SIDESHOW TOYS
Buffy the Vampire Slayer sixth-scale figures
"Hush" Buffy - early version body; molded shoes/feet. Tallest figure. Double-jointed neck. Head attachment highly proprietary.
Faith ("Bad Girls") - contemporary body style, still tall. replaceable hands and feet. Head easily removed/replaced
Willow ("Dopplegangland") - contemporary body style, shortened by 4 scale inches.
ORIGINAL (unmodified) releases:
In 2004, I started picking up the 12" Buffy the Vampire Slayer line from Sideshow Toys. To date, the following figures were released:
From Angel
Early 2007, Sideshow confirmed the line is going on indefinite hiatus, which most fans interpret as meaning is ended. That could well be true, though many (myself among them) feel both lines are really incomplete without some key characters--Anya, Tara, and Dawn from Buffy, Wesley, Gunn, and Fred from Angel. Still, both shows have been off the air for a few years now, though resurrected as comic book lines scripted for now by Joss Whedon. Regardless of the future of the franchise, I do think there never was nor has there been since a better television show, as far as being popular but smart.
As for the figures we did get, I believe that for the most part these are some excellent representations of the TV characters as far as costuming and accessories go, and with the exception of Faith and Willow, excellent portraits of the actors who portray the characters. Part of the success of the Buffy, Angel, and Spike (and Oz,) figures, I believe, is that scanning was involved in the facial sculpts. Normally, I'm all rah-rah for hand-sculpting--preserving art auras in the age of mechanical reproduction and all that--but in the case of a figure which is also meant to be a portrait, I personally don't mind and in fact prefer the manufacturer use the latest technologies such as scanning to ensure a successful likeness. To be fair, though, I think the production process on both the Faith and Willow heads screwed up what may have started out as decent sculpts of a couple of difficult-to-capture faces. The prototypes on Sideshow's website look okay, though Faith (by Mat Falls) doesn't really resemble Eliza Dushku to begin with. Willow's face (by Andy Bergholtz) is a little better. At the very least, though, both prototypes were fine as representations of the characters, if not the actors. Prototype Faith could've been tougher, but was okay; Prototype Willow appropriately vulnerable and cute for a season 3 version of the character.
The production Willow head, like Faith's, was so different from the prototype that in my mind it qualifies as a whole new sculpt altogether. Actually, I feel the production Willow has a better resemblance feature for individual feature to Alyson Hannigan than the website prototype as a whole. However, the features are so exaggerated--oddly, again like Faith's production head--that it's still off as a result--to the point of caricature. I've heard a rumor that Sideshow's sculptors sometimes tweak each other's work, which might be a plausible explanation for the change from prototype to production. If there's any truth to that rumor, I'd find it odd and perhaps unsettling from the perspective of the original artist, though it might be a plausible way to get a consistent style across a range of figures when executed by a number of different in-house sculptors.
The production faces on both were released distorted (Faith's got squished down, Willow's got squished and stretched length-wise). The jaws on both heads became prominent, Faith's outward, Willow's downward. The paint aps on Faith is pretty horrific. Willow has worse problems. One side of her face looks like it's morphing. I can't decide which side. Her paint job, though, seems fine, except for some minor weirdness in the size and placement of the eyes and the super-arched eyebrows (which seems like Sideshow's factory painters' trademark lately).
MODDED (2005): That said, it's easy to be an armchair art critic, not so an artist. I was planning to do just another paint retouch on Faith and Willow as I did on the X-Files Scully and Mulder, but after taking a look at Willow and seeing how the paint is applied well enough already, I ditched that idea. Instead, I decided to try my hand at my own Faith and Willow sculpts. Pictures of the latest developments with this project follow.
FAITH - Minor face repaint, body swap for shorter SST body. New sculpt in progress
BUFFY - Eye repaint, body swap for DML Eve 1.0
WILLOW - DML Eve 2.0 with custom headsculpt (early draft)
I did a Vampire Willow one-off for a friend. See the project page HERE.
I completed a Wishverse Tara and Vampire Willow project. You can visit the project page HERE. Or the final photo page HERE.
I've also done some retouch-painting on the Angel figures:
And a photospread/review of Giles, the last scheduled release of the line.
July 08 - I've finished Project Gunn! At least the headsculpt part. Now it's time to get to work with his hubcap axe and baseball bat stake.
Next up is Wesley, then human Willow, then Faith, then Tara.
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