CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURE: R-3PO (STAR WARS: SAGA OF THE FORCE)
MATERIALS USED: ACRYLIC PAINTS, ELECTRICAL WIRING, PAPER CLIPS, SEWING PINS, SEWING THREAD, TREE BRANCHES
MEDIA APPEARANCE: STAR WARS EPISODE VI: RETURN OF THE JEDI

"I could be mistaken--they're using a very primitive dialect--but I do believe they think I am some sort of god."

Preamble: I've wanted Hasbro to make this version of C-3PO for a long time.  It seems like one of the more distinctive versions of the character for them to produce (the Cinema Scenes figure packs would have been the ideal format; they could have sold him in his throne and packaged him with a couple of generic Ewoks), but for some reason they never got around to doing one.  (It's occurred to me that they're waiting until I make one, to see if it can actually be done.  That seems to be the case of late.)

Construction: The prospect of adding knee joints to a styrene C-3PO seemed daunting; styrene doesn't bend, so I'd have to create gaps in the joints wide enough to fit an X-Acto blade, and I wanted more tight-fitting joints than that.  (I suppose I could have cobbled together two separate C-3PO figures, making the upper legs from one toy and the lower legs from another toy, but I don't have two extra figures to spare right now.)  Anyway, I decided to go with the rubbery R-3PO toy as a base figure instead--a great sculpt, and it looks more like Threepio than a lot of C-3PO toys do.

Working with R-3PO proved easy enough, the vinyl plastic allowing me to bend and contort the knee joints to some extent while I separated the upper and lower legs.  I didn't just want to shove a section of paper clip inside the knee joint and call it done, as I've done with past projects, so I carefully cut the pistons on the outsides of his knees about halfway off, peeling them back so I could drill a small hole through the knee joints.  I used a plastic-coated paper clip, cut to the right length, and slipped it into the joint, gluing it in place on either end.  To hide the holes I drilled, I glued the pistons back in place and covered up the other end with a piece of round PVC plastic.

I also decided I wanted to change the pose of his arms so that he could grasp the arms of the throne, so I cut off his arms just beneath the shoulder and sliced off his wrists so that I could reattach them.  I had just been planning to glue the parts back in place, but I realized that I could retain greater poseability if I used sewing pins to hold the parts together instead.  I did the same thing with his feet.  I also wanted to fix the wiring in his torso, since C-3PO apparently got his wiring straightened out at some point between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  So, I cut the toy in half at the waist, carefully slicing off the existing wiring and then replacing the strands, one at a time, with bits of electrical wire of various widths.  Instead of just gluing the toy back together, I drilled a hole through his side and used a paper clip to hold the body halves together, acting as a hinge.  All told, the figure has 14 points of articulation.  (Having a working joint waist enables him to sit up a bit straighter in the throne, incidentally.)

I decided early on that I was going to build the throne from actual pieces of wood.  I've got five large poplar trees in my backyard, so there's plenty of branches and things out back at any given time.  The trick was to find sticks that were the right thickness and were relatively straight.  I cut them to the right lengths and glued them together (carving out Lincoln Log style grooves where needed), then went back later and wrapped some thick sewing twine around the ends afterwards to create the illusion the throne is held together with vines.  The seat cover is a thin piece of material cut to the right size and sewn in place.  I painted it brown, which helps it to retain its shape and stops the ends from fraying.

Using R-3PO as a base figure meant I'd have to paint him gold, instead of relying on an existing C-3PO figure decorated in vacuum-metalized paint.  At first I was a little disappointed that I wouldn't be able to get him very shiny, but after studying some publicity photos from the movie I realized that C-3PO's really badly tarnished in this film, particularly during the Endor scenes.

Comments:  While I was doing the research for this project, I was rather surprised to learn that there actually was a vintage Kenner version of this toy, sort of.  The Ewok Village playset came with a throne for Threepio, but there was no dedicated C-3PO toy  to sit in it, let alone one with articulation at the knees.  So, this project wasn't quite the novelty I'd thought it was, but I did come up with the idea independently of Kenner, so that's got to count for something.