Ian and Barbara and Martha

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't really see a problem, myself. That was, after all, what they looked like. But, alas, without any hope on the horizon I did what I said I would do and looked at making my own.

Martha Jones

Of the two figures Barbara was going to be the simplest in terms of sourcing material. Companion Martha Jones was recommended by a few customizer sites as the best base figure (options were limited as it was) but she needed some work. The hair had to go, the jacket had to go and the flares on her jeans needed to to be trimmed back a bit to be more like something Barbara would wear. Barbara was one for cardigans and skirts but I wasn't confident enough in my sculpting skills to try and whittle the legs down that much so I stuck with a version which wore slacks. One of Barbara's trademark sweaters with an almost turtleneck look to it would serve as the top, but needed to be sculpted once the jacket was removed. I resorted to a tried and true method to remove the jacket; I dunked the figure in boiling water to soften up the plastic so it would be easier to slice off and pry away from the body. This method also made the pants easier to slice down, then I just needed to sand then a bit to smooth them out.

My biggest challenge with Barbara, though, was going to be the face. First off, Barbara is a white woman, Martha is not, so to repaint the skin to match was not going to be easy. But before I could even tackle that problem was the face itself; the two women do not resemble each other at all. It was mentioned elsewhere that Barbara did not have the same jaw as Martha so I applied a bit of epoxy to the face to round it out a bit better. I could have been more careful now that the job is done, and even sanding it down didn't save the final product from looking a bit lumpy, but once she was sculpted and repainted she didn't look like Martha anymore. I did up her hair in a sort of bouffante that Barbara was recognized for and put her on the shelf and stepped back for a look and decided that from some angles she would do. But I figured I'd be back for a second run later.

Ian by comparison was a lot easier as far as his body went. I took a tenth Doctor action figure and recut the suit jacket to widen the lapels a bit, then gave Ian a thin tie and white shirt. The suit itself was painted grey and the trainers worn by the tenth Doctor were painted over to be black shoes. I ran into a challenge again with the face as William Russell who played Ian looks nothing like David Tennant, and I wasn't sure how I could sculpt this one to make it work. The hair was an obvious place to start but before I had to resort to it I stumbled upon a Halo action figure with a face not too unlike Ian's, so I did a transplant and sculpted new hair in a conservative side part like Ian had. And with a little less effort than before, I had my original TARDIS crew all sorted out.

And while I had Martha there in front of me it occurred to me that she changed her hair over the season she was in, so I took another one (I had a few just for these purposes by then) and took off the hair that it came with and resculpted longer hair and painted it. A simple variation. The fact that the figure was a reissue with a bit better paint on the face made it that much more distinctive.

Martha before and after her day at the hairdressers