Featured Artist: Killcutter, and the Laser Pointer That Beat the ThunderCats

Two days after it went up, a photograph of five action figures on a slab of hand carved foam sat at number five on the all time chart of r/Thundercats. Everything above it had been climbing for months or years. This one did it over a weekend.

Lion-O, Panthro and Tygra scramble on a stone floor chasing a red laser dot while Mumm-Ra and Jackalman watch from a ruined temple behind them — "Distracted Felines" in full. Lion-O still has the Sword of Omens in his hand and has completely forgotten about it. Photograph by Chuck Eiler, used with permission.

The picture is called “Distracted Felines” and the joke lands in about a second and a half. Mumm-Ra has spent decades throwing plagues, mutants and dark magic at the ThunderCats. What finally works is a red dot on the floor. Lion-O is face down with the Sword of Omens still in his fist. Panthro is crouched over the dot with one hand out. Tygra has gone in low from the right. Behind them, up on the temple steps, Mumm-Ra and Jackalman are enjoying themselves enormously.

Artist: Chuck Eiler
Chicago
21K+ on Instagram
Official BBTS content creator
985 upvotes, #5 all time on r/Thundercats

Who Killcutter is

Portrait of Chuck Eiler, the photographer who works as Killcutter, lit with blue and orange rim light

This is Chuck Eiler. He works as Killcutter, out of Chicago, and he describes what he does as making small worlds feel massive.

He builds practical sets, lights them like film sets, and shoots them almost entirely in camera. Digital work comes last and only to finish the illusion, never to create it. His words: subtle editing is the finishing touch, not the foundation.

An eighties kid raised on Star Wars, G.I. Joe and Transformers, with a dash of He-Man. His favourite scale is 1/12, because every diorama he owns is built to it. His white whale is the G.I. Joe U.S.S. Flagg. His best tip for anyone starting out is to hit the figure with clear matte spray to kill the hot spots and the plastic look.

He has a real press file behind him. PetaPixel profiled him in March 2026. Gizmodo has run him twice, once for Star Wars and once for a horror set. Screen Rant covered his recreation of the Boba Fett and Cad Bane standoff. Bored Panda ran 54 of his images in a single feature. German outlet t3n ran him under a headline that asked who needs AI. He is an official content creator for BigBadToyStore, and he has shot collaborations for McFarlane Toys, Super7, The Loyal Subjects and Operation: Monster Force.

The range

ThunderCats is one afternoon in a much larger body of work. He moves between Star Wars, horror, kaiju, fantasy and dinosaurs, and the through line is not the property, it is the lighting.

Boba Fett standing on a heap of defeated bounty hunters at sunset — "War of the Bounty Hunters". Boba Fett on a heap of the competition, backlit at sunset.

Darth Vader and three red-lightsaber Sith closing in on a single blue lightsaber in the dark — Four red blades against one blue, with the sabers doing all the lighting.

Stormtroopers and a dewback in a desert sandstorm — Troopers and a dewback losing a fight with the weather.

The four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Splinter sitting on a girder high above a city skyline — The Turtles and Splinter on the girder, restaging "Lunch atop a Skyscraper". Sold as a print.

Ultraman and King Kong fighting a kaiju among toppled skyscrapers at sunset — Ultraman and Kong versus a kaiju, on a city he built and then knocked over.

Black and white image of Godzilla and a winged kaiju destroying a city — The same appetite for destruction in black and white.

Frankenstein's monster standing in a laboratory lit green and red — Frankenstein's monster in the lab. The Halloween set got him a second Gizmodo feature.

A Predator riding a large carnivorous dinosaur across a desert — "Blood Sport". A Predator hunting the Jurassic. Dinosaurs turn up in his work more than he can justify.

A lone figure holding an axe facing a Tyrannosaurus rex in a dust storm — One axe, one T-Rex, and a lot of atmosphere in the air.

Jabba the Hutt's court lit in deep red, with Boba Fett and a glowing blue energy whip — Jabba's court, lit almost entirely in one colour.

An armoured warlord holding a flaming torch above a blue-lit army of skeletal soldiers — A torch against a blue army. Fire and cold light doing the staging.

Chuck Eiler standing in front of a full size Millennium Falcon — Chuck at full scale for once, in front of the Falcon.

Look at that grid and the ThunderCats picture stops being a novelty. It is the same person who lit Jabba’s court in one colour deciding that a red dot on a stone floor was the funniest thing he could do to a group of cats.

The build is the good part

The temptation with an image like this is to assume the software did the work. It did not.

The same temple scene photographed from above in ordinary room light, showing the diorama sitting on a table in front of a printed sea and sky backdrop — The same set with the lights up. The stone floor and the columns are XPS foam, carved and painted by hand. The jungle is inexpensive plastic plants glued onto foam bases.

