The upcoming DST Battlestar 7” figure release includes three pivotal characters from the modern BSG mythology: the heroic Admiral William Adama, iron fisted Admiral Helena Cain and the weasel like Dr. Gaius Baltar.  Obviously, having been involved with these characters from the beginning of Diamond’s BSG run I’ve developed very clear cut opinions of the various personalities. And the show having been so well written I was  easily drawn into it’s various tangled plots and subplots.

When working on any property the idea is to bring that type of affinity for the show into the project so that the final product reflects that enthusiasm.

When we started the initial concept discussions with DST’s various BSG enthusiasts, Bill Adama was initially the trickiest to nail down. The decision had to be made which version of him should be the final representation.  For instance, mustache, no mustache, heavier, thinner  which way do you go? Well initially we experiment with the various looks and narrow them down to what everyone likes. Then a decision has to be made as to the production costs and possible returns on a figure, which leads to deciding where parts can be reused to keep the tooling costs manageable.  Believe me, everyone would love to make every character a one-off sculpt, but it’s not always viable and realistically, some characters would never see the light of day if they couldn’t be achieved with a head swap or judicious reuse of accessories. Consequently you rarely see a company go past the main two or three characters in a movie or TV show before the line tanks.

We settled on a slightly heavy version of the Admiral. After beginning the project DST decide he was too important a character not to represent him in his two most iconic looks; clean shaven with the specs and the longer haired mustached depiction. With the body we first tried to maximize the existing tooling and do a straight head swap on the Apollo. Needless to say it didn’t cut the mustard so we settled on a heavier torso and legs and were able to adapt Apollo’s arms to the sculpt.

Admiral Cain was a sculpt we had actually done quite a while ago; many of you will remember seeing it awhile back. The only real costume choice was the uniform dress blues. And we went with the hair style from the series rather than the Razor movie.

Baltar was another character who undergoes at least a lot of visual transformations through out the series. Everyone seemed to agree though that the longish haired presidential style would be the most iconic.

View the whole progress gallery!