Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Iron Man Concept Toys

Never one to let anything go to waste, Marvel and Hasbro have put out the Iron Man 2 Concept Series of 4" Action figures. What does "Concept Series" mean, you ask? Well, dear reader, it means some of them are based on my UNUSED concepts from Iron Man 1. Click on the links for the original renderings these are based on.

The first is based on my Stealth Suit concept, and is known as the Hypervelocity armor.The second is the Deep Dive armor... And the last is one of my first attempts at War Machine (back when it was to be additional snap-on armor for the MK 3 & worn by Stark) now dubbed the Power Assault armor. As shown in the original sketch here:


Kudos to the artists at Hasbro, who translated the designs remarkably faithfully for such small action figures, and even filled in the back details (which I never addressed) with a great eye to maintaining the form vocabulary. Bravo!

All at your local toy store...

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???

Yes, I know, I am the world's worst blogger.
So I just finished up on COWBOYS & ALIENS, Jon Favreau's new movie. Looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, you know, like a Peanut Butter Cup. Two great tastes that... you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I was responsible for designing the signature alien vehicle (oops! hope that's not a spoiler! There are...ALIENS in the movie! And they have some sort of... VEHICLE! I think I hear the Dreamworks police knocking as we speak! That's all you're going to get out of me though.)
Before that I finished up Tron Legacy, which I know everybody out there is madly anticipating. Tough to wait till December though. And that means there's a year's worth of work I have to wait to post!!
So in the mean time, I'm reaching way back to some work I did for the ill-fated Marvel theme park in Dubai. Why ill-fated, you ask? Well as soon as people started abandoning their Bentleys in the airport parking lot in their rush to escape from debtor's prison, the writing was on the wall that the economy just wasn't there for the worlds largest entertainment complex.

So here are a couple of pieces for some early ride concepts that didn't make the cut...


The first was a dark-ride in the vein of the Raider's ride at Disney, themed to Marvel's villains. Depicted is our tour vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time as Electro escapes from his containment...

Above is one of the many versions of an Iron Man ride, this one a "people-mover' style dark-ride shooting gallery using video projections. Much fun! Ironically I noticed that the final presentation version sent to Dubai had the woman cropped from the image and replaced with the man. I guess I should have expected that...

Anyway, more from this on another post!

Phil.