Staff and Clientele at the Mos Eisley Cantina

"Ey!  We don't serve your kind here!"

It's been a very long time since I added anything new to my Star Wars collection.  That's almost certainly because the new movies sucked a lot of the joy out of it for me.  Eventually I'll have to wade into them and try to find things about them that I can bear because my little one likes them and to have something I loved so much in my own childhood that I can share with my son in his seems like a great opportunity.  

Space hotties fishing for some free drinks...too bad they didn't make minis of them...

In that spirit, I picked this crew of Cantina folks to bring with me thinking that I'd enjoy working on them over here and Lo, this month I got them out and started working on them.

Good old Mr. Hammerhead!  I loved my Hammerhead action figure I had when I was about my son's age.  He was just so...so alien!  I painted my lead Hammerhead's shirt the same blue as my plastic Kenner Hammerhead's baby onesie just for nostalgia reasons.  In later years I found out that some busy body had come up with a proper name for Hammerhead and given his species a long back story.  Apparently they are a bunch of stupid boring pacifists or something.  Some people have a need to take the fun out of everything.  Well, they'll always be the Hammerheads to me.  I have a bunch more Hammerhead castings and because the model has such nice limb separation, I plan to chop them up a bit and give them pirate cutlasses and Storm Trooper blasters and what not, as I think the Hammerheads should be a bit treacherous and troublesome, eh?  I mean, just look at the shifty eyes on this fellow below!

Lost my Kenner Hammerhead so long ago.  I need to acquire another one.

Hammerhead with the Cantina's Luddite bartender..."Your Droids!  They'll have to wait outside, we don't want them here!"

I actually ordered these guys for my Rogue Trader campaign.  They are the 'Bar Patrons' pack from Kryomek miniatures.  When they showed up I was surprised to find that they were much closer to 25mm than 28mm.  No worries!  They fit in perfectly with my Star Wars guys!

Kabe, the Chadra Fan who can be seen squeakily demanding her drink from the bartender, although she seems to have been sculpted in a different outfit than she wears in the movie.

Pig Face and Chadra Fan.  I love pigface's don't give a damn, hand in the pocket pose.

Bar Fly.  Probably my favorite of the group.  Because he's a bar fly. 

Horn headed fellow on the right bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the briefly glimpsed figures in the Cantina...

Looks like I painted his 'horn' a different color, though.

Shady Kryomek character.  Blends right in in the Cantina, though.

The infamous amateur surgeon Dr. Evazan.  The movie doesn't give you the impression that Walrus Man's partner would be a surgeon of any kind, but whatever.  I remember the character in the film being dressed in what seemed like mostly rags instead of this more Han Solo type outfit, but there you go.

"Ey!  He doesn't like you!  I don't like you eevah!  You just watch yourself!  I got da deff sentence on twelve systems!"  My wife hates it when I quote from Star Wars ad nauseam so I'm teaching our son to do it with me.

"Ooorrkk!  Yoork Oork urgk!"

These are probably my favorite figures of the lot.  Painting ol' Walrus Man stirred sharp memories of playing with my brand new Walrus man figure that my Mom had just bought for me in our TV room.  I couldn't have been more than 6 or so then, but I remember that chilly evening so well.  Funny, the things that stick with you.  Dr. Evazan is a nice figure.  The figure was originally armed with a very slender scalpel, but it was so thin that no matter what I did it would always break off so I replaced it with a more robust knife which I think looks better anyway.

Later I grew up, sorta, and found out his name is Ponda Baba.  Sorta like Mr. Hammerhead.  

The Modal Nodes get down...

"You will never find a more wretched hive..."

Some interesting raw footage of the Cantina scene

And then, in some even weirder, alternate universe that none of us will ever be able to understand, there was...somehow...this.  Yeah.  Walrus Man gettin' down with Bea Arthur.  Yes.  It happened. I'm sorry.  But not nearly as sorry as I am about The Force Awakens.  No, that was much, much worse than this.  I actually saw this when it came out on Network TV when I was maybe 5 or 6.  It was a pretty big deal to me at the time...

Star Wars: The Bounty Hunters

Just had our 4th change of station since we arrived in Godammitstan.  The internet here is spotty as hell, so its a battle to post anything, and the constant moving around and long hours have conspired to keep me from painting as much as I'd like, but I still manage to get a few things done here and there.  My latest completed project:  The five Bounty Hunters Grenadier made for West End Games' Star Wars Miniatures Battles way back in the mists of time. (A time also known as the 1980s.)

The five pieces here are all nice examples of the line, with lots of nice detail.

 

Here is Dengar, Han Solo's old racing rival...

 

 And the weird insect creature, Zuckuss, who worked for both the Imperium and the Rebel Alliance...

 

 

The original Boxed set did not contain 4 LOM, the Gand-built droid, as the box artwork seemed to promise.  It did contain a number of figures which had nothing to do with bounty hunting:  some rebel figures and such; pieces that Grenadier couldn't think of anything else to do with, I guess.  Disappointing, as 4-LOM would have been a nice mini to have.

Zuckuss hanging out with my personal favorite of the five, the Wookie hunter, Bossk. 

More Bossk...

And mighty Boba Fett.

So...not a super-exciting post, but there it is.  Not much else to tell.  Plan is to start on a squad of Jabba's bodyguards next, but you know...Man plans and the Gods laugh.

'til next time...stay frosty!

Womp Rats!

Deep in the Jundland wastes, old Ben Kenobi runs afoul of a pack of young Womp Rats, voracious, loathsome haunters of Tattooine's dunes and canyons!  I'm sure Ben has the situation well in hand, however.  Actually, Ben's not in the Jundland waste, he's in Afghanistan, but who the hell can tell the difference, really?

The minis are, of course, simple Citadel Giant Rats from a post-Oldhammer edition of WFB.  They came in a lot with a bunch of 3rd Edition Giant Rats but they just didn't fit in with the others.  Wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, until I remembered that the Star Wars universe has big rats, too...

Apparently there's a good deal of learned debate as to what Womp Rats look like, exactly.  Most scholars hold the position that the creatures have four ears.  This illustration is from a book on the wildlife of the Star Wars galaxy I bought a few months age.  This Womp, being of a two-eared variety, looks closest to the miniatures I have to work with, So I chose him as a model for my own rats.

I think the minis look ok...

Womp Rats are supposed to be about two meters long, as I remember.  These are a bit smaller than that, unless you're counting nose to tail.

 
  Maybe they're young Womp Rats who've just been out of the nest a season or two....

Anyway, they'll be lurking around the edges of my Tattooine games, ready to drag down the odd Sandtrooper now and again...or to menace some Princess who's lost her way in the desert...