Saturday Morning Cartoon (Part 4)

When I was a kid, I remember waking up every Saturday morning while my parents were still asleep, getting a giant bowl of Cookie Crisp and watching cartoons until lunch. I loved shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, Dungeons and Dragons, He-Man, The Mighty Orbots and my favorite, Thundercats. I really liked all the characters but my favorite was always Panthro. He seemed like the toughest Thundercat out of all of them and had, what I thought to be, the coolest weapon. The NUMCHUCKS! ..or nunchaku if you want to be all technical. Here’s some images of Panthro from the original show.

I thought it would be fun to make a Panthro model but it would be too time consuming to do another full character like the Baroness so I decided to go with a bust. I started with a torso I had already created from another character and reshaped him into Panthro, adding his gear and spikes from basic primitive shapes in zbrush. I didn’t want to redesign him but there were certain things I didn’t like about the original that I wanted to adjust like the spikes on his gear. They were really thin and flimsy looking in the cartoon so I bulked them up and shortened them. The other thing was his nose. In the cartoon they have very human-looking noses but I thought it would be cooler to make his nose more cat-like. Once I was happy with everything, I gave him a slight snarl, found a Thundercats font, modeled his name for the base and I was done!

After looking at the bust for a while, I thought it would be fun to pose him in a fighting stance. Since his numchucks have a very long chain, I thought it would be cool to have him holding one end and then have the other end going back under his opposite arm as if he had just caught it there. After some final touch ups in photoshop, Panthro was done!

I hope you guys dig it and check back next week for more Saturday morning cartoon art!

Chris