The Mythic Legions action figure customs of Jeremy Girard

The Ogre King

I am a designer by trade, so one of the things I love to do with my Mythic Legions customs is to approach them as a design challenge. This is why I do so many “tribute” style customs, where I reimagine certain characters how I think they would appear in the Realm of Mythoss. This is one of those tributes – my version of the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons “Ogre King” from LJN Toys.

You can read this character's story on my Instagram page

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Recipe

My desire to create this figure started when I got the Argemedes toy from the Mythic Legions: Wasteland wave and I realized how great his helmet would look on an ogre and how it has some similar design elements to the LJN toy. That started me down a spiral to recreate this toy in Mythic Legions form!

I began this process by looking at the Ogre King toy and determining which key design elements of the figure I would carry over into my custom. I obviously already had the helmet I wanted to use, and I knew that I would use a Kkkurzog ogre as my base figure. Looking at the 1983 toy, some notes I made were his armored right arm, as well as his weapons of a large curved sword, a mace, and a shield with a reptile motif on it. I noted that he wore armor that left his chest exposed, but which covered his midsection and thighs. He has a belt with a bull on the front, knee pads with skulls, and he wore sandals on his feet. With all these design elements in mind, I set out to find the pieces to make this custom.

I have found that 1:6 scale weapons and accessories work wonderfully with the Mythic Legions ogres, and that is where I turned to find the pieces you see on my final custom. These pieces came from a variety of places and figures, and I admittedly went a little crazy on assembling these disparate pieces for the ogre king (translation – this cost me a small fortune to put together)! You can see detailed pics in this post of all the design elements I recreated on this figure. For his armored right arm, I used a real metal pauldron armor from a Coo Models Knights of the Realm figure paired with some Mythic Legions faulds armor that I sliced and modified to work here on the ogre’s arm. His “chain mail” lower arm is from a Play Toys Princess Knight. It is basically a soft goods piece that slips over the arm and looks like chain mail! His pair of chest belts are from a Hot Toys Dr. Strange. His shield is from a TBLeague Goddess of War, his sword is also from a TBLeague figure named Fighter Woman, and his mace (which is real metal) is from a Jurchen Jin Dynasty Iron Pagoda figure. His torso armor was original from a MIVI Qin Empire Emperor Dragon figure. I had to customize it to remove the original chest piece and I used what was supposed to be shoulder armor for the thigh pieces, gluing the leather straps they came with in place so they would hang accordingly. His belt is from a Haoyu Toys Bull Demon King. For his legs, I removed the normal knee pads by pulling the glued pieces off and replacing them with some TBLeague shoulder armor pieces from their Soldier Strange toy. They worked great here as knee pads! Finally, I added some sandals from a Hasbro Marvel Legends Gladiator Hulk build-a-figure.

With all my pieces finally in place, I had to next think about paints. The original LJN toy has somewhat garish blue armor, and they also a did a second version of the Ogre King in orange armor. Neither of those color choices appealed to me, so I made the creative decision to not paint the armor pieces here, but to rather keep them largely as is. I did repaint the helmet and added some gold hightlights to the knee pads, and some brown paint to the tops of the lower leg armor, but other than those small additions, I was happy with the colors of this figure that I already had in place!

Ultimately, this custom was mainly about finding the right parts to combine to realize my vision. What I love is that, even though this custom uses parts from a wide range of figures, I think the combined results is so seamless. The pieces really do look like they belong together, and I think they hit upon all the key design elements needed for my tribute to the D&D Ogre King!