I LOVE this sword!It is huge and just looks wicked!I have to give high praise to DST for their
work on that piece and for doing such a great job getting it to line up with
the source material so well.I have/had
another minimate sized version of this sword from a Devil May Cry toy from a
few years back…well thinking about it, it was likely more than just a few years
ago lol, but I think this version is much better!
I do love some Ghouls and Ghosts and love
the fact that we have an Arthur minimate, well two in fact!DST did a great job with the design of Arthur
and this one in the silver armour looks fantastic!I think I like the shield better is silver
than I did on gold!Now bring on the
non-armoured underwear variant and we will be all set!
This
is a nice looking Iron Man minimate, without a doubt.The colours look great and it really
pops!Marvel has given Tony such a huge
inventory of armours over the years it is neat to build a collection of them in
minimate style but clearly the best thing about this minimate is the fact he
comes with the massive proto-cannon from the game – kick ass!
Today brings
a debut to the blog, well 2 debuts in fact.
One being the new section to Portrait of an Addiction – a news section
where I will make additional posts to cover news releases related to our
favourite toys Minimates! The second
debut is the EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE of the lucky 13th wave of Marvel
Minimates to hit Toys R Us!
This wave
consists of a nice assortment of characters from across the Marvel Universe and
out of the 8 Minimates in the wave 7
are brand new, only the Daredevil will be a repeat, being the same as the one
slated for wave 43. In this assortment
we have:
ØSpider-Sense
Spider-Man and The Punisher – This is the first new Punisher Minimate since the
Punisher: War Zone box set and is
based on his first appearance where he took on none other then Spider-Man! Appropriately Spidey comes with a removable
spider-sense effect to help him dodge the Punishers attacks!
ØDaredevil
and Kingpin – The first Kingpin Minimate goes all the way back to the very first
wave of Marvel Minimates in 2003 and this new one is a welcomed update thanks
to DSTs new big-body design for bigger characters like the Hulk. He is packed with his long time foe Daredevil
in his traditional red costume!
ØMirage
and Magma – Heading into the X-Men side of the Marvel Universe DST brings us
two highly anticipated New Mutant favourites in Mirage and the fiery
Magma! Both of these are first timers to
the Minimates line and will help round out anyones New Mutants collection!
ØBoomer
and Rictor – DST flashes back to the 90’s with these versions of Rictor and
Boomer from X-Force. These two all new
Minimates fill out the roster of that record breaking comic team and give
mutants fans a couple more characters to add to their collection!
Look for this
assortment in Toys R Us stores and online at toyrus.com in March!
I
have no seen this character before, not having played Final Fight where he is
originally from.I do, however, like how
DST did with this minimate.It looks
very good and compares very well to the source material.The facial expression is great and I love the
pipe accessory!
I
have to admit that I really do like the way that they have increased the bulk
for the Hulk minimates.Yea it can be a
bit movement restrictive but it really looks good!There is something really sweet about the
facial expression on this one; really seems to capture the character perfectly,
I love it!
This
is a great minimate of Jean in her green Phoenix
costume, without a doubt. The colours
look great and I love that Phoenix
force base too. My only downside to this
minimate, and truth be told it applies to a few of the ones that were also part
of the Marvel vs Capcom 3 SDCC sets – I wish they would have given us different
facial expressions for characters like this one where the only other difference
is the costume colour. Would have given
it a little extra pop I think.
Now I am a big minimate fan – go figure right
;) , and I really liked the first go round they did with the Street Fighter
minimates and was very sad to see that it just was not their time and we didn’t
get more. This minimate kind of brings
up the bad blood from that time as if we didn’t have Darkstalkers characters in
the line then we could have got a few more characters from the Street Fighter
franchise in that wave. That being said
it is a pretty decent looking minimate, visually it looks good and I dig how
they made her wings.
Now
a year later I wandered down the toy aisle to once again find Art Asylum
products, namely Minimates, but this time they were in the now standard 2-pack
and were 2 inches tall. Was the switch to the smaller scale a choice or
was it to accommodate particular licenses?
Digger
- I have no idea Jeff. LOL! That's a question for the current Art Asylum
regime.
Can
you shed some light as to how the character selection happened back in those
early days?
Digger
- The plan in the beginning was to go after all things pop culture or to expand
on any of the properties that we had rights for. KISS, Crouching Tiger Hidden
Dragon, Eminem, Rob Zombie, Ozzy etc- that whole first 2 years we had other
products coming out from action figures to "N" the Box. It was just a
matter of seeing what was going to sell and like I said before our first waves
did OK but our sales team was used to selling girls products, and the
cylindrical packaging we did was bitched about by every non specialty retailer.
I would have kept doing the music related characters until the end of time but
it wasn't blowing up the spot. If you mean Marvel then again - I'd have to say
it was by character popularity first and then feeding in the more obscure
characters as we went along. Spiderman and Wolverine were the two most popular
characters so we led with Spidey and packaged variations of him with other
characters. I'm a huge fan of the Marvel cosmic mythos that Lee and Kirby created
and Jim Starlin expanded like no one else in the 70's. I never thought as a kid
that Thanos and Adam Warlock would ever see the light of day as product and
here we were running them as Minimates with tons of other B and C level
characters. I think the balance back then was always quite good.
