Looks like retailers have started receiving the first shipments of the Four Horsemen-sculpted DC Universe Classics line. This is my most anticipated line since comic Hellboy, or perhaps even the revamped Masters of the Universe.
You can click on the pic below to order a six-figure case.
Codename: Zach Oat
Specialty: Editor
Base of Operations: ToyFare magazine
History: Zach Oat grew up in the affluent suburbs of Rhode Island, where he was only allowed to play with wooden blocks and watch public television. But when his father fell in with some of the local Hasbro employees, Zach quickly became proficient in all G.I. Joe small arms, with a secondary specialty in Transformers repairs and modifications. He even considered it as a career, until he discovered girls.While attending St. Cyr military academy, where he majored in studio art, he rediscovered toys, particularly the cheap Marvel figures available in the local Kay Bee. Upon graduation, he immediately returned to Rhode Island and signed up with a small toy company to finish his training. Three months later he was drafted by Wizard Entertainment, where he rose through the ranks to command their crack ToyFare squad.
“You can’t find guys like Zach on Craig’s List – you have to grow them in special tanks, pumping nutrients, oxygen and the latest assortment of Marvel Legends in through a tube. He’s got a handshake like a dead fish and he leaves wet spots on all the furniture.”
PG: Please describe what you do at ToyFare. Is this the culmination of a lifelong desire to work with toys or the inevitable result of a misspent youth?
I head up the ToyFare magazine team, planning future issues and making sure all of our features and departments live up to our high ToyFare standards. I work with Justin on Incoming, Jon on Price Guide, Jake on FanFare, Dylan on photography, Jairo on design, everybody on Twisted ToyFare, and Adam on planning and scheduling. I proofread and/or fact-check everything we print, I photograph a lot of special events like Toy Fair and I’m also responsible for all C.O.P.S. coverage in the magazine.
Working here is a happy accident. I applied for an internship and didn’t get it my junior year, but I scored a job interview shortly after I graduated. I had conveniently worked as a copy editor at a couple of small papers before and during college, I’d gotten back into toys while at college, and I’d interned at a toy company right out of school, so it was kind of perfect. I started out as a copy editor, but it was so much fun working here that I just stuck it out, and eight years later here I am.
PG: Please list the toys in your work area.
Custom Metalocalypse Dr. Roxxo Mego-style figure by Alex Kropinak
Bif Bang Pow!’s Talking Big Lebowski Bobblehead
DC Direct’s WildCATs Voodoo Statue (signed by Tim Bruckner)
DC Direct’s Infinite Crisis Wonder Woman
Diamond Select Toys’ Marvel Goblin Queen Statue
Diamond Select Toys’ Talking “Wrath of Khan” Enterprise
Mattel’s DC Superheroes Steel, Clayface and Parasite
McFarlane Toys’ Blair Monster from The Thing (Wilford Brimley)
McFarlane Toys’ Elizabeth Bathory
The Four Horsemen/NECA’s Full-Size Skeletor Statue
Mattel’s vintage Skeletor in vintage Roton
Toy2R’s Classic Bad Boy 8-inch Qee
Toy Biz’s Superhero Showdown Namor with Hammerhead Shark
Customized Cowboy Snake Eyes (riding shark)
Cards Inc.’s Golden Compass Sam Elliott figure (riding shark)
Bandai’s Big O figure
Eight wind-up dancing squirrels
PG: What’s the most interesting thing going on in the toy industry today?
Toys I want getting made? Everyone is jumping on the return of Indiana Jones, ending a long toy drought, and we’re also getting Goonies toys, Metalocalypse toys, Heroes toys, Princess Bride toys, Conan the Barbarian toys, Labyrinth toys, Shaun of the Dead toys, Wrath of Khan toys…it’s like I’m living in a dream.
PG: What’s the best thing about working at ToyFare?
I genuinely like the people I work with (Jon and I have known each other for fifteen years), and most of our meetings involve us sitting around trying to make each other laugh – and it’s entirely work-related. Also, I get to see toys well before they come out, which is both good and bad, in that I want to buy a lot of them.
PG: What’s your fondest toy-related holiday memory?
I can’t remember the last time someone got me a toy for the holidays. I must have gotten a Transformer or Joe vehicle for Christmas in my childhood but I can’t remember which ones, for the life of me. And I never had anything bigger than Optimus Prime or the Amphibious Personnel Carrier – no Flagg or Trypticon or anything like that. I had half of Devastator, and my brother had the other half. Nobody has bought me a toy in years – they assume I have everything. I don’t!