Seen flat, in ordinary light, the whole thing is a tabletop. The ruined plaza and its broken columns are extruded polystyrene foam that Chuck carved and painted himself. The undergrowth is cheap plastic aquarium style plants on foam bases. The ocean and sky behind it is a printed cloth backdrop clipped to a curved stand.

The laser is the part people assume is fake, and it is the one thing that is completely real. Chuck sprayed Atmosphere Aerosol into the room to load the air with haze, then fired an actual laser through it. The beam in the photograph is light hitting particles, caught in camera.

Overhead view of the diorama with the red laser beam running from the temple steps down to a bright dot on the stone floor — The beam running the length of the set. No compositing: a real laser through real haze, which is why the light falls off and scatters the way it does.

The pointer itself is a prop, built oversized so it reads at figure scale. In the close view you can see it in Mumm-Ra’s hands, a long pale barrel with a red tip, held like a rifle.

Close view of the Mumm-Ra figure holding a large custom built laser pointer prop, with Jackalman standing beside him laughing — Mumm-Ra with the custom pointer, Jackalman beside him. The scale of the prop is the whole gag: at 1/12 it reads as an artillery piece.

And the setup that produced all of it is a living room. Hardwood floor, two softboxes, a camera on a tripod, and the diorama balanced on a plastic storage cart with sandbags hanging off the light stands.

Behind the scenes view of the shoot: the diorama on a rolling cart in a living room, lit by two softboxes with a camera on a tripod in the foreground — The rig. Note the pet bed in the bottom right, which is the correct hazard for this particular shoot: Chuck has said cat hair is the sworn enemy of a toy photographer.

Overhead view of the Lion-O, Panthro and Tygra figures posed lying on the stone floor of the set before the effects were added

Tight crop of the finished photograph showing Lion-O, Panthro and Tygra converging on the red dot in the haze

Posing is the unglamorous half. Three figures have to look like they are moving toward the same point on the floor, from three different heights, without a single one of them standing up straight. The version on the left is the blocking. The version on the right is what the haze and the light do to it.

Why it works on us specifically

Fan art of ThunderCats tends toward reverence: Lion-O holding the sword aloft, the insignia burning in the sky, Cheetara mid sprint. There is a lot of it and much of it is beautiful. Very little of it is funny.

This one is funny because it takes the premise seriously. They are cats. The show never once acknowledged it, and forty one years of fans have quietly noticed. One commenter on the thread got there and could not let it go: the Eye of Thundera projects an enormous glowing sigil into the sky, and the other ThunderCats come running. Chasing the dot.

That is the whole trick. The photograph is not mocking the show. It is finishing a thought the show left lying around.

The figures

The cast is Super7 ULTIMATES. Mumm-Ra and Jackalman on the steps, Lion-O, Panthro and Tygra on the floor.

Availability moves around on this line, and the classic ULTIMATES Panthro and Tygra are between runs at BigBadToyStore right now, so the shortlist below is what is actually buyable today rather than a list of everything in the frame. Our full catalogue of the line, wave by wave, is on the ThunderCats ULTIMATES page, and the wider maker hub is at Super7.

If you want the vintage end instead, the LJN Collector’s Guide and the toys archive cover the 1985 run, and Mumm-Ra’s encyclopedia entry has the character history that makes the joke land.

Follow his work

Instagram, @killcutterphoto, where the ThunderCats set first appeared
killcutter.com, the full portfolio, prints and commission enquiries
Behind the scenes, if the foam carving is the part you want more of
YouTube and TikTok, including stop motion collaborations

He has said there is more ThunderCats and He-Man coming. We would encourage that loudly.

All photographs on this page are by Chuck Eiler and are reproduced with his permission. They remain his copyright and are not covered by any reuse licence on this site. thundercats.org and Killcutter are both part of the BigBadToyStore creator programme.

Sources

Killcutter, About and Press
PetaPixel, Photographer’s Cinematic Toy Worlds Bring Plastic to Life, 17 March 2026
Gizmodo, You’ve Never Seen Star Wars Figures Like This
Build details and permission confirmed directly by the artist on Instagram, August 2026
BigBadToyStore product listings, checked 11 August 2026

Featured Artist: Killcutter, and the Laser Pointer That Beat the ThunderCats

Who Killcutter is

The range

The build is the good part

Why it works on us specifically

The figures

Follow his work

Sources

Join the conversation.

All Sections

Who Killcutter is

The range

The build is the good part

Why it works on us specifically

The figures

Follow his work

Sources

More ThunderCats news

Characters in this story