*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?)
