Comic and pulp-based adventure movies today tend to do the good ol’ Photoshop montage for their posters, creating a tedious sameness, but one designed to convey the maximum amount of information, whether scrolled past on a phone or strolled past in the lobby. Before we had those technical tools for such things, the posters, frankly, ruled. Artists did them, and we remember them in ways today’s models will be forgotten. Everyone remembers Star Wars’ overly muscular depiction of Luke Skywalker raising his lightsaber high. Almost as iconic is the similar Conan the Barbarian poster, with its even more muscular hero putting even artistic-license Luke to shame with that bodybuilder’s chest.
As Large as Life?
Renato Cesaro didn’t have to exaggerate Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sandahl Bergman’s physiques — they were athletes through and through, with Schwarzenegger in the ’80s making bodybuilding more popular than ever before. He’d be back…and neck…and chest…and you get the idea. Now Mezco has realized the art as a One:12 scaled mini-statue. It’s part of their Static Six collection of statues that are scaled to six-inch figures so that even if they can’t quite “play” together, they’ll look good displayed together.
That said, you might need a slightly taller shelf for this one, given that Conan’s aloft-wielded sword basically doubles the height of this thing to 25 inches. Details are hand-painted down to the veins in Valeria’s hands, signifying her grip on the shaft of her weapon. The likenesses of both actors appear very well done. Nobody’s likely to wonder who they are or what this is.
$375, a reasonable market price for collectible items this tall, is the price of preorders, with fulfillment expected closer to Christmas. The official images below give a sense of the scale, as well as some tight closeups of key details that matter.
