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Sunday, February 15, 2009

Ray Harryhausen's monsters from 7th Voyage of Sinbad & Clash of the Titans

Ray Harryhausen is the master nonpareil of stop-motion animation that endangered filmmaking technique by which models are brought to life through being photographed frame by frame, moved millimetre by painstaking millimetre between exposures.
Despite all the improvement in movie special effects, I am still fascinated by stop-motion animation. Imagine all the patience and painstaking effort needed to make the models come to life. Besides being the master of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen's monsters' designs are bizarre and yet excellent!
When I was younger I used to love 7th Voyage of Sinbad & Clash of the Titans. I could watch them over and over again. I was very happy that X-Plus & Gentle Giant decided to produce the Cyclops/Dragon from 7th Voyage of Sinbad & Medusa from Clash of the Titans respectively.

Cyclops & Dragon from X-plus
The Cyclops and Dragon are 8" scale and they are made of vinyl, hence they are pretty light-weight and have only basic articulation. Just like the Bandai Ultraman figures.
The sculpt for Cyclops is almost perfect and the details spot-on (almost). The only complaint is that in the movie, the Cyclops actually had 2 horns and not 1 as sculpted in the figure.
I really love the texture of the body. They managed to include all the bumps and lumps on the Cyclops' body.
The paint ops are decent enough. I do admit I like the shading done on the Cyclops which enhances the texture of the bumpy skin even more. However the color they used on the lower half of the body is a bit too dark as compared to the movie.
If you got the Cyclops, how could you not get his nemesis, the Dragon, in which he had an epic battle at the end of the movie. The sculpt of the Dragon is not as good as compared to the Cyclops. In the movie, the dragon had two really long "fangs" but in the figure the "fangs" are pretty short.
The texture and details on the body are pretty good. Again, I think the color of the Dragon is a tad too dark as compared to the movie. There is also no shading unlike the Cyclops.
When you display the Cyclops and Dragon together, I feel the proportion is a bit off. In the movie, the Dragon is actually as tall as the Cyclops and much bigger.

Medusa by Gentle Giant
The sculpting for Medusa is very good and spot on! The texture on the body is great
and very detailed. The paint ops is also very well done. I really like this figure a lot. Medusa is around 9" and has basic articulation.

Overall, these are solid figures at reasonable prices. Also it's pretty hard to come across solid figures from such movies like Clash of Titans & Sinbad’s movies

Cyclops




















Dragon
















Royal Rumble!!!!








Medusa




















3 comments:

LEon said...

the last caption is funny. LOL

Dennis aka Katsuden said...

These legendary & mystical monsters are cool. Seems like they are hard to get.

Little Plastic Man said...

Leon - Thanks
Dennis - Yup...locally it is harder to get. However I managed to get Medusa at Simply Toys

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