not do well in low light, but you get the idea.  I probably should have left him under a bright light for a bit longer.

In painting this guy, I was aiming for the sort of rainbow effect that an oil slick will produce.

Here's a glimpse into how the arms can stay in place and still move while made from hard baked Sculpey.  Magnets are the key!  Unfortunately, there is a bit of paint that rubs off at the joint, but this guys is pretty much for display only.  Sculpey is not exactly the material of choice for toys.

Someday perhaps I'll get around to making up some other Sculpey kaiju.  Hedorah at least has Godzilla and Minilla for company.  Luckily they're not busy having an all-out monster brawl in my display case.

Toy Review: Godzilla's Gang Bemustar

This is a very short toy review for a very cheap toy.  Mattel released a series of old Popy soft

vinyl toys in the USA in 1978, dubbing the line "Godzilla's Gang."  Outside of Godzilla himself, the rest were actually Ultraman villain monsters.  It was kind of a strange grouping, but at around a buck a piece, one wasn't going to complain (not that I had any clue of who Ultraman was at the time).  I'm pretty sure that we had three of these toys, one of which was Bemustar.  I have no experience with the actual Ultraman show that Bemustar originated in, but I was able to locate this video of him doing his thing.

Anyway, all this is completely secondary to the fact that I'm here to post pics of a toy I knew virtually nothing about as a kid, but enjoyed mightily.  Here is Bemustar.

Sculpting on these old vinyl toys rarely were screen-accurate, but that's part of the charm.  He's got a joint at the neck.

I remember that the colors just enthralled me as a kid.  I believe the actual vinyl is a brown, but then there are varying sprays laid on top in metallic greens and magentas.

He's also got some joints that allow his arms to move up and down, but that's about it for such vinyl toys.  Still, having practically no articulation matters little when faced with such awesome paint.

Bemustar's got some really cool skin texture.  I love the silly tail.

"Oh, you think my tail is SILLY, huh?  I'll show you how silly it is next time I'm stomping around your downtown!"

There's the famous Popy stamp!

These old vinyls are great if you can get your hands on them.  Bemustar seems to be fairly easily acquired via venues such as Ebay, though the other Godzilla's Gang figures may be harder to come by.  He was a cheap thrill back in the day, and still seems to be today.  Thanks to Bemustar, I am in some small way able to reach back over the years to that little eight-year old me, breathing life into a small hunk of vinyl.

Toy Review: West Kenji SD Godzilla and Minilla

Today's review is a toy set that means a lot to me personally for a variety of reasons.  I've been a huge fan of  Godzilla movies since I was a young boy, and though I am a collector, I don't own much in the way of Godzilla memorabilia.  However, when I saw this kit at a local comic shop many years ago, it just seemed to call to me.  West Kenji was a Japanese manufacturer of soft vinyl model kits featuring the likenesses of a variety of characters from the Godzilla universe.  Regrettably, West Kenji seems to have closed up shop.  I'm not at all sure when they stopped producing these kits, but this particular one was released in 2003.  It's a shame as I would have liked to pick up a few more.

When I was young I used to spend a good portion of my free time painting lead and resin miniatures for use with role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  Knowing that acrylic paints would work well with vinyl as well, I started in on painting this set almost immediately.  This was my first try at such a kit, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all worked out.  Vinyl models like these usually come in parts and need to be fitted together.  In the case of this set, the heads, arms, and legs were all separate from the bodies.  It was a snap to trim off any extra gray vinyl from the parts and assemble the two figures.  My biggest worry was that when painted, any movement of the parts would wind up rubbing the paint off from around the joints.  However, time has shown this to be a baseless fear.  These two might as well be small mass-production toys in regards to their durability.  I won't go into much detail of how I actually painted these up, but a variety of techniques yielded up a pretty nice look.

If you don't already know, SD stands for "super deformed" which refers to a particular style of Japanese caricature.  SD characters are usually drawn with large heads, and small arms and legs, as if they were children.  There are actually quite a few lines of SD toys that represent anime characters, giant monsters (or kaiju), robots (Gundam especially), and so on.  The design of Godzilla in this kit follows his appearance in the late 60's film, "Son of Godzilla," along with his baby, Minilla.  It is entirely appropriate that this kid-friendly movie's heroes wind up in miniaturized form.

Here is the end result of my paint job on these particular SD figures.  Godzilla stands about four inches high, and Minilla measures around two and a half inches.

   

The texture on the figures is quite nice, and detail accurately represents the look of the monster suits from the movies.  Although Godzilla is technically supposed to be a charcoal gray color in the films, I chose to add a bit of green to his skin tone.  This is how Godzilla was always represented in toy form when I was a child.

Godzilla looks good from just about any angle.

The seams for arms, legs, and neck can be seen here.  Each can rotate 360 degrees.

He's got a minimum of articulation, but this is hardly abnormal for a vinyl figure.  Godzilla's characteristic dorsal fins are nicely represented here.

Minilla has the same level of detail as Godzilla, if not the same number of points of articulation.  Minilla's head, and arms can be rotated.

Minilla just looks like a baby Godzilla.  He hasn't even grown his fins yet!  In the films, Godzilla is often shown teaching him the ropes of being a giant monster, including how to breath fire.  Minilla seems only to be able to puff out smoke rings, however.

Godzilla is always looking out for Minilla.  Oddly, there never is a mention of Momzilla anywhere in the movies.

"I love you, Daddy!"

This is a phrase any father would long to hear, and it's part of why I love this movie so much.  I am always reminded of my own relationship with my boys when I watch it.  It's just a really cute and fun movie, and they seem to love it as much as I do.  This kit, too, was a lot of fun to build and paint, and I still get a lot of joy out of it to this day.