Diamonds in the Rough – Scott Bowen

Welcome back to our monthly spotlight series! In this feature, I interview Star Wars costumers who have ‘gone the distance’ and put in the effort to create solid, in-universe outfits or personas. This month we’re looking at Scott Bowen’s excellent original Rodian character, ‘Bossome Scow’:

As you might imagine, Scott’s initial inspiration for this character design was the ur-Rodian example, GREEDO! His goal had a challenge embedded, however: not only to create an original Rodian character, but also to try and stick to Greedo’s iconic orange/teal/yellow colorscheme. As we will see, he definitely succeeds!

One thing I really like about this kit’s color scheme is that it feels authentically cultural for the jungle-dwelling Rodians: very reminiscent of the species-specific accent colors seen when creating a character in Jedi Academy:

Character background: Scow was born and raised on Rodia, where like many he was groomed towards the hunter profession. However, his heart wasn’t in it, as he didn’t like the killing aspect. Now, he acts as first mate/muscle to a young Twi’Lek captain (Scott’s daughter’s OC) as they smuggle and scavenge across the galaxy. While he hasn’t decided on a specific timeframe for their characters to exist in, Scott says that he really likes the period of the Rebellion (Galactic Civil War, for the win!).

When it comes to the realization of this character, Scott told me he had been working on it for over a year. Credit for the Rodian mask and hands goes to Troy Alan Larson, of 7heads10horns prop shop. Scott said he wanted to avoid using any Mandalorian-pattern pieces of armor, and as a result, the basic armor pieces are not from the GFFA at all, but from the late ’80s TV show ‘Captain Power‘ that Scott picked up “rather cheap”! He then proceeded to modify them using EVA foam, and added greebles until they were unrecognizable. When designing a Star Wars ‘OC’ (original character), Scott kept asking himself, “Does this look ‘Swarsy’? Is that too Steampunk? Is this just ‘generic space man’?” The decision to start with a foreign (non-SW) set of armor and then alter it to get closer to the GFFA aesthetic is fascinating, and–assuming the original design isn’t too divergent–quite effective!

Scott’s approach to creating this kit’s soft parts are a brilliant example of cost-effective Frankenstein-ing: the base jump suit was found at a yard sale (cheap!), while the puffy collar and ribbed sleeve details were cannibalized from a snowspeeder pilot jacket sold at the Galaxy’s Edge park ($99)! Commissioning a custom flight suit with these details would almost certainly have cost much more than the $100+change these two components cost, so this tactic paid off big time! Take notes, folks!

In terms of future upgrades, Scott wants to add a fan to keep the mask from fogging up, and that he has started upgrading the front fly covering the zipper – he said he thought it would look better if it were orange.

While he doesn’t plan on using this kit to interpret any topics in true ‘living history’ style, Scott told me if he was using it to illustrate a specific technique in character creation, it would be the importance of repurposing items for Star Warsy usage!
The one downside (for our purposes here) to using alien masks like Scott’s are that they make it very hard–if impossible–for one-on-one educational interactions: Disney has an interactive, animatronic-masked Rodian on board their Starcruiser hotel, and all she can do is jabber in Rodian or Huttese and pantomime. I suppose the best way use a masked character in an educational scenario would be to pair them with a non-masked partner who could act as ‘interpreter’. Now that I think about it, hmmmm, that’s a really fun idea! What would you think?

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