Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Kookycraft Paper Action Figures That ALMOST Were!

Hi gang! Been a good long while since I did a good old fashioned blog post and a Facebook conversation from this morning got me thinking about the Mixo Kookycraft paper figures I designed a while back.

Some of you may remember these from a couple of years ago, before I got hired on at Funko.

They were a cool idea, but never really caught on, despite our pushing them as hard as we could at SDCC 2012. Oh well. They led to me landing my dream job, so all's well that ends well, I guess.

In total, we released 4 different DC superheroes...


And 2 Masters of the Universe figures...



But what I thought would be a hoot is to look at the ones that got designed, but never put into production! So here we go...

For the DC series, we had planned to start getting into villains and I actually designed a Joker and Riddler...



For MOTU, Beastman and Teela were next on the list...


We were planning a foray into the world of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers...






 And for you music fans, we even looked into having KISS figures made, as seen here in my hand-built mock-ups...


And I olny got as far as making a John Lennon one for our Beatles Yellow Submarine pitch...


And that's about as far as we got.

Looking back, this was a trying time for me, but also very exciting as I daily faced a new adventure in the worlds of licensing and design.

I sort of wish these had taken off better, but if that had happened, I may not have ended up where I am now, so it's probably all for the best.

Given the choice between paper or plastic, I'll take plastic any day. :)

Check back soon, when I'll take a look back at our Boxos line of mini stylized papercraft figures that almost were!

Monday, September 23, 2013

The Best $4 I've Ever Spent at Target!

Who doesn't love the Target $1 section? The gods know that I sure do. But I super-duper loved it this weekend when I came across this pile of Darth Vader themed school supplies...


Okay, I admit, the 7 piece set was actually $3, but that's beyond worth it.

I got a couple of Vader pencils, a tiny Vader eraser, a Vader pencil sharpener and the world's tiniest Vader sketchbook/notepad. For really, really tiny Vader drawings.


And I can carry all of this in my new handy-dandy Darth Vader carrying case! Huzzah!


But for larger, more involved drawings, the set comes with this bigger sketchbook...


And just in case I make some truly massive mistakes, sold separately was this gigantic Vader eraser...



I couldn't help but think that if I had found this set when I was in 5th grade, I would be the king of the class for a day or two amongst my Star Wars loving friends.

But, now I'm 40 and and the most I got out of this score was a weird look from my wife.

Whatevs. The Force is strong with this score.