#funko screed

[kaijutegu]

Please talk more about how much you hate Funko!

Another reason I hate Funko has a lot to do with some of my major frustrations about “geek” culture and the way merchandising is done for... well, everything. Take Fallout, for instance. We’re gonna talk about Fallout because the sheer amount of cheaply-produced geek garbage that came out for Fallout 4 is... a little embarrassing, I think. Before the game even came out, there were Fallout 4 puzzles, mugs shaped like pip boys that were impossible to drink out of, various skins of board games that had nothing to do with the game or its universe, a shitton of cheap blankets with yellow 111s printed on them... a game of Yahtzee where you put the dice in Vault Boy’s head... a badly-made Dogmeat plush that didn’t even try to be the same colors as the dog in the game...You get the idea. Do we really need a Fallout-branded Monopoly? The rush to get this stuff out so that people could show how much they liked the game through consumerism led to a lot of merch- which, yay, merch! I’ll admit, some of the shirts and stuff are pretty cool. But this oversaturation of merchandise isn’t good. The Fallout New Vegas poker chips are beautiful things- they’re real poker chips with a nice heft to them and gorgeous paint jobs. Funko Pops are kind of endemic to this poorly-made, quickly pushed merchandise, and no Funko Pop is a better example than than that of the best character in the game, John Hancock. Hancock’s a ghoul, but he’s still not horrifically unappealing- he’s a nice raisin who likes to dress like the founding fathers and hates fascism.

Here’s his goddamn Pop.

Now, not all Funko pops are THIS off-model. But this is kind of an issue I have with g- 

wait did they give the hancock funko a six pack

where is his shirt

what am i looking at here

ANYWAYS an issue I have with geek culture and the way it’s marketed- you gotta have the latest hunk of plastic, you gotta collect and consume, and Funko really feeds into that mentality. There’s nothing wrong with collecting! But the Fallout Pops are an example I think of how bad things are. In this case, the Pop was based off of concept art- concept art that mercifully was not used in the final game. The company didn’t even care enough to make a decent piece of merch that matched the universe they’d licensed- they knew people would buy whatever, and they did.  

[kaijutegu]

Tell Us About The Pops. I share this frustration about what they did to the toy market :(

Another major issue I have with Funko is the utter lack of stylization. Simple/minimalistic isn’t always good design. It can be, but the way Funko Pops are stylized is really bad. The sameface with those lifeless eyes was not a good choice- they’re just there, they have no character to them at all. 

These are Labbits here from the same production line- same designer, same run, same blind box theme. One’s a pug, one’s a Dalmatian, and one’s a black cat (with the constellation Sirius on its flanks and a dagger with eight lives crossed out, it’s a pretty cool one). Even though they’re all meant to go together, they have character and style and charm. I know it’s a matter of taste, but I have a really hard time finding most of the Pops charming. Some aren’t so bad- the Fraggles, I kinda like- but one of my Major Beefs is that this product came in and supplanted the art toy market by sheer force without actually being art toys. 

By moving into the geek spaces where these niche things were sold, Funko’s sheer volume kinda trampled everything else. 

[kaijutegu]

please tell me about your hatred of funko pops and how they destroyed the vinyl art toy scene

So after Funko started churning out product like there was no tomorrow, a huge part of how it wrecked the scene was how it was sold. Nowadays, you can go to Target and get you a Pop, but that wasn’t always true- they were originally sold in niche markets, like game stores, indie toy stores, and other places that didn’t really have a mass market. And because they had these licenses- if you look at a lot of the early ones, they were comic book characters, and comic nerds went ape for them- they sold, and sold pretty well, and eventually they just kind of replaced the market for art toys. 

Another of Funko’s biggest advantages was that they’re cheap. No, really, they are. Even though some people will pay a lot for them, the basic funko is cheap and readily available. You can see what you’re getting with the Pops- there’s less of a blind bag/blind box element, and they’re pitched very much as a pop culture thing, not an independent thing. 

Which isn’t necessarily bad. Other companies jumped on the vinyl toy bandwagon, most of them lots bigger than Funko. They just didn’t cut the same design corners, and at least from the perspective of somebody who’s into the indie stuff, that makes a ton of difference. For example, Disney has a line- Vinylmations. Here’s three versions of the same character (my favorite Disney character, incidentally).

Look at the eyes. This is the same character all three times with the same basic eye style- bright yellow with purple eyebrows. But hey, they’re different! Top hat Figment has a focused look and he’s excited (because he’s supposed to be announcing something). Astronaut Figment looks right ahead and is smiling- he’s supposed to look how his Audio-Animatronic looked on the ride. The third Figment, from the Nerds Rock line (I took off his glasses to show off his eyes a bit more) has a more stylized look, less reminiscent of his AA figure/official design- and his eyes are bright and cheerful, because he’s supposed to be, y’know, cute and appealing. You can make licensed characters cute, and you can even do licensed characters in such a way that they’re all recognizably part of the same line- here’s some of the rest of that Nerds Rock line.

Those aren’t on-model for their actual characters, but the stylization is charming. Decisions about what to simplify seem deliberate, instead of just “let’s give everybody the same face.” 

[kaijutegu]

*asks you about your seething hatred for fucko pops*

OK SO when i was a wee lass (well, not exactly wee, but back in late high school/college) I was really into vinyl art toys. I still am, but now most of what I go for is kaiju and Japanese sofubi, because the American scene has largely dried up. Vinyl art toys/urban vinyl are neat little figures that come in a bunch of shapes- what was cool was how they’re customized. You can get everything from neat street graffiti style to figures that look like storybook characters, and there’s different artists that do different things with them. Production companies like Kidrobot create lines of just really creative, beautiful objects. This post, which sums up what happened AMAZINGLY, describes them as 3D illustrations, which is pretty much how they were. Even the licensed stuff that existed back then was really good- there was quality and creativity to it. And the customs/designer lines! It’s amazing what a pesron can do with a simple platform. Take Kidrobot’s dunny, for instance. These are some of the ones that I have, there’s thousands more designs that different artists have done. Even though they’re similarly shaped, there’s enough variation on the theme that they don’t have the soulless look that Funko Pops do.

Heck, I’ve got two fish monsters and look how different they are. With the exception of two (the resin cast Scott Wilkowski dunny and Unit 0-Bun), these Dunnies were pretty big production lines, and each one looks distinctly styled. 

Vinyl art toys are still around- they haven’t evaporated completely- but fewer and fewer new artists pop up and there’s a lot less variety. And if you don’t like the look of Kidrobot’s platforms or some of the other stuff that’s readily available (like Tokidoki, etc.), then you’re SOL because there’s not a lot of new platforms (blank models) being put out today. Of course, overseas (particularly in Asia), the vinyl market’s still killer. But it was a beautiful outlet here stateside, and now we just... kind of have the blank-eyed monstrosities. 

(also, side note: I have two of those army dunnies with the skull faces and I don’t really like them or the death rocker with the red hair (they were blind boxes), so if anybody sees them and loves them, drop me a note and I dunno, send me some baked goods or some other thing and we can trade?)