Major Surgery

With my recent purchase of the Gamma Ray-Gard and its Major Matt figure, I found myself in the position of having a surfeit of Matts. As I still need a yellow Doug Davis and blue Jeff Long figure to complete the team, I wondered how I might make a different figure from the existing ones.

A few years back National Geographic made a pair of figure based sea explorer playsets, one with a large diving bell and the other with a scuba diver. Both included an excellent jointed and poseable figure. As both figures had the same head sculpt and were roughly the same scale as Matt, I took the one from the sub, who wears a cutoff wetsuit and shoes and swappe his head with a spare Matt. The Nat Geo figures are solid neoprene, so a bit of cutting and drilling was necessary to accomodate the neck plug for Matts body. Matt’s head sat on the diver body with the help of a little hot glue. 

The divers body is slightly longer than Matt, sothe head looks a liitle small, but the diver head sits neatly on the astronaut body.

Using a divers head links neatly into the other figure line from Mattel, the Sea Devils, which had rubber frogmen and sea scooters and even re-used some of Matts equipment.