| Original Wax Sculpting for General Madine Head | |
| Madine may have been a general but I suspect as a military officer he was somewhat lacking. He goes through the entirety of Return of the Jedi--a movie that's basically one big battle scene--without even uttering a single line. He just stands in the background, looking like a '70s singer-songwriter, while playing second fiddle to an oversized lobster. Even the action figure's accessory is lame.
The toy representation of this great military leader looks pretty much like you'd expect it to--crisp, buttoned down, and wholly vanilla. It was sculpted by Bill Lemon in his usual medium: the hard, unforgiving acetate. You can see the full sculpt, which is now in a private collection, here. I think you can see by looking at the sculpt that most of its details were carried over virtually unchanged into the final production figure. The head of the figure, however, was reworked in wax, and it's that final wax head sculpt that you see above. It was pretty typical for Kenner to modify Lemon's work in order to soften it up and make it more lifelike. In this case they seem to have made the head more oval (the final sculpt has an almost pointed cranium), naturalized the facial expression so that it appears less stern, and changed the hair up a bit. |
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| Description by: | Ron Salvatore |
| Photo: | Ron Salvatore |
| From the collection of: | Ron Salvatore |
| Country: | United States |
| Film: | Return of the Jedi |
| Licensee: | Kenner |
| Year: | 1983 |
| Category: | Prototypes / Action Figure Related |
