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Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Plain clothed characters are possibly the worst ideas for toys from a sales standpoint. In general, buyers are looking for colorful, flashy characters that catch your attention. Taking that into account, Art Asylum packaged one normal human with one ghost in each of their TRU 2-packs. It seems to have worked pretty well, considering they successfully sold through 4 waves and several boxed sets.

For this week’s Minimate Spotlight, I decided to feature three of the ghosts that played minor roles in the two films – the Titanic Captain, the Central Park Jogger, and the Zombie Taxicab Driver:

Behind the Image:

I’ve gone with overly photoshopped projects for several of my recent Ghostbusters articles, so for this one, I wanted to do traditional photography. As is my usual approach, I found corresponding images to use as backdrops and took a photo of each Minimate standing in front of their respective images.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Art Asylum’s Ghostbusters line doesn’t just focus on the heavy hitters – Along with the popular characters, we have also been given supporting players, and even alternate versions of some of those people.
We’ve already seen the first release of Louis Tully (packed inside the Terror Dog), and this week we’re featuring his suited-up appearance from the end of the second film.
Along for the ride is Janine Melnitz, in her colorful attire from the same movie 🙂

Behind the Image:

I wasn’t sure what kind of background to use for this image. I tried finding a screen capture that would work with these characters, but that attempt failed. So I eventually settled for a NYC backdrop, since I was unable to think of anything else that might compliment Louis and Janine. 

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

What better way to ring in the new year than with a Minimate designed especially to celebrate the holiday? With Ghost Busters 2 taking place on New Years Eve, the release of Janosz in Minimate form (who happens to be possessed, as you can tell from his facial expression) came packaged with 2 hair pieces – one of which sports a “Happy New Year” cap!

Behind the Image:

This is another very simple image. I took a photo of Janosz and superimposed him over a google’d image of fireworks. I played around with the colors a little to make him look as if the lighting was influenced by the background sky… and viola, instant New Years Janosz 🙂

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s appearance was a key moment in the first Ghostbusters film, as was his destruction. Aside from an “exploding Stay Puft” Minimate, Art Asylum took that scene as a jumping off point for ‘mated variations of the main human characters. Since Peter Venkman didn’t really get any marshmallow goo on him after Stay Puft exploded, we didn’t get a Minimate of him all covered in sticky ghost entrails. The other three, however, may as well have gone swimming in a pool of Marshmallow Fluff.

Since it’s Christmas, I felt like doing a seasonal image for Minimate Spotlight… and since we’re in the middle of looking at the Ghostbusters movie line, I thought that the “Gooey” releases would fit in well with a snow fight scene. And I also wanted to find a way to work the Dana Barrett Minimate into an image – and this seemed like a perfect opportunity!

Behind the Image:

Again, I took the straight-up-photography approach with this image. I used some snow covered trees from a train set and a blue board for sky, set up lights, and took the photo. Very simple, very quick.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Having Minimate renditions of the ghosts from the Ghostbusters films is a no brainer, but the line would be severely lacking if there were no heroes to face down the apparitions. Art Asylum left very little to be desired when they planned out how to produce the main characters from this property, having released at least 3 movie-accurate designs of each of the four Ghostbusters. This week’s image displays the most iconic look these guys ever sported – their fully suited business attire, complete with all their tools of the trade:

Behind the Image:

This one was kind of fun to photograph. I wanted to take a break from the photoshop approach that I’ve been taking lately (and will be returning to soon enough), so I arranged the four ‘mates and set a sheet behind them with some fun lighting to give this image a unique look.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Along with Slimer, Ghostbusters gave us one of the most unique and memorable ghosts ever: the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. What Ghostbusters line would be complete without good old Stay Puft added to the mix? And Art Asylum didn’t skimp – we didn’t just get one version, we got four (two traditional forms, one with a happy smile *pictured below* and one with an angry smile; an “exploding” version, and one that glows in the dark – just for kicks)

Behind the Image:

I have to admit, I got lazy on this one. I found a screen capture of the epic climactic Stay Puft scene, and my idea was to edit in the Minimate version like I’ve been doing with the last couple of images I’ve featured… but as I was searching for more Ghostbusters images to help with future projects, I stumbled across the above image. Yes, someone else had made the exact image that I was thinking of making – more than a year ago.

