I'll Make It Myself - A Toy Customization Blog

The last couple weeks I have gotten hold of a few new pieces for customization work, and I have been working on a few things as well for upcoming projects... The best way to repaint a Dalek Repainted Paradigm Daleks - a vast improvement if you ask me Fodder for the customization mill; a junk lot I picked up for cheap

No custom figure for this one, which is inspired by a novel from the BBC Books range. I did make the house in the back; I was hoping for the colonial feel of old Salem. I was also thinking of setting it on fire.

The first Doctor and my customs of Susan, Ian and Barbara menaced by a dragon...

Marco Polo is one of the most talked about episodes of the series, primarily because it is all missing and no-one has seen it since it was broadcast. The stills that exist show some fantastic costumes on the series regulars, and I decided to start with an Ian Chesterton variant as I got my hands on another Halo figure and could recreate my earlier success. I found a still from the episode itself to serve as a backdrop for one shot, but when I get materials to make a new Barbara and Susan for this one I will probably do something else for the set. Painting the new Ian was challenging as his costume was covered with Chinese writing which I couldn't accurately do and thus approximated it as best I could in gold paint. I had to use a toothpick to draw on the designs to limit the risk of blobbing up the paint. I have trouble doing sharp defined edges with the epoxy I use (its real intended use is for repairing plastic pipes but it bonds well with action figure plastic and most time...

Not really a custom creation here; I took a first Doctor action figure and made him a bandage for his head as was the case in the episode itself. This one warrants making a full sized console room instead of just one wall as the episode takes place entirely inside the TARDIS, but to do it right would require different versions of Barbara, Ian and Susan to go with it.

You can't go wrong with a Dalek toy. You just can't. They have gotten everywhere - die hard fans have them and casual collectors have them. And they come in so many sizes and functions. Character Options knew this full well when they got the line and they have managed to pump out every variation that ever there was on the screen with pretty decent accuracy; as luck would have it for CO's sales division, the Daleks would change their look up in subtle ways once they started showing up in colour episodes. I have not had to do much to customize any of the Dalek toys aside from a repaint here and there to provide a variation for the collection and one to make their colouring a bit more accurate. The TARDIS lands on the planet Skaro and emerge into a petrified forest, the result of a thermonuclear war. I recreated it with masonry sand and some trimmings from an invasive vine I cut off the side of my house.  Thanks to Action Figure Theatre I've been able to recreate ...

To round off the original cast come two companions: schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. I remember saying to a friend of mine that an Ian, Barbara and Susan 3 pack would be a perfect way to bring the original crew to the collections of fans the world over, but as I have said nothing even close to that has happened. Some of the justification thrown around when it comes to the original series characters is that they are not very dynamic; Susan and Barbara are after all the original screamers and are not known for being women of action. Barbara, despite one misstep with the Aztecs, was a woman of integrity but that doesn't really translate well into an action figure. Ian was supposed to be more of a gymnast and martial arts kind of man in the beginning but that went away as the character was developed for screen, so yeah, really all we would be given would have been a woman with a thing for cardigans and a sixties hairdo and a man who wears suits and ties a lot. I don...

Playsets are few and far between in the world of Doctor Who action figures. Dapol gave it a try with the TARDIS console room and failed by making the console five-sided instead of 6, and the set didn't even have complete walls just the corners which were created by taking the police box toy apart and sticking them onto the base. Character Options started off strong with two console room sets from the current series but did not release one based on the new configuration from 2012's The Snowmen and onwards. Aside from the TARDIS itself there have been no playsets made for the 5.5 inch figure range aside from a fold-out cardboard pyramid from a story called Pyramids of Mars . The 3.75 inch range got a few playset packs created for it but they are of limited use, really, and ended up on clearance after a few years of gathering dust on shelves. It was clear that the Doctor Who range was never going to get something epic along the lines of a Death Star playset, and given that the a...

I can't remember where I actually started with my custom creations - I think it was probably with a more contemporary companion like Martha Jones - but why not start at the beginning and work my way up. Not that I am going to stick to a chronological order or anything here, it's just easier to start at the start. And the start would be the Doctor's first companion ever, his granddaughter Susan. Given that Susan is from Gallifrey and is a Time Lord the same as the Doctor it's debatable if her name really is Susan at all, but it's all we were given. Since the first episode there have been a lot of other Time Lords in the series but their names rarely approach anything resembling an Earth norm like Susan; closest we really got as far as I can remember is a Time Lord named Damon in 1982's Arc if Infinity. But whatever her real name is, Susan is the first and as far as I am concerned she should have been one of the first classics made. The first Doctor action figur...

I like Doctor Who a lot. I also like Star Wars and as a fan of the latter my fandom included amassing heaps and heaps of action figures and ships in my youth and then again in my adult life. It always annoyed me that there were never action figures of Doctor Who as I was growing up; I wanted to bring the Doctor into the Star Wars universe so bad that I built my own Daleks out of toilet paper tubes but there was never going to be a way for me to create Cybermen or the TARDIS or the Doctor himself. A company called Dapol took a stab at it and marketed some iffy at best Doctor Who figures close in size to the Star Wars line but a side by side comparison showed them to be too tall. They were not the best efforts they could have made either; faces were not very accurate and the limb joints were poorly made and would break. The original run was two variations of the seventh Doctor (light and dark jackets), two variations of his companion Mel (pink top and blue top), K9 the robot dog and th...