Showing posts with label toy design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toy design. Show all posts

Saturday, December 27, 2025

If you thought those Nacelle Star Trek figures seemed surprisingly cheap, well...







And speaking of toy reviews:




But also, speaking of Cyclops:

Labels: ,

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

FYI if you're planning on getting this Revoltech Ninja Gaiden figure



Labels:

Thursday, April 10, 2025

Here's Toy Nacelle's optimistic statement about tariffs (and their demented new Star Trek The Next Generation figure)

No intention of raising prices or cancelling anything, with very high confidence:




The Garrett episode is one of the best, but that alternate head is truly disturbing:

Labels: ,

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

The artists responsible for the Marvel Legends Nextwave MODOK; The legend of Luke Skywalker; Rear projection used in T2


















Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Apparently Warner Brothers isn't permitting toys be sold with guns as accessories

Some new DC toys are being promoted as coming with inexplicable accessories like this Arkham Knight with swords and daggers:



Per this interview with the Mezco CEO, Warner Bros. has a new policy that toys under a certain price point can't include triggered weapons. Starting around 1:12:00, he explains he's not sure whether his company will make certain Batman villains because he doesn't think collectors will want the figure without logical accessories.



No guns in Elmer Fudd cartoons, either.
Labels:

Monday, April 19, 2021

Interpretative dance celebrating the Trans-Tasman bubble; Animorphs Vietnamese cover art; Confusing shadows















Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Great wide-ranging interview about the toy business with Super 7's Brian Flynn



In addition to revealing upcoming toys, topics include:

-The challenge of adequately rewarding passionate supporters and satisfying earnest collectors, while dealing with speculators

-The complexity of selling female characters like April O'Neil to adult men that bring baggage to toys from their youth

-Working with NECA to diversify their approach to the same licenses

-And a really personal story about why Super 7's first Disney toys include Prince John from Robin Hood

You can buy/preorder Super 7 toys here.
Labels: , ,

Thursday, August 15, 2019

“'We take pride in the fact that we can Popify about anything,' says Sean Wilkinson, Funko’s creative director"

Vox:
“There’s literally a certain height of eyes a certain width apart, and the head being two-thirds the size of the body, it’s a set ratio,” he explains. “Like baby animals with big eyes that are kind of far apart. I think it’s sort of born in us to be attracted to these things.”

...

Yet it’s also undeniable that many people find Funko Pops ugly or unnerving

...

A May 2019 investor presentation from the company boasts that a Pop can be designed and submitted to a licensor in 24 hours, molded into a prototype in 45 days, and “sourced from Asian facilities while maintaining quality control” in just 15 days. Funko also prides itself on its low production costs — each new figure costs between $5,000 and $7,500 to develop.

...

On the Funko website, there are currently 29 distinct figurines of TV host Conan O’Brien
some of the most recent Funko Pop preorders are based on The Purge and Us:




Labels:

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

The explanation for why He-Man rides a giant tiger is very funny



*Previously: Masters of the Universe figures based on each major league baseball team.
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, November 29, 2018

"Toy makers, who are experts at capitalizing on children’s weird interests, have now figured out how to make a toy that replicates what kids like about unboxing videos"

Atlantic:
Enter the L.O.L. Surprise! doll, a sphere the size of a bocce ball that consists of seven layers of packaging. Kids peel away the layers of crinkly plastic, which contain stickers and messages and tiny accessories that are surely crunched under many a parental foot, and find a small, nearly naked plastic doll with giant Bette Davis eyes who measures just a few inches tall.

More than 800 million L.O.L. Surprise! toys have been sold since their debut in late 2016, and they were one of the top products sold on Cyber Monday this year, according to Adobe Digital Insights. This year, even more toy makers have caught on to the trend. Parents can now buy eggs, pods of foam, cake pops, burritos, and balls of many shapes and sizes containing mystery animals and figurines. (“Unrolling is the new unboxing,” said Ashley Mady, the head of brand development at the company that launched the burritos, called Cutetitos, in October.)
Labels: ,

Monday, June 18, 2018

Ten funny tweets




















Labels: , , , , , , ,

Saturday, April 28, 2018

Infinity War, 2018

Labels: ,

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Link roundup

1. "Pricey Restaurant Chain Fig & Olive Exposed Using Pre-Made Frozen Food"

2. "Global supermarkets selling shrimp peeled by slaves"
Pervasive human trafficking has helped turn Thailand into one of the world's biggest shrimp providers.
3. "NEXO Knights prototypes & development from LEGO designer Mark Stafford"
Labels: , , , , , ,

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Link roundup

1. DMCA makes it difficult to test carmakers' claims.

2. Why put blurbs on books?
The blurb isn't exactly meant for readers — at least, not entirely. By the time a blurb gets to the reader, by the time it's resting on a book in a display, it has already done most of the work it's supposed to do.