And since it’s getting close to Christmas time and I’m swamped with work, I decided to just feature the image I found rather than making my own. Once Christmas is over and I’m less busy, I’ll do my own version and replace this article’s featured image. For now, though, this will give you the idea of how cool the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Minimate is 🙂

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Although Vigo the Carpathian is not considered to be the most memorable foe that the Ghostbusters faced, he certainly had a unique presence in the second movie. To honor that, I decided that there was no more fitting approach for featuring this particular Minimate than to portray him as a painting:

The Ghostbusters franchise spawned a decent number of fan favorite ghosts, not the least of which was Slimer, the gooey green slob whose main purpose in life is to gorge himself on any food he comes across.

Art Asylum’s rendition of Slimer is rather accurate to the movie, which required a creative take on the overall design. Instead of a full Minimate body, Slimer’s frame is made up of everything above the waist, which sports a sculpted piece that conceals everything except the arms. To keep him posed, he comes packaged with a clear stand that you can insert where the waist peg would normally go.

Behind the Images:

For the image of Vigo, I found a scan of the painting featured in the film and simply superimposed a photo of the Minimate overtop of it. It only took a small amount of tweaking the color scheme to make everything feel as though it was done as a complete painting.

Slimer was a much quicker photoshop job than Vigo, even though it was essentially the same process for both images. With Slimer, I didn’t need to alter the background as much (note – the background is a screen capture from his introductory appearance in the first film). And to achieve the slightly transparent look, I only needed to utilize some filters and a few layer commands. I also added a glow effect to give him that slightly supernatural feel that he had in the movies.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Continuing our look at Art Asylum’s Ghostbusters line, this week’s focus is on the very 80’s styled Gozer, and the Terror Dogs, displayed in a faithful recreation of the first GB movie’s climax:

The Terror Dog was relatively new territory for Art Asylum. Only once before had they released an animal Minimate (Muffit from the original Battlestar Galactica series was the first), and since AA is amping up the production value of their releases, they found a way to not only make the Terror Dog a fun diversion from the usual formula, but they also packed it with a surprise. Underneath all of the sculpted pieces that make the animal form, there is a basic Minimate body holding it all together. Seeing the opportunity to be true to the movie and give buyers a treat, AA designed the Terror Dog to be taken apart to reveal a hidden character: a very disheveled Louis Tully!

Behind the Images:

For this week’s first image, I basically just superimposed Gozer and the Terror Dogs over a screen capture of a scene from the end of the first Ghostbusters film. The lower quality of the image was a direct result of working the Minimates into a screen capture – the movie was filmed long enough ago that getting a really nice quality shot is pretty much impossible without heavy restoration. So instead of putting in 5 or 6 hours to essentially recreate the background, I simply took over-saturated photos of the Minimates so that they would match the image quality of the screen capture.

The second image was a straight-up photograph with some tweaking and a replaced background. I set them on a wooden desk, and that worked as a pretty decent base for a late night dock scene. I muted and re-colored this image in much the same fashion as the Kree Soldiers image that was featured back in October.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Last week we took our first look at some of the Minimates that Art Asylum has released from their Ghostbusters line. As I said then, this line is extremely comprehensive, having spawned six boxed sets and four full waves. That’s quite a bit, considering every release has been based on two movies and one video game.
So for the next few weeks, we will be showcasing various Minimate incarnations of iconic Ghostbusters characters. This week’s feature is none other than the infamous Statue of Liberty, and her climactic walk through New York City:

Behind the Image:

I decided to take a break from my usual Photoshop-intensive approach with this week’s image. I wanted to see if I could pull off a believable portrayal of a giant Minimate Statue of Liberty walking through a city, using only a camera… this is the result. In the same tradition as the Picard and M. Bison images from previous articles, I placed the Minimate in front of an image of NYC and took the picture. No editing or special effects.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters

Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.

Art Asylum has diversified its Minimate line with a broad range of pop culture licenses, and possibly its most successful offering aside from Marvel Comics characters is its very comprehensive Ghostbusters line.

With Halloween in full swing, I thought it’d be fitting to look at some of the ghouls from this popular movie series.
Don’t recognize some of these guys? That may be because these particular ghosts are bosses from the latest Ghostbusters video game: 

Behind the Image:

Just like last week’s BTTF image, this one required some heavy photoshopping. I had fun once again with the cloud tube that gave the fog/mist look, which I used to blend the individual photos of each Minimate overtop an image of some woods that I found from a google search. Relatively simple, and relatively effective.

On Ebay: Ghostbusters
On AtomicAvenue: Ghostbusters