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

Photograph by Chuck Eiler / Killcutter

featured artists

Chuck Eiler builds miniature worlds by hand and lights them like film sets. Star Wars, kaiju, horror, dinosaurs, and now ThunderCats. His piece Distracted Felines is now the third highest scoring post of all time on r/Thundercats, and the temple in it is hand carved foam.

By Mark (Grizzlor) · · About our news desk

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A photograph of five action figures on a slab of hand carved foam is now the third highest scoring post of all time on r/Thundercats, at 1,038 upvotes. It reached the top five within two days of going up and has kept climbing since. It is three days old. Everything else in that top five has been accumulating for between five months and a year.

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.

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

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
  • 1,038 upvotes, #3 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
Chuck Eiler, who works as Killcutter.

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.

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

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 was added afterwards. It was not. Chuck sprayed Atmosphere Aerosol into the room to load the air with haze, then fired an actual laser through it, and the beam in the photograph is light hitting particles, caught in camera. That goes for the rest of the frame too: he built the entire set by hand, so there is very little here that is not physically real.

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.

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

The pointer is not a scratch build either, and this is the detail that makes the whole thing better. It is an actual cat laser pointer toy, the sort you would use on a real cat, standing in at 1/12 as siege equipment. 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 full size cat laser pointer toy, with Jackalman standing beside him laughing
Mumm-Ra with the pointer, Jackalman beside him. It is a real cat laser pointer toy, and the scale is the whole gag: at 1/12 it reads as an artillery piece.

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

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.

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

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

Shop the figures in this shot at Big Bad Toy Store

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

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

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Characters in this story

JackalmanJackalmanMutantsLion-OLion-OThunderCatsMumm-RaMumm-RaPanthroPanthroThunderCatsTygraTygraThunderCats

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