"We now very often receive submissions from literary agents to consider a book, and the agent's letter will have endorsements already in place from authors you've heard of," says Michael Pietsch, CEO of publisher Hachette Book Group. "And that's the way the agent is getting the publishing community to read this book ahead of all the other thousands of books on submission at that time."
3. "When Iron Man’s toyline was canceled due to poor sales after its last batch of toys were already produced, they instead became X-Men and Spider-Man 'armor' toylines"
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Mortal Kombat X "Kollector's Edition" includes a designer vinyl figure of Scorpion



Coarse designed a vinyl figure of Scorpion for the Kollector's Edition, which can be preordered at Amazon.

This video shows how the figure was designed, assembled, and painted:

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, July 5, 2014

A Lego designer discusses choices made in turning a fan design into an official project



Reddit:
A common question seems to be why the barrels? Pete's original version had lovely lozenge shaped forearms and they are very iconic to the design. However they are entirely made of single stud connections. When moved they just come apart. So I had to find a solution.
Labels: ,

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Todd McFarlane explains the current toy market

From a longer interview:
the world sort of shifted a few years back. Where we use to be able to do almost anything with not only the Spawn stuff, but we did the twisted fairy tales and twisted Christmas, and Clive Barker and I came up with the Tortured Souls. We use to be able to do all this cool stuff, right. But there used to be the stores that would buy that on a regular basis. You had stores like Suncoast, Tower Records, Virgin Records, and stuff like that. And all of that made complete sense. But now those stores have either amalgamated, disappeared, or gone bankrupt. And those options of doing some of that cool stuff have been limited over the years. I mean, much to my chagrin, as I’m as big a monster, creep fan as there is. And the chances of getting it into the Walmarts and K-marts of the world are getting harder, because they are a little more risk adverse.
Labels: ,

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Furbys are designed to become evil--there are guides to fixing their behavior. Gizmodo reviewed one awhile back:
The Furby's erratic mania culminates in its schizophrenic personality changes. It shouts, "I'M CHANGING," squeezes its eyes shut, and then reopens them. Now it's changed. During our testing, it remained in some sort of demonic phase, with slit eyes, a raspy voice, and lots of cackles. ...By the end of the testing, Furby seemed permanently deranged. No amount of cuddling, petting, feeding, or murmuring of "I love you, Furby," made any changes. Its eyes were vacant, even for LEDs—a great vacuum in the hole where its soul should have been.
Labels: ,

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Link roundup

1.  Science tattoo.  (NSFW.)

2.  From the latest chapter of An Illusionist in Skyrim:
After a moment of total bafflement, I realise it’s a dragon. The reason I didn’t recognise it is that it’s crashed skull-first into the ground, its massive pelvic bone wiggling weirdly in the air. It’s not a skeletal dragon, it’s a dragon skeleton. In fact, it’s almost certainly the skeleton of the dragon the guards killed for me out at the guard tower. What the hell it’s doing here, and why it plummeted out of the sky, I will never know. 
Backing slowly away, I see there are only two Stormcloaks left now, so I Fury one of them into killing the other. When the spell wears off, he looks round at me, the Imperial soldiers behind me, and the massive dragon skeleton on the ground between us, and he runs off into the night. Whiterun is ours. 
I head back to the city gates, stopping briefly to check my journal and make sure that’s where I’m meant to be going. When I put it away, a titanic mess of bone crashes down on my head. Jesus goddamn Christ! Get it off me! 
The gibbering dragon skeleton wobbles awkwardly between me and the city gate, then slumps down to the ground. It’s the same one, it just jumps on top of me every time I bring up my inventory. Is this glitch meant to remind me how bad I should feel for setting angry giants on the guards who killed this dragon for me?
3.  Wired looks at how a vinyl toy gets made.
Labels: , ,

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Link roundup

1. From a speech by Warren Ellis about how the present is very cool:
The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space.
2. Better than any promotional alternate reality game, how a group of running enthusiasts exposed a devious cheater by studying race results and in-race photos.

3. Wired looks at all the design work that goes into Nerf guns (and veers too far into advertorial):
It may seem silly to take this stuff seriously as feats of engineering, but in their own way, these toys are as well designed as a Dyson vacuum. When you pick up a blaster, when you feel the heft, when you put the stock to your shoulder and wrap your fingers around the handle, when you chamber a dart and pull the trigger and the dart comes flying out with that immensely satisfying thunk, it doesn’t feel like what you’re holding is just some cheap hunk of plastic. And every detail of that experience has been meticulously designed, engineered, and tested.
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)