Thursday, December 27, 2012

Rescue Heroes

A while back I was brought in by the creatives at Fisher-Price to design some new items for their Rescue Heroes line.  What made these extra fun at the time was the fact that my son was at the perfect age to enjoy Rescue Heroes and he already had some of the toys produced. 

The first project was designing an ambulance for the figures, intended as a counterpart to the Rescue Heroes firetruck which was a popular item in the vehicle line.  Because of this, I had some reference for scale and volume, and it was supposed to look like it fit with the line, but I was given the latitude to create features and functions that would be unique to the vehicle.

Here are the 4 designs I came up with, the features being called out;


















The features and design they worked from mostly was 'A', ultimately producing this for the market;















Next up was designing 2 new characters for the figure line.   These went pretty quickly, not going through a number of iterations typical in developing an action figure.  In fact, the first passes were the designs they decided to run with for the renderings presented. And while they did go through some refinements along the way, they pretty closely resembled the characters I designed.

At the time I was called in all they knew was they wanted a "mountain climber" and a "safari explorer".  The gadget features, which are always integral to the Rescue Heroes play, were discussed and decided at the outset.

The names of these new characters came later,  ultimately introduced in the Rescue Heroes line as;  Cliff Hanger and Seymour Wilde.  




The expanding hang-glider backpack on Cliff remained, though the climbing claws were eliminated (perhaps too 'Wolverine').
The shooter held by Seymour Wilde launched the more appropriately-scaled capture net, not shown.