Review – Keliens V’r

“Strange visitors from planet Kel7alpha in the distant Oldmanian starsystem.. Keliens are genetically malleable. Adapting to each new environment and native inhabitant. How will they look in your world…”
— from the back of the card

Last week a new resin toy popped up: Keliens V’r, available at Etsy, which I found through a post at the October Toys forum. Impressed with the design, I clicked over to the store for a peek at the figures and, by the end of the week, I had ordered and received six of the beauties. At $6.50/each, these have to be the most inexpensive resin toys available today.

And, best of all, they have a little articulation. Let’s take a peek at the V’r.

Packaging

Each Kelien comes in a pretty basic, unimpressive ziplock bag with a simple header sticker applied to the bag and a piece of paper tucked inside with some text. It’s plain, a bit dull, and — fortunately — easily the worst part of the toy. You shouldn’t feel at all guilty about popping the bag open and taking the toy out, since the bag’s nowhere near a piece of art. And besides, if you’re a collector of packaged toys you can still take your Kelien out and play with him because the ziplock isn’t obstructed by anything at all.

Me, I threw the bags away after snapping some shots of the figure in the bag.

An Articulated Resin Toy

As you know, my biggest complaint with the resin toys I’ve seen has been the fact that they’ve been solid chunks without any moving parts. Well, V’r breaks out of his resin limitations and has a total of three points of articulation: each arm rotates and the head rotates. This work of genius is accomplished with sticks of plastic embedded in the arms and torso and holes drilled into the appropriate places. It’s a low-tech approach but it works perfectly well and I could see someone taking the idea and creating a resin toy with moving wrists, legs, feet, waist . . . basically any part of a toy can rotate using this (simple) system.

Complete With Accessories!

Not only is V’r articulated, he also comes with a helmet, a gun, and feet parts (that you need to glue on). The gun is a simple shape that fits into the fist using the stick+hole concept that’s used for the articulation while the helmet, a separate resin piece that fits perfectly over the head, is a work of beauty. When I asked how the designer managed to fit the piece so perfectly to the head, his response showed just how dumb I am. He said:

“To make the helmets I coated a casting of the head with release agent then sculpted epoxy over that. All in all lots of dremeling and sanding”

Obviously, that’s too simple an idea for me to come up with on my own.

Sculpting

The V’r is smooth. Super smooth, in fact. The artist/designer who created V’r spent a lot of time sanding and polishing his master before taking a cast, and the effort he put into that master really shows in the finished piece. Sculpted in eight pieces — two arms, a head, a helmet, a gun, two feet parts, and a body — every single component is smooth and perfectly polished. I’m very impressed. The few things I’ve sculpted have always been rough and chunky, and even after a lot of sanding they didn’t smooth out anything like these parts. The guy must have spent weeks just sanding and polishing the masters.

V’r, as you can see in the photos, is a skinny little guy with featureless face and almost no muscle definition on the body. I’d classify him as an action figure, yes, but I’d also call this a designer toy because of how smooth and featureless he is. Two great types of toys wrapped up in a perfect, inexpensive package.

Casting

Since each one is cast by hand, every V’r that I own is unique, with different marble-like effects in the resin. The photo above — the red V’r without any accessories — is an excellent example of the sort of uniqueness the hand casting leads to. He’s not a solid red but, instead, a more cloudy red with streaks of white subtly mixed in. The photo really doesn’t do the effect justice; it looks even better in person.

Overall, the casting is excellent. I didn’t notice any air bubbles or weird pockets, so the QC checks these guys go through before leaving is top notch or the casting process is almost flawless. Either way, the result is some great little toys.

Little?

Yeah, these guys are only about 3.5-inches tall, so they’re not exactly giants in my collection. They’re pretty substantial, though, with unusual proportions that help them feel larger than they actually are. They’re too big to be pocket toys (and too fragile, since they’re made of resin), but they’re small enough that they make great desk toys for the office.

Taking Things Apart

The photo above shows a V’r broken into all of his pieces and clearly shows the stick+hole articulation system. And since V’r come in a variety of colors (so far we’ve seen white, green, red, pink, blue, and orange) you can trade the accessories around to create your own goofy guys. Below you can see where I added the green accessories to my red V’r. And of course, you can even paint these guys. I haven’t tried it yet, but at least one of my white V’r toys is destined to visit the garage for a painting session.

A Playable Toy

Though they are fragile, I could see where older children — say seven or eight and up — could easily play with these without harming them too much. Sure, there may be some scuffs and maybe even worn spots, but overall the toy should hold up as long as it isn’t dropped or thrown. And even then, it may survive a few drops.

And besides, the V’r love to explore. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the photo below and check out the green and white V’r on an outdoors mission along with a few of my Glyos System toys. They had good fun with the sharp, stabby plants! (Though not as much fun as that red/yellow Buildman who decided to scale an agave.)

Closing Thoughts

No, these aren’t as cool as Glyos System toys. They come close, though, and the design is certainly quite attractive. At $6.50/each, the Keliens V’r is a great buy and I highly recommend that you pick up one or two of them today. The Keliens section at Etsy lists a few different colors for sale right now, but since they’re hand cast and crafted figures they aren’t gonna last around long.

Don’t worry about a sell-out, because I fully expect the designer to keep loading these for sale just as fast as he can manufacture new ones. I’m already anxiously awaiting a purple V’r . . . so if you see a purple up for sale, be sure to notify me so that I can get it.

A nice toy that’s well designed, playable, and priced lower than it should be. (I could see $10 still being a great deal for these, considering their size and the fact that each one is cast by hand.)

Philip Reed is looking forward to picking up new releases in the Keliens series. Excellent resin toys and at a low price for hand-cast works of art.