Ever since I can remember, I was fascinated with the Flash Gordon Serials from the late 1930’s.
So when I came across the Screamin’ series of 1/4 scale Figures, I decided to get both the Flash Gordon and
Ming the Merciless kits.
Fortunately the original outfit that Charles Middleton (Ming) used is still in existence, and this is what it looks like
The instruction sheet was basic, but it also had a brief description of Ming.
Both of the kits are made of some vinyl/nylon material, with some parts being made of resin. I’ll describe them as I go along.
Upon opening the Ming box, and looking at the 4 white colored parts, the first thing that stroke me was how the vinyl parts felt slightly “oily” . I think this is the release agent that was used to remove the parts from their moulds. This was divided into two parts, the upper chest/arms and the lower waist/legs.
The Head and the Hands/Rifle was made of resin.
I started working on the upper chest/arms (first. washing off the release agent,) I didn’t like the way the sleeves were moulded
as one piece, so I decided to open them up first. You can see how the sleeves are solid from the parts picture above.
I used paper-mache and filled them in, once the paper dried I poured a couple of tubes of cyanoacrylic (superglue) which
hardened it. Just to see how it would look I painted them red so as to be able to see if there were any rips. There were
only two, which I patched up.
I put this part to the side and started to work on the hands / rifle… This is in my opinion the weakest part of the kit.
Just to digress for a minute. The head and hands seems to be at least 5% larger then I think they should be, maybe it’s my
eyes, but they seem larger then they should be. I think the body and the heads/arms were sculpted by two different people.
The rifle was sculpted very badly. The barrel was mostly misshaped and off centered, so this was were I centered most of
my work on. First I cut out the right hand from the rifle, and started to make a new rifle from various sizes of brass and aluminum tubing.
The rifle should look like these screen caps from the series
This is as far as I got so far.
This it to be continued..
