Skip to main content

RICSAN Custom Toys The Unbelievable (Varan)


For the last few months, I had been seeing photos and YouTube reviews of custom Godzilla kaiju from someone known as RICSAN Customs. He’s a guy in Mexico who makes 3rd party customs of articulated figures that no other company is making. Due to licensing issues, he gives them different names, such as The Dream Ogre and The Infant (Gabara and Minilla), Monster from Odo Island (pre-mutated Godzilla Minus One), Sō Shingeki Serpent (Manda), etc. This one is called The Unbelievable, and is basically the Toho monster from the film Varan (aka Varan the Unbelievable from the English dub). His figures are made of resin and use thick string articulation instead of ball joints (similar to Meego figures). So they are articulated and posable, you just need to be aware that they’ll move differently from standard ball joint figures, so practice a bit more care when handling them.


Ok, let’s get the one negative out of the way. He packs his figures in styrofoam, and since that stuff can be sticky, my Varan figure was covered in little specs of styrofoam that I had to blow and gently brush off. Due to this, the paint on his left eye stuck to the styrofoam and peeled off, so he has an unpainted left eye. That should be an easy fix, I’ll just need to find some decent paint and give it a touch up. Other than that, the figure is solid and I’m loving it.








He comes packed in a printed box with his name and artwork of the figure. The included accessories are 2 small 3D printed tanks, a maser cannon, and a statue of the symbol from the 1958 film. All of these are unpainted, but highly detailed.










As for the star of the package, Varan is in the standard 1:12 scale, about 6” tall, so he scales well with the figures from the SHMA line. He seems to be modeled more on the puppet used for the 1968 film Destroy All Monsters. Toho didn’t bother to build a new suit for that film, opting to instead use the puppet prop in a handful of “blink and you’ll miss it” scenes. He has a dinosaur-like body with a spiked head, and a row of spikes running down along his back and his tail. His only ability was that he could extend the membranes between his arms and legs to take to the sky like a flying squirrel. Obviously, those flight membranes were not part of this sculpt, as they probably would’ve been challenging to incorporate, especially with the string articulation. The figure is painted a glossy brown, with a few reddish highlights here and there. The inside of the mouth is painted pink, and the teeth, spikes, fingers and toes are a dull yellow. The eyes are white with brown irises and small black pupils. The guy who makes them, Ricardo, has stated on his YouTube channel that he’s not much of a painter, so he’ll give his figures basic paint jobs. There is some paint scruff here and there. That being said, I’m not much of a painter myself, so I’d say he did pretty well. 














The box claims the figure has a total of 26 points of articulation, though I only counted 24. Anyway, he can move his neck at 3 different points, his shoulders, elbows, wrists, thighs, knees, ankles, at multiple breaks in the tail, and his torso. His mouth is on a hinge and can open and close. He can be put in various monster poses, just take your time moving those joints to not stretch them too far and risk breaking the string. I was able to get him to kick his leg up, and balance him on just his legs, with the tail in the air. He can also look down, crouch, turn his body, bend his tail, and lift his arms high. The arms are in a fixed pose, with the elbow slightly bent. They cannot rest flat at his sides, but that is fine with me.











Final thoughts? This figure, apart from the left eye paint issue, is pretty awesome. I’m psyched to now own an articulated Varan figure, as I doubt S.H. MonsterArts will ever give us one, since he’s hardly had any film representation (that’s a whole different set of facts I can do a separate post on). Thanks to 3rd party custom artists, we’re able to have some of these lesser known kaiju. I’ve already preordered a Titanosaurus figure from RICSAN Customs, and I may consider picking up Manda or Gabara. Between this guy’s figures, and Titanic Creations, with their awesome Gorgo and upcoming Yongary, fans or less popular kaiju can now have their favorites in highly articulated form. Now if someone will just give us an articulated Guilala (The X From Outer Space) or Gappa, I will be in heaven.








 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help Me… I’m Possessed (1974) / #Missingcouple (2024)

I've watched some weird, obscure horror movies throughout my life. I can now add this lurid 1974 schlockfest to that growing list. In a castle in the desert, Dr. Arthur Blackwood runs a sanitarium filled with mentally disturbed patients (as well as staff). He claims to be working on finding a way to cure people of any violent tendencies they have, and brags about his younger sister, innocent, child-like Melanie, as evidence that his treatment works. When she was a child, their parents had to keep her locked up and chained in the basement, to control her violent fits. Now that he's cured her, Arthur has his wife Diane come to the castle to meet Melanie, so that they can be one big, happy family. Diane begins to grow suspicious that something is amiss after a Sheriff shows up investigating the murder of 2 local teens, and sets about on her own investigation, hoping to uncover the sinister secrets that she feels her husband is hiding. Help Me... I'm Possessed is an outrageous,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Titanic Creations Yongary 1967

This figure was released in late December, and I got it about 2 days before the New Year, so I'm counting it as a 2025 release. It is the Titanic Creations version of the Korean kaiju Yongary, Monster From The Deep. The film was released in 1967 as a Godzilla ripoff, with several ideas copied from the Gamera series, such as his tusks, his ability to fire a stream of flames from his mouth, and even firing a laser beam from his horn, similar to the slicing one used by Gyaos. The film is pretty goofy, but Yongary, like most of those Asian monsters, was pretty cool (to me, at least), so I was psyched that someone finally made a figure of this lesser known kaiju. When Titanic Creations put it up for pre-order, they announced a series of tiers, where they would add accessories when a certain number of orders were met. Enough fans ordered him, so that Yongary ended up with a shit ton of stuff, making him absolutely worth the price. In addition to the kaiju, you get a flame breath effect, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RicSan Custom Toys Kyōrū Kaiju (Titanosaurus)

My latest kaiju figure purchase is the Titanosaurus made by Ricsan Custom Toys. I own and love the Varan & Gabara, so of course I had to preorder this one when it was available. He was delivered earlier this week. This kaiju hails from the last Godzilla film of the Showa era, 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla. The Black Hole aliens are back, rebuilding their robot in another effort to take over the planet. They enlist the help of an ostracized Earth scientist named Mafune and his daughter Katsura, who are able to control an aquatic dinosaur named Titanosaurus. They plan to use both kaiju and mecha to attack Japan. Titano was a cool monster, with his tail that opened into a fish fin, and he would use it to create whirlpools in the sea, and high winds on land. I'm hoping that S.H. Monsterarts makes one for the 50th anniversary of the film, but when I saw this Ricsan Custom version, I couldn't pass it up. Titanosaurus (called the Kyōrū Kaiju), comes in a white box, with its n...
Post a Comment
Read more