All this week, I’ll be posting pieces related to ToyFare, the popular toy magazine whose editors have had the good graces to publish my scribblings in an issue or two. In the days to come I’ll be interviewing members of the ToyFare staff about the industry and their favorite holiday memories.
But first up, a shameless plug. A few months back, ToyFare did a “Halo Week” on their website, primarily by posting my article from issue #123 piecemeal.
Codename: yo go re
Specialty: Toy reviewing
Base of Operations: Online Action Figure Entertainment (OAFE)
Did you know? All the “facts” you’ve heard about Chuck Norris? They’re actually about yo go re. He just knew Chuck’s feelings would be hurt if no one was talking about him.
PG: What is the first action figure you remember owning?
It barely counts as an action figure, what with only two points of articulation, but the first figure I have a distinct memory of owning is Ram-Man. Or maybe Trap-Jaw.
PG: What’s your favorite review among those you’ve written for OAFE?
I don’t really have one. I’m of the Ron Popeil school of creativity: I just set it and forget it. My favorite is whichever one last helped someone to make a decision. Which is a crap answer, so I’ll say Ultron, because it provoked a response from Jesse Falcon.
PG: What’s the most interesting thing going on in the action figure industry today?
Despite the horrendous delays they faced in 2007, the Four Horsemen’s FANtastic Exclusive is awesome. Fan-directed toys? That’s wicked awesome! Of course, that may just be because so far everything I’ve voted for has won. And did you see the article in ToyFare about how the Seventh Kingdom is becoming its own real line? Even better!
PG: Spill it: what the heck does “yo go re” mean?
It’s the Fukawi Indian word for “small totemic carving.” And you can tell that to the Marines! [Note: yo go re is full of crap. –PG]
PG: What’s your fondest toy-related holiday memory?
Probably Santa Claus giving me the last Constructicon I needed to complete the G1 Devastator. And I don’t mean that in an abstract way: a guy dressed as Santa actually came to the house to give all us kids presents one year, and the one I got was Long Haul. Of course, I didn’t have the rest of the Constructicons with me, so I still had to wait a few days to build the big guy, but that was still a hell of a sense of accomplishment for a little kid.
Paul from ToyBender has very kindly done a write-up on PoA. There’s nothing like free publicity, even if he does suggest that I support feeding babies to zombies–which I totally don’t!
…anymore.
This is amazing. I’m green (and red) with envy.
Back when Santa Jack was first released, I bought one. Its right leg broke out of the package, so I returned it to the comic shop and got a replacement–whose right leg broke out of the package.
I hate gluing figures, so I just chalked it up to bad luck and gave the figure away for customizing scrap. But this year, I found myself wanting another SJ and went looking for him online.
To my surprise, I discovered him for sale at the incredibly cheap price of $3.25 at Sci-Fi Genre. So for a total of $12, including shipping–the price of one of these figures at retail–I picked up both the first and second versions of Santa Jack. If you’ve been holding off on the NBX figures, check out the sale at SFG.
This is certainly an appropriate topic right now…there’s about seven inches of snow piled up outside my window.
I’ve already mentioned my love of Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. One of those specials is The Year Without a Santa Claus.
Oddly enough, I didn’t watch this special very often when I was growing up. My favorites were Rudolph and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town. I would catch Year once in a while, along with another obscure favorite, The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus, which was based on a novel by Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum. (Sadly, this last has yet to be released on DVD.)
In my early years of college, while searching for holiday-themed websites (back when websites were still something of a novelty), I came across The Heat Miser’s Hot Spot. Since I preferred the Snow Miser to the Heat Miser, I was a bit indignant that Snowy had no website of his own, and took it upon myself to create one.
That was about seven years ago. That website is still up. It’s gone through various incarnations–it started on my old undergraduate website, had its own URL for a while, and now resides as a sub-site of this one–but I’ve never taken it down.
It was originally called The Snow Miser’s Big Chill, to contrast with the Heat Miser’s Hot Spot, until I finally read a plot summary of the movie The Big Chill and discovered that it was a euphemism for death. Thinking quickly, I came up with the far more clever title The Snow Miser’s Cooler.
Since I created the website, The Year Without a Santa Claus has become one of my holiday staples. It still rates behind Rudolph and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, mostly because I don’t find the story that compelling–the Misers are the best part. But that website has been a perennially popular holiday destination for thousands of people each year. I’ve yet to have any other part of my website be quite as popular as that one, which still looks like it was made in Notepad in 1999 (which it was, though I update it once a year or so).
