Bengali

Sculpted by Paul Bennett
Produced by Rob Potts

 

The third statue released was Bengali, a bold move because he’s a second season ThunderCat and not part of the core stable of characters. Although Bengali is a popular LJN toy to chase down, this is because he’s more scarce given that LJN was producing fewer toys in the later years of the original ThunderCats run. He also doesn’t get a lot of screen time in the original cartoon and only appears in the second season. Hard Hero hedged their bets though, issuing this as a limited run of 350 regular edition and 50 Artist Proofs (AP), and sold exclusively through Big Bad Toy Store (a large on-line retailer).

The chosen pose seems to be borrowed from Paul Bennett’s first concept for Lion-O. It wasn’t approved by Rob and so whether Paul did so intentionally or not, that idea has influenced the design of Bengali. At the time that Bengali was announced there was already news that Tygra was going to be produced very shortly afterwards. There was conjecture that Bengali would be a repaint of the Tygra mold or vice versa. This proved to be unfounded because they are definitely two different molds, and the only similarities between the two stems from the fact that their original cartoon designs were similar also.

Big Bad Toy Store (BBTS) received a lot of praise for working hard with customers to honor the assigned Artist Proof (AP) bonus that Hard Hero had developed for the line. If you bought an AP statue you were assigned that number on a reserved basis for future characters issued by the company. Because only 50 AP statues were produced for this exclusive run it wasn’t going to be possible to give all buyers their preferred and assigned numbers on the Bengali statue. Despite the fact that they had no obligation to do so, Big Bad Toy Store seemed to have satisfied the lionshare of buyers.

Despite the limited production numbers on Bengali he seems to have been the weakest seller of the line. By the end of August 2012, BBTS had reduced the statues to a clearance price of $51.75 and that price dropped even further eventually to only $35 each.

 

 

Awaiting input.

 

	Early vintage prototype drawings of the cartoon Bengali say he is a brother to Tygra. This idea was abandoned as there is no mention of this in the cartoon.
	There were rumours that Big Bad Toy Store tried to secure a license from Warner Brothers to do another ThunderCats exclusive without going through Hard Hero. This never materialized.
	Hard Hero’s version of Bengali was the only second season ThunderCat to be produced during the revival up to the time of this writing (Sept 2014).
	The rock base used for Bengali was used on the rest of the heroic characters. This was done intentionally so you could push characters bases towards each other and display them together.