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Sunday, August 21, 2011

Create Your Own Master: Ant King and Hypnos by Justin Zyduck

A couple rough sketches of what I came up with for the contest. I always enjoy the challenge of having a set of rules and then having to work within them. In this case, the contest's official rules say to minimize new sculpts and re-use standard torsos/legs/etc. wherever possible. I also gave both my villains the famous "He-Man crouch" until I realized that the new MoTU figures have articulated knees and elbows (!!!)



I don't have a better name for this guy than the Ant King. I came up with him because a surefire formula for a MoTU villain is "animal head with humanoid body" and I thought he filled a void in He-Man's list of adversaries -- an underground-dweller. The gimmick here is I thought he could have pose-able antennae like those bendy toys they used to make. The sword is weird, but I think I had an action figure with a sword like that. Maybe it was a Ninja Turtle? Anyway, you could tell the kids it's good for digging underground tunnels to break into Castle Greyskull.


This is Hypnos, Skeletor's psychic interrogator. I came up with the gimmick first of having armor that contains one of those spinny hypno-wheels. I came up with the helmet after my first drawing of him just looked like Hugo Strange in a funny outfit. The helmet is clunky and crude and seemed to fit perfectly with the original MoTU aesthetic.

7 comments:

  1. Awesome! And two characters! Very impressive, excellent focus on the restrictions of the contest. The Ant King would be a great fit into the MoTU world, and I really like Hypnos and his outfit. Reminds me of Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture meets the Hypnotoad :) .

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  2. It was definitely the Ninja Turtles that came with that...thing. I think they called it a Kama?

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  3. I can imagine these as MOTU characters. Good work!

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  4. Love the logic behind them. I can clearly see these as toys I might have had. I recognize all the pieces from Hypnos for sure. In fact, from from head down (sans armor) that appears to be Man-at-Arms. (I painted my man at arms into a hulk toy when I was a kid) I wanted a Hulk toy but only had MOTU figures.

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  5. I also painted my cannonball figure into a human torch. But really, who the fuck buys a cannonball dolly?

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  6. Those are some pretty whacky designs which fits pretty well with He-Man. And Eric is right, that staff weapon was definitely from Ninja Turtles

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  7. The weirdest thing about the Ninja Turtles kama is that it looks nothing like an actual kama, which looks like a small one-handed scythe. Maybe they didn't like the idea of a kid playing with toy scythes or something, but it looked more like a stage hook to pull bad acts off of the stage at a theater.

    Ninja Turtles kama:
    http://www.hobbyid.com/images/371a9397626996a262fc594990c23d0a04d30f72209d7476c4ae3382be69cd/kama_shredder_teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles.jpg

    real kama:
    http://matayoshi.info/images/kama.jpg

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