In 2000, I held the second “Rumble in the Claymation Jungle.” The first was held by POFToo! creator Paul Levesque (which may or may not have been his real name…) and featured a battle between the Bumble and the Winter Warlock. Mine pitted–you guessed it–the Snow Miser vs. the Heat Miser. Ol’ Hothead won by 3, 193 to 190. In a fake CNN article I wrote about the event, this was probably my favorite paragraph:
In addition to the 383 votes cast for the Snow and Heat Misers, there were 5 votes claiming that neither Miser would win in a fight, 1 vote for their mother, Mother Nature, 1 vote for Jesus Christ, and a vote by ‘Aquaman’ for himself, who said, “As a…JLA member, I can tell you that my power to communicate with fishes would overpower these two.”
I’d like to do a third Rumble, but frankly, I’m not sure there are any badass characters left. Maybe I should think outside the box and do, say, the California Raisins (they had a Christmas special) vs. Jack Skellington?
To make this post more on-topic–as I mentioned before, The Year Without a Santa Claus was treated to an entire toy line by the now-defunct Palisades Toys a few years back. Later, NECA bought the molds, and you can now buy YWASC figures at pop culture shops like Newbury Comics and Time and Space Toys–including, of course, the Snow and Heat Miser. If you’re curious about the figures, you can read this review by Michael Crawford.
Codename: Red Kryptonite
Base of Operations: Cambridge, Mass.
History: Red Kryptonite was raised by ewoks. Consequently, she is able to make elaborate patio furniture from sticks and twine, and is furry and adorable. When she grew to be three times as tall as her parents, they decided she was actually a wookiee. [She’s also the creator of all the art on this site. –PG]
PG: What was your favorite toy line growing up?
RK: Gotta be the Kenner Star Wars toys, with their tiny extending light sabers (please ignore how filthy that sounds) and their vinyl cloaks. You could own the entire, to-scale world. I had Chief Chirpa and Wicket; the ewok village; various cantina and Jabba-palace creatures; a 3PO whose arms and legs kept falling off, no matter how many times I glued him back together; Leia as bounty hunter; Lando as spy; several Vaders (lost one behind the couch but found him again); a vintage black-vested Han and a Chewie. On Sunday evenings they would take sides on the dining room table, and my dad and I would wage epic battles that were really just an excuse for us to chuck action figures at each other and make Wilhelm screams when they slid off the edge.
PG: Did the industry divide between “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys” bother you?
RK: No. My parents never pressured stereotypical “female” toys on me or made me feel weird that I didn’t care about baby dolls who cried and wet themselves. (I still don’t get it; how is that fun?) I was more a cute animal/dinosaur/movie tie-in action figure enthusiast, and the ‘rents were happy to encourage that.
I had no interest in Barbie–other than her bitchin’ remote control convertible, which I *did* receive for Christmas one year–so they had no interest in forcing her on me. The only Barbie I ever owned spent the majority of her life trussed up and held for ransom inside a Hess truck.
PG: What’s your favorite Christmas television special?
RK: There are two things I adore most in this world (for the purposes of answering this question) and they are: stop-motion animation and puppets. In the former category, “Rudolph” wins, not by a nose, but by a cowboy on an ostrich. Of the latter, I choose the Jim Henson, not-technically-Muppetverse “The Christmas Toy,” which, despite predating “Toy Story” by many years, is about the secret lives of well-loved toybox denizens threatened by a new, flashier toy with a personality disorder. As an added twist, if a human in “The Christmas Toy” catches a toy moving of its own volition, that toy becomes inert forever. I was never the same after I realized my own potential as a toykiller.
PG: What’s your favorite toy-related Christmas memory?
RK: Probably the year my parents got a toy: a Casio keyboard, complete with pre-recorded backing beats like ‘rumba,’ ‘waltz’, and the amazing ‘demo’ button, which played a five-minute synth symphony of funk.
PG: In your opinion, what are the top five movie Santa Clauses and why?
RK: In no particular order:
Stabby Santa, “Hot Fuzz”
–Peter Jackson, in a half-second cameo, stabbing Simon Pegg through the hand. Brilliant.
St. Nicholas, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
–I love the idea of St. Nick outfitting children for hand-to-hand combat.
Santa, Rankin-Bass’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
–Because he’s such a dick. I like my Santas salty.
Ed Asner, “Elf”
–Casting that is too perfect to attempt to convey with mere words.
Dan Akyroyd, “Trading Places”
–The most awesomely pathetic moment ever committed to film. Reminds me every time what the holidays are all about, and how lucky I am not to be destitute, filthy, and the pawn of rich old white dudes. (Watch it now. Video NSFW for language and graphic depictions of Dan Akroyd under severe emotional distress.)
