This time round, we're looking at the fanatical religious faction known as The Family and a collection of heroes, who can work with any faction able to afford them: A Fistful of Clints.
Released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Great Escape Games, each miniature is a different Clint Eastwood character from his rich Western history:
"Five lone riders. A mercenary with a wary eye. A preacher who brings judgment. A rebel who won’t back down. A killer pulled from peace. A lawman with a rope around his past. Each miniature captures a different face of [a] frontier legend, grizzled, righteous, and deadly."
This is - currently - pretty much it for my Wild West miniatures, bar a few waifs and strays, but as I've already 'warned' Matt, I'm also returning to an earlier theme: Warlord Games' Judge Dredd miniatures skirmish system.
Having produced a lovely - but limited - range, Warlord pulled the plug on its 2000AD games line (which included Slaine, Strontium Dog and The ABC Warriors), much like they did with their Doctor Who line. I guess licensed miniatures aren't great money-spinners, which is a great pity for those of us who like them.
I've recently rewatched both cinematic efforts at bringing 2000AD's legendary lawman Judge Dredd to the big screen and I have to say my opinion on both remains unchanged.
Each movie - 1995's Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone in the title role and 2012's Dredd, starring Karl Urban - gets some things right, but also gets an awful lot wrong in its attempted adaptation.
Take Judge Dredd: the first eight minutes - the fly-through of a comic accurate Mega-City One and the Block War - are near perfect... right up until Stallone’s Dredd rolls up and slurs out “I am the law”.
In fact, things don’t really go off the rails until a quarter of an hour in and Dredd takes off his helmet - taking with it any credibility the film might have had.
So much thought has gone into the staging, the look, the costuming, and other characters (The Angel Gang and the A.B.C. Warrior are wonderful, for instance) that it blows my mind that that attention to detail was lost completely in the actual script and the all-important depiction of Dredd himself.
Meanwhile in the more recent attempt (which I can't help but think pandered more to those members of the Dredd fanbase who perhaps don't see the satire in the character), while it may have nailed things with Urban as Dredd (never taking his helmet off, of course) and Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), it totally screwed the pooch with its version of Mega-City One.
While Stallone's claustrophobic, future city not only looks like The Big Meg seen in the comics, as well as bearing a passing resemblance to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Coruscant in Star Wars: Revenge of The Sith, the city we see in the 2012 movie could be almost any contemporary city (with a handful of high-rise "blocks" CGI-ed in for good measure).
Judge Dredd's Mega-City One
Dredd's Mega-City One
Its roads are empty and buildings are spaced far apart. Even the civilian costumes and vehicles are just lifted from everyday 21st Century life, with no attempt to "sci-fi" them up.
The Judges all get nice paramilitary outfits, that bear a passing resemblance to the source material, but it's Stallone's movie that actually gives us "proper" Judges' uniforms.
There's no denying that Dredd is the better movie of the two, but its blatant disregard for so much of what makes Judge Dredd 'Judge Dredd' is grating.
Mega-City One and its inhabitants are as crucial to the verisimilitude of a Judge Dredd movie as the portrayal of Joseph Dredd himself, so what we really need is someone with the design chops of the team that built the world of Judge Dredd to work with actors who understand the material (as we saw in Dredd).
With the Judge Dredd: Mega-City One TV series - that was announced in 2017 - apparently, disappointingly, mired in development hell (I believe the big issue is financing, but don't quote me on that), it looks as though the best adaptations of the Dredd are still coming from unofficial/fan sources such as the incredible Judge Minty, from 2014 (see below), and this short animation, from 2019:
Look at the promising depiction of MC1 in this poster for the proposed TV series
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
