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"Listen, guys... if I don't make it... it's been great being
part of the team!"--Scavenger, "The Core" (TF)
ViceGripX turned to me when he wanted ten of the Beast Machines Scavenger toys repainted in G1 colors, intended as the exclusive toy for the CybCon 2001 mini-convention in Washington state. He ordered the figures in bulk from kbtoys.com, and had them shipped to me along with enough money to cover the cost of paints. (He also took every single one of these beautiful pictures of the finished toys.)
The new version of Scavenger is, to me, obviously based on
the Constructicon of the same name. If the original Scavenger had ever
had a Cybertronic form, this would be it. He's got the treads, the
side-mounted canopy, and of course the shovel arm. I'd even venture
so far as to say that this toy was deliberately designed to be a new incarnation
of the original character; the only thing that belies this, really, is the
fairly hideous color scheme. (You know, Hasbro promised us at BotCon
'94 that they weren't going to use those garish fluorescent colors any longer.
That didn't last very long, did it?)
Well, this project mainly entailed disassembling the toys and sitting down for a few nights' worth of painting entire groups of 10 or 20 parts at a time, assembly-line fashion. Since I didn't know if I'd be able to do it all in one sitting, and in case I needed to make touch-ups after I was done, I mixed up a big batch of green paint and poured it back into a paint bottle so that I could reseal it to prevent it from drying out. (Remember how I've always said to make more paint that you think you'll need? Well, I spilled the bottle at one point and lost about a quarter of its contents. Still had enough to do the job, though, with a little bit to spare.)
One suggestion I made for the project was that I replace the
Vehicon spark crystal design with a Decepticon insignia. I'd previously
done this with my TM2 Grimlock and TM2 Cyclonus repaints (made from Dinobot
and Sonar, respectively), which involved slipping the hemispherical plastic
out and sanding away at its bottom until the original symbol disappeared.
This time, however, I had access to Delta Star's fantastic reproduction
labels to make the new spark crystals look far more professional. I
also gave the toys counterfeit rub symbols, for that extra touch of G1
authenticity. The only other physical change I made to the toys was
to sand down the arm brackets and the hinge that held the shovel-arm in place
to prevent the moving parts from scraping the paint off during transformation.
I also stuck the upper legs on backwards for the same reason.
Although I stayed mostly true to the original Scavenger's colors, I also added a number of new paint operations that Hasbro's version of this toy lacked. Some touch-ups here and there really helped to bring out the details on the toy, particularly the tail lights on the back of the vehicle (in addition to a small square component that I am convinced was meant to represent where the original Scavenger's head ended up in vehicle mode). I also painted the eyes red. The only parts of the toys I left unpainted were the ball joints, since moving the joints at all would, naturally, cause the paint to scrape off.
As
part of the project, I also devised "box art" for the toy, which adorned
the custom instructions and tech specs that ViceGrip printed up at Kinko's.
It was among the most ambitious coloring jobs I'd attempted up to that
point, since I wanted it to closely resemble the level of art that was used
on the original Transformers packaging. The artwork was intended as
an homage to the original Scavenger's box art, but I'm not sure if that came
through in the finished work. (It loses something at the smaller scale,
too. Click the image if you'd like to see a higher-resolution version
without the background.)
You can read a bit more about the project on ViceGrip's site by clicking the link below. Incidentally, the project went so well that we're already planning another batch of CybCon repaints for 2002, which as of this writing is scheduled for the same weekend as BotCon 2002.
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This Page Created: 7/6/2001
Uploaded: 2/12/2002
©2002 Inspiration Studios
Toy images courtesy of ViceGripX
