In theory, I could probably write a Sightings post about a Kickstarter campaign for a toy every day of the year. That said, if one goes out of their way to contact me and has a product that looks pretty good, I’ll pass the word along.
The Hero Project is an attempt to create a toy line that captures the essence of heroes. The project’s founders believe “action figures play an important role in children’s social development. They are pathways for kids to act out their fantasies, to work out for themselves the differences between right and wrong and to push at the boundaries of their blossoming imaginations.”
The line will start with Rama. As you may recall, there have been Rama figures in the past (as well as his monkey buddy Hanuman), but the idea is for the “Unibody” format to be used for multiple heroes throughout history:
The goal for the line is $125,000 – very high for one of these projects, but as they explain on the page, “steel molds used to reproduce a figure are expensive and that expense grows exponentially with scale, complexity and quality. A small and simple Pokemon item may cost $5000 to make a mold, $15,000 for Batman or Ninja Turtles figure, and upwards of $30K for most larger scale figures. Ordering a sizable batch of large, multi-part figures is costly and like most people we know, neither of us has an extra large bundle of C-notes sitting around to front the capital.”
As of right now they have only $21K with nine days to go. $21K isn’t bad at all, but it’s not anywhere near what they need. Still, I wanted to help spread the word – you never know what could get the snowball rolling down the hill.
