After finishing the Castle Grayskull Wasteland terrain from the Masters of the Universe: Battleground set, it was time for one of the figures.
I reckoned that Trap Jaw was one of the grooviest MotU character designs back in the mid-eighties.
It turns out that over 35 years of life experience hasn’t changed how I feel about blue/green cyborgs with modular weapon arms, grotesque facial bionics and vague pirate themes one iota, so I figured that I would start with TJ.
Like a lot of similar media, the MotU franchise tends to have various different takes on the origins of the characters, and Trap Jaw has a few. My favourite is the one above.
In summary, Skeletor hit “Kronis” so hard that parts of him still havent landed, and Tri-Klops built Trap Jaw out of the bits that did.
Those illustrations – from the – Icons of Evil: Trap Jaw comic from 2003 – tell the story better than I ever could.
(Image from actionfigurebarbecue.com, click on it to check it out)
Anyway, like Morten Harket and your mum, Trap Jaw has had a few different visual iterations since “We Built This City” was number one.
Initially the 1980s Trap Jaw toy was pretty much what I was interested in referencing. The thing is, many of the physical details on the original toy were lost back then, due to the minimal paint deco.
As I wasn’t going to slavishly ignore details that would make for a better figure on the table, simply to match a mass produced toy run from almost forty years ago, I looked at the toy that the Archon sculpt referenced.
(Image from actionfigurebarbecue.com, click on it to check it out)
As “Masters of the Universe: Battleground is a fantasy miniature game based on the beloved ‘Classics’ toy series” it made sense to paint TJ to match that rendition of the character. As the “Classics” series was an adult collector range supposed to take the memory that you have of the character and update it, without taking away what you liked about it back then, it made sense.
Giving some extra attention to the physical details on the sculpt that are in some cases not even present on the original toy but were added in the Classics version was the obvious way to go.
So thats what I did, ending up with the finished verion of the miniature shown in the iffy photo at the top of this post, looking a fair bit like the beautiful illustration above.
I didn’t record the paints that I used, I just looked at various images of the character and decided what paints I had that I thought best represented him and got stuck in… and I loved every minute of it.
Until next time!
Filed under: Boardgame, Miniatures | Tagged: Archon Studio, Boardgame, Eighties, Evil Warriors, Fantasy, He-Man, Masters of the Universe, Mattel, Miniatures, MotU, MotU Battleground, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Terrain | Tagged: 2022 | 14 Comments »
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