The Papercraft Star Wars That Never Was!

Just clearing out my desk for the big move (Funko is moving to a larger facility) and I came across this mock-up for a papercraft Darth Vader that we pitched a while back, but was never produced. I thought he turned out pretty cute. Too bad he'll remain one-of-a-kind!

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!

New Additions to the Nerdatorium Papercraft Arcade!

Just thought I'd post a quick update and show off my latest additions to my rapidly growing miniature papercraft video game arcade. My newest machines are Defender, Gauntlet and, a personal favorite, Tempest! Enjoy...

Welcome to the Nerdatorium Papercraft Video Arcade!

My recent resurgent fanaticism for old-school video games and pinball machines and my work-related crash-course in, and budding love, of papercraft models has collided when I found a couple of links to action-figure-sized, build-'em-yourself, vintage video game cabinets and other classic arcade ephemera, thus helping me begin to build my very own mini arcade...

The papercrafts themselves are beautifully designed and pretty easy to put together. As I learn more about the hobby of papercrafts, I'm figuring out that I should probably be using glossier paper and printing on the "photo" setting, but to save ink, I've just been doing a standard print on regular cardstock. Either way, it's just two tons of fun to slowly build my very own mini-arcade.

The only downside is that I keep making these on my lunch break when I should be working on my VROOOM! series. Gah! Gotta get focused!

Here's the machines that I've made so far, including Pac Man, Donky Kong, Galaga, Dragon's Lair and the Inidianan Jones and Medieval Madness pinball machines. I even found a template for some little stools!

 

I've already downlaoded all of the templates that they had available and will probably end up building them all, but I thought it'd be fun to share with you all now, and I'll keep you all updated as I ad machines.

Now I need to print and cut out a ton of really, really tiny quarters...

You can start your own mini papercraft video arcade by downloading the files from the links below:

Video Game Arcade Papercraft

Classic Pinball Papercraft

Enjoy!

I'm Seriously Getting Into Paper Toys...

Ever since the company I work for has started dabbling in papercraft stuff (we're launching a huge papercraft playset series in a few months), I've been slowly falling more and more in love with building cool things out of paper.

It was in this spirit that I decided to pick up this box set from Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks back that was filled with ten different papercraft robots you can build and even pit against each other in a paper-robot battle royale...

The ten different bots come on these sheets, which are already perforated and scored for easy punching out and folding. Then, all you have to do is glue down the tabs in their appropriate spots and before you know it, it's Robot Throwdown Time!

I've only made 6 of the ten so far. Here they are...

There was something so satisfying about building one's own toys. I mean, yes, they were already designed and perforated and scored and super easy to build, but I still couldn't help but feel like I've sort of "earned" these toys. Before I knew it, I had a practically instant collection that took just a little more than buying it and taking out of a package.

It's official: I'm hooked.

I'm planning on picking up these two gems as well, before taking the step of printing and cutting out some choice pieces that I've found on the interwebs. And, of course, once the papercraft playsets that I'm personally working on are released to retail, that should be the most satisfying collection of all!