The PopCult Bookshelf will return next week. Today we’re going to bring you more of the best links to articles and photos from the American International Toy Fair in New York, which finished up yesterday.
Funko, the folks who make those nifty “Pop” vinyl figures you see everywhere, have unleashed ReAction, a new division devoted to making 3 3/4″ figures with limited articulation and simplified sculpts. The idea is to grab the nostalgia market for the 1980s, when such figures were plentiful and collectors were less discriminating. It’s not unlike what’s happening with the current retro action figures made to look like 1970s MEGO figures.
Aiming squarely at a meaty demographic for collecting, ReAction has snapped up a ton of 1980s licences to populate this line. “Escape From New York,” “Back To The Future,” “The Terminator,” “The Goonies” and more. Inside The Magic has a more complete listing. Toy Ark has a killer photo collection from Toy Fair.
Also working in a smaller scale, though with a more cartoonish look, is a new line of figures from Kasual Friday, one of a few new start-up companies headed by former Hasbro executives. They will be releasing figures based on “Army of Darkness,” “Invasion USA,” and “Rocky III,” plus they’ll have some King Features Syndicate stars like The Phantom and Flash Gordon. Toy Ark also has a great photo collection from their booth at Toy Fair.
Superherohype.com has comprehensive photo coverage of Hasbro and Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Captain America” and “Spider-man” toys, plus pictures of the “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” figures, and more photos about toys we already covered here in PopCult, LEGO, Transformers, Star Wars and GI Joe and Disney’s toys.
Ace and Gary, up close
Speaking of retro MEGO-style figures (we were a couple of paragraphs up there) Toy Ark offers up a photo gallery of Horror Movie Icons like Freddie Kruger and Jason Vorhees from NECA. Bif Bang Pow will continue their MEGO-style figures with The Ambiguously Gay Duo from Saturday Night Live, The Venture Brothers, Six Million Dollar Man, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, a final batch of figures from The Twilight Zone and figures from the upcoming Showtime series, “Penny Dreadful.”
Bif Bang Pow will also release new MEGO-style and 3 3/4″ figures based on The Big Bang Theory, a property the appeal of which escapes me. Toy News International has details.
Finally, this is not exactly Toy Fair related, but the timing is close enough. Ed Catto, one of the men behind the revival of Captain Action, has been blogging over at 13th Dimension about the development of the Batman uniform that they’re coming out with for Captain Action. He’s had a great post about the packaging artwork, and another about a Captain Action set, related to Batman, that almost happened.
This is going to wrap up our linked coverage of this year’s Toy Fair, but we will be mining our Toy Company contacts for future installments of The PopCult Toybox.
I absolutely LOVE the Batman costume set!!! If the prototype is indicative of what the finished product will look like, I plan on buying multiple sets. The vintage Murphy Anderson artwork looks just awsome with the prototype. I can’t wait for Wave 4 to be released. Well done, CA Enterprises and Round 2!!