Over the Holidays I picked up a bunch of SDCC Green Lantern 3 packs. I bought them just so I could make some Holiday Hal Jordan's for some of my friends as Christmas gifts. So I had a bunch of the Flight Suit Hal's just taking up space. One night while sipping on some magic juice from Russia, I got a crazy idea & some inebriated motivation.

Batman Beyond Return Of The Joker has been my favorite animated DC movie since it came out. Nothing has even come close to being a good as that IMO. That is until I saw Under The Red Hood. Sure it has it's problems like Red Hood always seems to have an unlimited amount of ammo & other things like that. But I thought this movie was very well made & kept me wanting to watch it over & over. Same feeling I had with ROTJ. So I really wanted to make a Timmnverse style Red Hood. I figured that I would just sell him when I was done since I only make/keep customs from BTAS/TNBA/STAS & he was never on any of those shows. He was going to be easy enough to make that I wouldn't have a lot of time into him ( or so I thought ) But I do really like the character & wanted to give it a shot at making him. Plus I had all these flight suits to use for something.

I really thought the Flight suit Hal would make a great Red Hood & I could design him like he looked in the movie, but give him a Timmverse twist. The problem I always had with the flight suit, just like many of their other figures, mattel made the legs too stumpy IMO. But that was in my favor because I needed to make his boots higher anyway. So I started by cutting his feet off & sculpting the boots on them. Then I drilled holes in the legs & sculpted boots I made & inserted dowel rods to make them more secure & glued the boots back onto the legs. Then I started sculpting the details on the figure.

One night all these crazy ideas brainstormed into my head. When I started making Red Hood, I thought that he had a gun holster on his leg which is why I wanted to order some of those casted gun holsters from Geek Variety. But when I was watching the movie over & over while sculpting, I realized it was a knife sheath. So I decided that I wanted him to be able to use the knife instead of it just being sculpted there. Yes, my great idea was to make the knife removable from the sheath on his leg kind of like some of the GI Joe's I had in the 80's. I always loved those toys for the reason that they had all kinds of weapons/accessories that were removable or snapped on their backpacks & such. So sculpted the sheath & made a knife blade out of styrene & sculpted the handle. When the sheath & knife handle hardened I hollowed out the sheath so the knife could slide in & out & glued it onto the figure's leg. One problem, the knife blade was just too stiff & every time I tried to put it back in the sheath it would make the sheath break loose from his leg. A few days later I started going through my parts box. I had a bunch of swords put aside for when I am going to make the Ninja, Kyo Dai Ken from BTAS. So I had a rubbery sword from some Marvel Universe Wolverine in there. I cut the blade down to make it look more like & knife & since it is more flexible it works perfectly. Problem solved. I'm pretty sure the next thing I did was sculpt the collars, straps, & buckles for the jacket. I wanted it to look like it did on screen & the Flight suit Jacket just didn't cut it for me. So I made the extra pieces out of kneadatite since it more flexible when cured & glued the pieces on.

As things progressed on this figure & so did the ideas. I sculpted the Red Hood mask over the SDCC Hal Jordan head so it does still pop off the body. Why not sculpt a Jason Todd head on another neck joint? Problem was I didn't want to waste another Hal head & so why not use the Sinestro or Abin Sur head since I used the bodies to make Holiday Hal. Well, because their necks are shorter than Hal's & it wouldn't look right. I decided since I was sculpting the head from scratch anyway, why not just cut off the Sinestro head just so I have the socket & sculpt the neck up. Then sculpt the head on top of that. Over the course of 3 days I sculpted that head.

Everything was pretty much done & the figure was on my shelf in pieces. I was just waiting on an order from Geek Variety which had his casted Kenner Two Face gun in it. I was also waiting for a good day to dullcote everything so I could put his jacket on & such. We had fifty degrees the other day & it was still relatively warm when I got out of work. So he was finished.

Normally I don't think much of my work. But this figure I just can't stop staring at. After watching the movie every night while sculpting, I realized how much I really like this movie/character. I put a lot of work into him & really think he turned out great. Needless to say, I will not be selling this figure now. I honestly feel that this is one of my best works to date. WHY? Because I feel this is not just a sculpture, a custom, etc, this is a freaking toy! Which is kind of tough to make in the JLU scale. The removable knife & two heads make this an action figure to me. mattel could produce this guy the way he is & sell it as an action figure. I'm pretty proud of what I've done here.