Month: January 2008

Thanks to Nathan for sending this in! I’ve linked to (or…wait, I thought I did…) several subpages on Alex Bickmore’s Super Toy Archive, which has photos of rare toys and action figures, and which also sells some (okay, that’s what I linked to). It’s obviously been a very long time since I last went there, because when I did, all they had were a Zoolie test shot and the small and large Niddler plush figures.

Well, they’ve updated since then. There’s some Wraith concept art, which reflects the toy design and not the show design and which was probably done as a sort of style guide or model for the actual toymakers.

And, more importantly, there are images of two action figures from a line of ten unproduced Pirates of Dark Water action figures! (Someone else had sent in a rumor years ago that there was going to be a Tula figure in this unproduced line, but this is the first substantial proof I’ve seen of these figures!)

There’s Strant, Bloth’s loyal four-armed crew member who you may remember from The Darkdweller as the one who bullied Ioz around after Ren and Niddler escaped Bloth’s ship to go rescue Tula from the Darkdweller. Interestingly, there’s a promo image at the bottom that spells his name “Strand“, though it seems to always be pronounced as “Strant” in the show. The promo image also advertises the toy’s “Twin Spinning Arm Feature”…not unlike General Grievous and his 4-armed lightsaber thing, perhaps? (But this character obviously predated the Star Wars prequels by quite a while–it’s just a modern parallel, sort of.)

And there’s another Ren action figure–shirtless–with something called a “sea sled.” The author of the site points out that the action figures had been pretty faithful, but this one has some differences–Ren’s shirt and boots are missing, his clothes and belt are darker (I’d even say the color’s more faithful to the darker hues of the show than the first Ren action figure‘s bright blue outfit was), his arm bands are a different model and grey-hued, and he has some kind of spiky armor covering his calves. And what exactly is that sea sled (attached to his left arm in the image at the bottom)?

This is intriguing. The Ren action figure in particular could be a clue to what the show’s creative team had planned for the unproduced episodes. The name listed at the bottom of these pages is in fact the webmaster’s name, so I’ll definitely be sending him an e-mail to see what other information he may have about this unproduced line of PoDW toys, which may give us all some new info on where the show may have been heading when it was canceled.