Familiar to anyone?
How about...?
If you were quite young in the 80s and 90s you may remember these guys from one of my favourite kids cartoons, The Dreamstone. Airing in 1990 and running for four series, The Dreamstone is one of those engrossing fantasy worlds with rich characters and dark undertones. The very first episode opens with Zordrak, the Lord of Nightmares (the big dragony bloke in the top picture) feeding the captain of his army to the monstrous Fraznats that live in a pit by his throne.
What really makes the cartoon stand out in my view is that it is really about the bad guys, specifically the officious Sergeant Blob and his reluctant wingmen Frizz and Nug. Forced by their giant master to undertake missions to steal the ever-desired Dreamstone from the cutesy land of dreams, their life is made dangerous by the half-baked inventions of mad genius Urpgor. The overriding feeling is that they'd all rather be fishing in the sea of despair and leaving the goody-goodies well alone.
Just over a yar ago I had the mad idea of sculpting a couple of these characters and sending them to Martin Gates, the director of the production company that created The Dreamstone. After a long period of waiting for companies on either side of the world to talk to each other (British production company, Canadian merchandising, German rights-holders...) I'm excited to say that this is now happening:
The next few months will see a lot of sculpting! The plan is to Kickstart (or other crowd-funder) the range in March and aim for a September release to coincide with the 30th anniversary. There'll also be a simple miniatures game to accompany it which will likely be a freebie for crowd-funder backers. I'll post updates here and on the Facebook page as I have them.
Exciting cartoon times ahead!
