IN THE EARLY '90s, there was someone with a bright idea. Didn't seem so at the time. It was more like an itch, fed by a blazing ego. But it's now an astounding industry that has blossomed under our noses. McFarland’s bright
idea spawned cool
line of toysDRAWN & QUARTERED
By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@star-bulletin.comAnd it started with comic books.
We're talking, of course, about artist/writer/entrepreneur Todd McFarland. Once an underappreciated worker bee at Marvel, he figured he could do better on his own, and began his own comic book line centered on the "Spawn" character. Spawn is a decidedly unpleasant book, but it has been hyped unmercifully and scored both on HBO as a faux-anime series and in big-time movies. Spawn was huge. Huge!
But not big enough for Todd. He wanted toys to go with his comic books. Action figures, like GI Joe and all those "Star Wars" toys. Stuff to play with. And so he created McFarland Toys, high-quality playthings for proto-adults.
He hired the best sculptors and three-dimensional artists available. They created figures far too complicated for mass-production techniques. They could have been produced as model kits, cast in resin or injected with polystyrene, but that requires labor on the part of the purchaser, which ran counter to McFarland's buy-now, play-now, instant-gratification philosophy.
He also wanted highly detailed, realistic paint jobs on the figures. Stuff like that requires lots of labor and wages. He also wanted them inexpensive. All these factors canceled each other out.
Here's where luck and history and capitalism intersect, and it's spelled C-H-I-N-A.
The Chinese were opening up to piece work required by U.S. companies. Computer-aided laser pantographing machines that could cut molds in aluminum from master sculptures, coupled with the development of rubber/plastic recipes that produced tough, flexible parts, and the availability of low-paid Chinese girls handy with paint brushes, made the product doable.
It exploded.
The first high-quality toys were spinoffs of Spawn, and these are still popular. Unless you're a fan of the series, however, these toys are bizarre, hideous and downright creepy. The market was created, however, and now such toys cover all ends of popular culture. These include movie tie-ins, sports figures, parodies of famous toys and even famous musicians.
The figures shown here were chosen because everyone knows what the originals look like -- classic Universal monsters Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster and Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein. These are famous faces of our time.
The figures stand about 8 inches tall, boast outstanding sculptures of the actors' features and have additional parts, realistic paint jobs, movable limbs, detailed bases, and the bride even has an alternate head. They were bought -- get this! -- at Toys 'R' Us, for less than $10 each!
The market for such toys continues to expand. Mind you, they're not really toys. They're collectors' items, set up like high-concept, kitschy-feely objets d'art.
In ancient cultures, such tiny representations of your hopes and fears were created as a way of psychic possession. It was a religious thing, a power thing, a mojo-on-your-enemies thing.
So where's my Osama bin Laden action figure?
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