Custom James T. West Store Display
Custom Jesse James Store Display
** Disclaimer: I make these displays. They were not made by any company currently, or in the past, affliated with Marx. I do not make these for resale, but instead for my personal use. Any / all use of the Marx trademarks, wordmarks, logo's, etc. are just to preserve historical accuracy in my creation. **- Click on images for a larger version
The Work...
James West
as seen on the TV series The Wild Wild West
On the back of Tom Heaton's Module 2: The Best of the West Series, 1974 book you can see this picture. I believe that this prototype display was photographed in the 'Model Room' at Marx and never made it out of the building.
I knew from the experience of doing the Custom Stony Display that I needed to study this original before I embarked upon recreating it. Here are the 'Lessons' learned from that study:
as seen on the TV series The Wild Wild West
On the back of Tom Heaton's Module 2: The Best of the West Series, 1974 book you can see this picture. I believe that this prototype display was photographed in the 'Model Room' at Marx and never made it out of the building.
I knew from the experience of doing the Custom Stony Display that I needed to study this original before I embarked upon recreating it. Here are the 'Lessons' learned from that study:
- I would have to 'guess' at the colors
- The mythical 'axe heads' and glasses would have to be created
- The accessory card has lots of decorations!
- There are 3 'Parts' to the display: Background, Accessory Card, Figure Stand Block
Measurements
Using the same techniques that I learned in the Stony display I did some ratio calculations to determine the size of this display parts. I determined that the Background was 22 in wide, by 18 inches tall; the Accessory Card was about 14 in wide, by 10 in tall; and the Figure Stand Block was 6 in wide, by 2 1/2 in tall by 4 in deep.
Background
The first task I had was to recreate the brick wall background. Several different elements had to be done in Photoshop from scratch. The side panel 'jail window and wall' and the bottom brick section were relatively easy. The Top banner was considerably more difficult. My Photoshop skills in 2008 were alright, but now my experience and the updates to Photoshop would make this pretty easy. I decided NOT to try to replicate the apparent angle of the figure background as shown on the original. I'm not sure that would have actually been done in a production environment... too hard to maintain stability. So I made my background flat like all the other single figure Store Displays that Marx made.
Next: The accessory card.
Wow! A lot of work here. The filigree around the 'Ancient Close Combat Weapons' section was fun to do. The train "Wanderer" with James riding up had to be completely redrawn. Thankfully, it's a pretty rough drawing so my lack of artistic talent doesn't show too much.
Next: The "Axe Heads"
I suspected, but did not know for many years, that the Axe Heads and Glasses [Spectacles] were part of the original accessory mold. But at that time no one had any proof. So, how to replicate these parts? Well, I broke out the baking clay and started to sculpt. I tried to copy the shapes as well as I could. As it turns out, I got pretty close to the actual axe heads that are now being recast in Mexico using the original molds (see the second picture). Turns out that the heads and the glasses were 'blocked off' in the mold when Marx ditched the idea of James T. West and used the accessory set for Sam Cobra instead. For my purposes, I molded and cast the heads in a black resin and used a pair of Mike Hazard glasses for the spectacles.
