Quicksilver, Yellowjacket, Captain Mar-Vell, Genis-Vell, and Havok are all variants of the classic Bullseye action figure from ToyBiz’s Marvel Legends Galactus Series 9, and I hate their lower legs and feet. In all the reviews that I do of these figures I rail against them. It’s probably unfair, and I do accept that I can be particular about my figures. When Hasbro released new lower legs for these figures on the Spider-Man in the Zola series, I was super excited. These would be great custom fodder for all the Hasbro figures, but the ToyBiz one’s would take some work. And then in a blink of an eye, these Spideys seemed impossible to get.
I had to resort to another method. Plus, I knew that I wanted to get them to work with ToyBiz figures. But that was going to require some work as the ToyBiz knee joints were thinner than the Hasbro joints — either a lot of sanding was required or something else.
Work and life delayed me from doing more with this project until 2013. I decided to reach out to Fwoosher Black_Arachnis as he’s doing some casting for me on a very old side project. I told him my conundrum and challenge and he understood the want. As time had gone on, I wanted a solution that wasn’t going to cost me an arm and leg (buying a bunch of Spideys on eBay ain’t cheap) and wouldn’t leave me with a bunch of half Spidey figures that would wind up in the garbage. Then I told him about the knee issue, and that the best way I could think of solving this would be to cut a Hasbro knee in half, a ToyBiz knee in half and then fuse the lower half of the Hasbro knee to the upper half of the Toy Biz knee and then make a mold and castings.
I know Black_Arachnis to be a perfectionist and professional, which means he takes time. He’s an artist when it comes to his casts, and sometimes there is a lot of back and forth on progress and even some hiccups. In the fall of 2013 the first tests were sent to me. They were amazing. We discovered some issues, but these weren’t “pabs proof,” and after some more tweaking, he got them out to me. And they are amazing!
One of the items we discussed was minimizing painting or making it easy to paint the parts. Since I wasn’t looking to paint the whole figures, we needed to work the magic and make the casts ready for paint. You’ll notice that all the castings and painting I’ve done are raw, I haven’t sanded the parts, and I did some quick and dirty painting with out-of-the-bottle Citadel paints. That was the point. For the clear figures, we had another challenge again — minimize the need to paint, and that was crucial with the clear figures like Genis-vell. As you can see, he turned out great. And look at how cool Nova looks with the clear legs, I’ll still paint the gold strip, but will leave the rest clear.
The other great part of this project was that Black_Arachnis wanted to use a rubbery, softer casting plastic, and it works fantastically. The best part is that outside of heating the original parts off, the casted parts can almost be put on with your own hands. I used a pair of needlenose pliers to help, but everything fit together easily.
During the process, I asked him if he could make a pair of grey legs as I have this crazy idea to swap out my Kree Soldier’s legs, which led to another crazy idea: getting casts of the Kree belt, gun, and collar. I thought they might look good on the Black Panther base. Or the collars would be great for making… Skrulls. Black_Arachnis obliged and he casted a Yellowjacket head for me since the size was right and it could easily be modded into a Kree head. Yeah madness.
At some point Black_Arachnis will have an update for these parts at the Casting Cave, and you can check his thread on the Fwoosh forums.
