Shan Yu (Mulan)

Nice work gentlemen, you've found the Hun army

 

The upcoming Mulan Pop vinyls were announced a while ago now, and at the time of writing this post are still only seen via the concept art. Unsurprisingly, the range (only 2 Pops) did not include the movie's villain, the Hun leader Shan Yu. To keep with my trend of creating forgotten villains, I decided to customise my own Shan Yu to keep poor little Mulan/Ping on her/his toes.

Shan Yu has an intimidating physique, with very broad shoulders. To combat this, I was originally just going to use the clay to bulk up the Tobias Funke body, since I was using his head. However I happened to receive some secondhand DBZ Pops from one of my students, since he knew I customise. The big shoulder pad thingies on the Vegeta Pop, as well as his cranky stance, just spoke to me as being a better basis for Shan Yu's lower half. Serendipity, really.

Tobias Funke may seem like an unlikely candidate for Shan Yu, but my reasoning was pretty simple- I find sticking polymer clay to the vinyl difficult if it's just small pieces that can't be smoothed into the surface surrounding it. I know I could use glue for this, but I figured that if there was a Pop head I could work from, I may as well use it. Tobias has a moustache and hair around the sides and back of his head, not too dissimilar to Shan Yu. Sure I had to slice out the middle of the 'stache, as well as adding extra hair to both, but it was a starting point that I was comfortable working with. I've also saved his glasses in case of future custom jobs needing them, naturally.

The Run Down:

Base Pop/s: head- Tobias Funke (Arrested Development 116), body- Vegeta (Dragonball Z 10)

Biggest Challenges: The little brown dot between his eyes from the glasses.

How I'd Improve It: Finding a better way to camouflage the dot. From a distance, looking at him from across the room, he looks awesome. Up close isn't good enough for me though.