Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Dude, you have a hole in your face...

When Jerry Bruckheimer asked me to come up with an idea for a teen version of his series C.S.I. I was honored. And only two months after that request I came up with the idea for a pilot that had the name I now, today, use as a title for this post.

"Dude, you have a hole in your head" was about an amateur club of forensics investigators/teens and their talking dog. My own personal homage to some childhood nightmares I must have had. Every episode would have fifteen to twenty minutes of incredibly gorey teen homicides, followed by five minutes of wacky chases and a twist secret ending in the last minute. I know what you're thinking: Pure gold.

But Jerry shut us down even before we get to production, but after I asked the fat kid from Nickelodeon's amazingly lame hit show Drake & Josh to loose some weigh for the pilot (he was going to play the corpse...)


Like this, but way cooler and with at least one of them dead.

But this was never going to be, doomed to join my other unproduced hits like The Possessed Flying Nun (she could spin her head as a helicopter) and Biker Mice from Mars... No wait, that actually happened...

Moving on, this time, I got a cool toy that finally allows me to use my unused title for something: McFarlane's T1000 action figure from the series Movie Maniacs 4 (released in 2001).



James Cameron's Terminator 2 was released in 1991 (ten solid years before this action figure was produced). On a side note, hey, did you remember when James Cameron used to direct cool science fiction movies? OK, when the movie premiered I was on holiday with my folks and we went to a drive-in to watch it. I remember that the drive-in was pretty much destroyed and the wall that prevented you from looking at the screen from the outside wasn't there anymore. All the cars waited in line to get in while the movie was still showing, so I distinctly remember seeing the ending of the movie without sound, incredibly weird images like the T1000 melting and not getting what the fuck was going on. Then I saw the complete movie and everything made sense. Yeah, I know now that the plot itself didn't made much sense... But still...

I loved that movie.




The action figure is great and it captures perfectly the moment when Arnold was shooting the T1000. Some of the coolest special effects of my childhood memories, and the reason a huge amount of kids got mercury poisoning trying to build their own T1000.

The sculpting is excellent, it doesn't only capture the character but also is incredibly accurate to Robert Patrick's face:


"FX Tech: OK Robert, stand still, we're going to blow up your face now
Robert Patrick: OK... What?"

Being it's from early 90s McFarlane, this figure came with a ton of accessories: Two hands, a gun, two of those hook hands he uses to jump on a car, a slightly bent metal blade that's not really too threatening, and last but not least, a whole new torso:



I don't display him with it because, frankly, it creeps the fuck out of me. But I can imagine the dialogue on set...


"FX Tech: Stand still Bobby, we're going to blow up your torso now...
Robert Patrick: Oh, DAMN!"

This is a very fun figure, and it's incredibly versatile in spite of the clear lack of articulation. I think that these figures need another name, maybe Action Statues, I'm not sure, something like that.


Until next time. STAND STILL BOB, HERE COMES THE BIG MELTING SCENE!

(SHIT!)

4 comments:

LEon said...

Neca will be coming T1000 in various forms. It's kinda funny that we both blog about something regarding the face today. LOL Who's the old man at the last pic?

Jon the action figures buff said...

Looks like modern day Obi-Wan.

chrismandesign said...

McFarlane... uhmmm much better... i love the 2 first movies of Terminator (the 3rd was weird & seems to be one of those "B" series... the 4th, i haven’t seen it yet...) but actually the figures based on those movies don’t appeal to me, at least not to buy’em... however, i don’t mind if someone else runs the risk, to show us something different =)... if that figure is McFarlane, then is really fine for me... LOL

Tom Freak said...

@Leon and Jon: He's Norman McCay from DCD Elseworlds series (Kingdom Come), he came with The Spectre and as far as I know, he's an accessory, since he has almost no articulation.

@Chris: I want the endoskeleton of a T-100, did you see the new all metalized T-1000 NECA is going to make? He looks wicked.