Excellent!

"So! We meet again... Doctor!"

In a brief interlude to my Trolltooth series, I bring you the most emotional of the, normally coldly logical, Cybermen!

The reason for the interruption is that I was really chuffed to get the boy painting the other day. He's a big Dr Who fan too and I'd bought him the Exterminate Game from Warlord Games for his birthday a while ago. We'd stuck all the minis together but as he managed to somehow lose the rule book we never played it! As Cybermen are super easy to paint I figured I could lure him in to trying it out and with the lockdown we have plenty of time to play games - beats bloody Fortnight anyway. We even found the rule book too!

In the spirit of fatherly support and nurturing, I had to get out some proper metal minis and show him how superior the older versions of the Cybermen are to these newfangled robot, Ironman type things we have today - and having done that I figured why not paint them! Harry's not quite finished his yet but they'll be featuring on here when they're done - just the basing to go. I was quite impressed when he inspected the two sided playmat you get with the game to decide what kind of basing he wanted. One side is a spaceship interior and the other is a desert type setting so he chose sand, which was good as painting spaceship floor designs on each base was going to be a bit tricky for him! I was also quite heartened that he wanted to paint the new Dalek models that come with the game in the old silver and blue scheme of the 60's stories so they all got a good silver drybrushing as well - he has yet to discover the joys of painting hundreds of Dalek roundels... Last bit of gushing about my son (and it doesn't happen often!) but he was also getting quite excited about coming up with a game involving the spare Black Tree minis I gave him and the rest of my Dr Who collection. I think we'll have a few basic games of Exterminate first to give him some ideas on how it all works but watch this space...

Back to my far superior classic Cybermen. As far as the silver giants go, they are quintessentially 80's - big shoulder pads, shiny suits and over the top acting - never got my head round why an emotionless Cyberman would do a fist clench but hey! However,  I was never really sold on this version of the Doctor's cybernetic enemy when I was a kid. Sylvester McCoy was my Doctor as I was growing up and Silver Nemesis didn't do too much for me when compared with Remembrance of the Daleks (same plot done better!) and Curse of Fenric. 80's Dr Who didn't really do much for the Cybermen's reputation in general and they lost a lot of their threat by dying left right and centre rather too easily in the episodes they starred in - killed by gold tipped arrows, gold coins fired from a hand held catapult, massacred by javelin throwing robots or tricked in to walking across an electrified floor. However, since then I've grown to love the campy performances and overly convoluted plots and, while the Cybermen of The Invasion and Tomb of the Cybermen will always be my favourites, these moon-booted and cricket-gloved giants did see off Adric and that has to count for something!

Exxxxcellent!!

If the stories were a little hokey in the 80's, the design certainly wasn't. They are pretty imposing - the minis standing a good head taller than regular humans - and there's no signs of ping pong balls or wellies! There's something I like about Cybermen carrying blasters over them shooting electricity out of their hands or rays out of their headsets - again makes them look a little more intimidating.

Painting these chaps up, I was reminded of the famous and aforementioned scene of them being massacred by the Raston Warrior Robot in The Five Doctors. Unfortunately I don't own a Raston Warrior Robot yet and I certainly wasn't about to cut my nice new Cybermen up but I think the scene I set up bears a resemblance!

There'll be a few more Dr Who posts in the future as I discovered a whole load of half and unpainted Black Tree minis when I was rooting about the other day. Fear not Fantasy fans - the lobotomised Ogres for the Dolgan Raiders scenario are coming along fine and I should have a post on Darramous and his Undead lackeys later today...