The Denizens Of Ankletown Station

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Empire Toy Works (@empiretoyworks)

Since I first saw Empire Toy Works' Rotgut Station, I started working on my 3.75 inch collection of figures. I wanted figures that would look good in a similar diorama/city. The place is going to have a Star Wars aesthetic, but plenty of non-Star Wars figures could still fit in there.

I had some figures already, but 3.75 inch hasn't been my jam for a long time, so I don't have that many. My six inch collection dwarfs my 3.75 inch...and not just because they're all taller.

I started keeping stuff that I thought I'd put on Ankletown Station in its own separate box, and this morning, for fun, I got it all out and looked at what I'd accumulated.

Here's my Star Wars guys so far:

Some of these are mine originally, some of them came in a bag of figures Rish sent me to populate my sand skiff battle, some I grabbed out of my oldest son's box of toys, and I added IG-11, DJ, and Hoth Leia since starting this.

It's a good group, but nothing impressive. I have to remember that it doesn't have to happen all at once. After all, I've yet to make the first building of the place, so who cares if I don't have a ton of storm troopers to walk around menacingly there?

Star Wars guys are always being released and re-released, so eventually I'll be able to get my hands on all sorts of figures. It will just take time.

I also have bought a bunch of Halo figures recently, because they've been showing up at Ross by the truckload.

There's the anti-aircraft gun in the back (with an alien figure in there that you can barely see), some gun racks and trunks that came with a checkpoint set, some alien figures and some spartan figures. These should be really cool mixed in with the crowd. 

These guys are a little tall though. It's not terrible, but they tend to be bigger than any of the other lines.

IG-11 can hold his own with them, but he's supposed to be really, really tall. And that freaking Princess Leia is so, so small. It came with a file card type thing that claimed Princess Leia was 4' 11". I had to look and see, and Carrie Fisher was 5' 1" so it's not true. I wonder why they made her shorter for the toy. What's the point of that? Just to save on plastic? 

I've got a few Fortnite figures that will fit in with the aesthetic...oh, and a shopping cart too. I'll have to find a way to use that in Ankletown.

Mmm, the Ice King may not quite fit, but that's okay, he has a place astride a dinosaur on the Christmas shelf, so he may not be in Ankletown much.

I got a few Jurassic Park figures on sale a while back, a kid and two dinosaurs.

 I was thinking of cutting off the dinosaur heads and putting them on different bodies to make aliens. Especially the one on the left, which is called a Gallimimus. The long neck and small head would look cool coming out of the shoulders of some armored up character like a Halo guy, for example.

Then I got the idea that maybe I could just stand the dinosaurs up and use them as is.

I'd have to heat up the neck so that I could bend it to where the face was looking ahead instead of up, but if I just made them some kind of clothes or armor, I wonder if it could look cool.

I'd have to bend the tails as well. The Gallimimus couldn't even stand up for a picture because of the tail.

I have my two Batmans and one Catwoman that came with the motorcycles. They'll fit in fine...once I paint over that stupid battle damage stuff they came with.

Then there's the tons and tons of Final Faction I got at the dollar store. A lot of them will be repurposed in one way or another, but I've got enough to fill all of Ankletown Station with just them, it seems.

There's the robots:

I think I'm going to repaint a lot of them to be police robots. Maybe I'll do the same with the dog robots:

Then there's these new little robots. Don't know what I'll do with them, but they could just go as is with just some paint touch ups.

Then there's the aliens:

They will look a lot better after a nice repaint, and they can be walking around town like they belong there. Those backpacks they wear may get repurposed into heads or something as well.

Then there's the alien robot:

I actually quite like this thing. It'll be really cool once I repaint it onto a cohesive cyborg-looking creature.

Then there's humans:

I don't see a lot of hope for these things. I think I might repurpose most of these into droids. Maybe I'll use the faces to practice painting. I've always been afraid to paint faces, but what if the figure only cost a dollar? Then it won't be a big problem if I destroy it with a crappy paint job. Maybe I can learn to turn a bad face into a good face with some properly applied paint.

I have this guy that I bought on sale a very long time ago. It's a Corps figure in a mech suit. I tried to paint it a little, and it didn't turn out well. It was the first thing I ever tried painting, though, so I could probably improve it a lot now that I know a few more things.

I have a couple of random 3.75-inchers that don't fit in a group, but I'll probably throw in the background sometimes anyway.

That Herbie is actually a six-inch version, but it seems like it fits fine with 3.75 inch, and I'm not displaying it anywhere else right now.

Then I have my very first custom guy, where I merged a star Wars Squid Head figure with a Fortnite Bone Wasp figure and made DJ Squid Head. I just finished getting the hands put on to complete the look.

I love it. I'm going to have a lot of fun creating more of these kinds of things.

So, that's where Ankletown Station sits. There's several more things that I might include. I have a bunch of 3.75" GI Joes, a couple of Vitruvian HACKS, more Fortnite guys in holiday displays for Easter, Halloween, and Christmas. Those things might make their way onto the station as well.

Right now, I'm thinking of differing from Rotgut Station to make a space port that is on a planet somewhere. I was thinking of something similar to what they did for Galaxy's Edge at Disneyworld.

Something incorporating terrain as well as buildings. We'll see what I get.

It's a long ways off, really, because there are a lot of things that we have to do around the house before I can ever start work on something like that. Right now, I'm busy packing all my toys away in boxes. I won't even have the Wall of Voodoo to look at, much less Ankletown Station.