SEASON NINE CUSTOMS

 

 

I make no secret of the fact that the Pertwee era is probably at the bottom of my favourites list in terms of the classic series. And this is probably my least favourite of his seasons too. That said, there are still some pretty decent monster designs to be had, and it's the Pertwee season that has provided the richest pickings for me (to date...)

OGRON

 

First up and the simplest, was the Ogron.

Fairly simple project this. Matt Smith base body, with details sculpted over the top. I did swap in the mouth and chin from a Lazlo figure to replace Matt's thinner features, as it gave the face a more animal base to work off. Rubber skirt trimmed from Matt's discarded jacket. Nice easy job, all told. 

AGGEDOR

Slightly more involved were two customs from Season 9's big monster mash, the Curse of Peladon. Firstly, the royal beast Aggedor.

 

Base figure was a Brannigan, as it was quite bulky already, which cut down on additional sculpting when I added furry texture over most of it. The hands came from the discarded toes trimmed off the Werewolf. The head was a scratch sculpt over chunks of plastic, with some rubber spikes glued in for the tusks and horn. 

I'm torn over the scale for this figure - the intent on screen is clearly that he's a huge imposing monster. But in most of the actual images of the monster on screen, he's humanoid sized. I took the latter path here, but I suspect if I took another stab at him, I'd lean more towards bigging him up a bit.

ALPHA CENTAURI

Far more complex was the other big new alien of the story, the hermaphrodite hexapod Alpha Centauri.

This obviously turned out to be the big non humanoid project this time around, and required the usual thinking outside the box. I started with a plastic tube (originally used for curry powder, so Alpha is still slightly pungent). The head was a plastic capsule from one of those arcade toy machines, which was handy as it could be split in two to access the innards. I fixed a big plastic screw into the bottom of the head ball, and a corresponding slot into the top of the body tube, so the head could rotate. I then found a smaller plastic ball to serve as an eye. I ran a length of wooden dowel through the centre, and glued this stick into holes in the front of the head ball. This allowed for the eyeball to rotate slightly (though I did fix two small screws into the back of the ball to catch against the central head axis, so the eyeball couldn't rotate all the way out of sight.

With the two trickiest bits of articulation engineered, the next big issue was the tentacles. I could have gone for solid sculpts, but I've done some experimenting over the years with flexible casting, and thought it might be an option here. I sculpted a tentacle over a wooden rod, and then made a mould using a 2 part putty called Silligum. Into this, I then poured some flexible 2 part casting resin (Polytek PT Flex, for anyone interested, both products can be found on Amazon or Ebay). Before this cured, I pushed some coiled gardening wire into the middle of the tube. When this was dried, I made 5 more (actually more like 8, once I'd discarded ones that didn't cure properly). I pushed the ends of the wires into slots in the body and tied them off inside. With a bit of glue and sculpting to bed them in, Alpha then had 6 poseable tentacles.

The rest of the job was thankfully simpler. I sculpted the texture on the head ball and eyelids (pre-painting the eye first for easier access), and around the torso. The cape was based on the skirt of the Gelth zombie lady, with the neck section sculpted in. Getting the gradient tone across the body was tricky, and is a job for which I suspect an airbrush might have been easier. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out though - the articulation functions as I'd planned, without spoiling the look. The whole thing is probably 5-10% too big again, as it was hard trudge the end scale while I worked on individual bits, but I don't think it's a deal breaker by any means.

MUTT

From the end of this season comes an unfortunate monster, one of the Mutants of Solos…

At first glance, this was an intimidating job, but on closer examination, it made a bit more sense. The starting point was to take the base figure (a new series Auton) and pose it in the hunched, leg-splayed pose from the stills. I cut away at the insides of the feet to achieve this stance on flat feet. With the figure posed, I had a better idea of where I could sculpt the carapace.

The abdomen was from a rubber insect figure fixed with a screw and sculpted around. The claws were trimmed from 6" figure hands, to allow for a peg and wrist rotation, and then fixed to lengthened forearms and sculpted over.The mandibles on the head come corm the legs of aforesaid insect toy, and the eyeballs are plastic beads, but everything else is a scratch sculpt.

The articulation is a little compromised on this, but no worse than it would have been for the original actors. And it can strike all the iconic poses from the story, which is all I was aiming for. Of more concern was the fact that subsequent looks at reference images show that I got the feet wrong - there ought to be a bifurcated toe, like the 2 clawed hand. A bit of an overhaul is definitely on the cards to fix this mistake...