With
Art Asylum there was much more than just Minimates going on, you guys had other
action figures, along with statues and busts as well correct? How hands
on were you with the designs for Minimates?
Digger
- Once we were rolling and the essence of the style in the Marvel line was
established, Nelson and the rest of the art department were rolling them out
one after another. I left for China
in 2001 to stay so unless there was a problem with a licensor I was making sure
that the assembly line stayed true to the original designs. It wasn't all
smooth sailing. MINIMATES are complex despite how simple they seem. Normal
action figures were actually much less work. The paint operations were higher
than anything I've ever worked on and the cost was always very high. The
factories would do a run for us see how much work was involved and dump us. I
was always begging some factory to take the work for whatever we could afford
to pay. It was a nightmare.
The
Lord of the Rings designs were amazing. Great characters, tons of detail, great
style, but the cost was coming in way too high for us to manufacture. The work
was getting overly complex for something that was designed to be simple. Not
out of laziness but for the sake of the design aesthetic and the cost so after
LOTR I was cutting back on things overseas to make sure we could continue to
make them. A lot of it was frustrating because of all the things we were doing
MINIMATES was my favorite and I wanted it to continue as long as it could. Our
financial partners at the time wanted it gone from day one and there was a
regular ritual to prove me wrong so the first thing that was always attacked
was MINIMATES. They'd say "why are we doing this? This isn't making any
money. The quantities are too low. The factories don't want to work on this.
It's too much work, our HK office is understaffed." Dam man! Why don't we
just sell spring water or pink marbles!? You know? Every year things got
a little bit easier and by the time we separated from our investors MINIMATES
was sticking with the collectors.
I
personally thought when you guys got together with the folks over at the DAVE School
and made some animated movies with the Minimates that was a stroke of
genius! I remember how cool I thought it was when I found out you voiced
my favorite character Wolverine in the X-Men one. How was it to have a
hand in those?
Digger
- That's an interesting story how that all came to be. Manny Jesus was among
many other things dabbling in Lightwave animation and had gotten in touch with
Ron Thornton's company, Foundation Imaging about an alien ( Species 8471) they
had done for Star Trek Voyager. Playmates reference had always sucked so true
to our passion at the time to be accurate we pursued the character reference
directly from the source which was Foundation Imaging. This was while we
were still doing Star Trek work for Playmates, a few years before we actually
beat out Jakks and everyone else for the master rights for Star Trek ourselves.
I became friendly with Ron who is the coolest most down to earth Englishman on
the planet and Jeff Sheetz ( founder of DAVE School ) was working with Ron and
knew I was in there cooking up potential ideas for us to launch an animated
show with both our companies.
Years
later we were doing a show down in Orlando Florida and Jeff walked up to our
booth and told me he had moved out to Florida to start the DAVE School, an
animation school that was originally intended to be a training camp for
Foundation Imaging. He said that Ron always spoke highly of me and wanted to
know if I would be interested in using our Intellectual Properties as projects
to train his students. We did shorts with them. PSYCHO PUMP, SPECIDEMONS and
then they started playing with MINIMATES and it became the perfect training
vehicle for their animators to work with. They did amazing stuff with us. If
you look at the animation for Batman New Times MINIMATES and think about the
time we did it you'll see how far ahead of Lego we were with animation. Our
intent to focus on our character style verses a building block system but in
that first Batman we did you'll see we heavily incorporated the Lego compatible
products we were creating as toys in the animation. The Batwing, Batcave,
Batmobile etc were all in the animation. Voices were acted by Mark Hammil, Adam
West and Dick Van Dyke. It had a decent story, great action and most
importantly it was FREE on the net. Shortly after this DC was giving us heat
about Batman Begins; they wanted us to make sure any and all signs of 60's bat
campiness were erased from the planet Earth.
We
did Batman New Times with DAVE
School completely without
permission. This was before the majority of the fan films you see on the net
and we were trying to get them to sanction this killer DAVE School
Batman animation. They told us NO. LOL.
Our
C3 Batman line cost millions of dollars in development, it was our biggest deal
alongside Star Trek and the development was brutal with the tiny staff Nelson
and Manny had in NY and the 2 Hong Kong
engineers overseas. We spent 100k on a TV commercial and with little resource
tried to go head to head with one of the biggest toy manufactures on the
planet, LEGO.
The
XMEN DARK TIDE animation was done in full cooperation with Marvel. DAVE
animated it and I brought in a voice team in Hong Kong.
I just cast myself and submitted it for approval and Marvel loved it. Lots of
fun!
Looking
back at the start of it all, could you have imagined that Minimates would have
lasted this long and cover so many different properties?
Digger
- Yes, I did see it sticking around if we crossed a certain number of
exposures. Once it crossed 5 years I knew it was going to stick around. Most of
the other brands that we're popping up were gone long ago. Some projects just
need time and the support to get there so they can sink in.
Are
there any Minimates you are particularly attached to for any reason?
Digger
- The all black one that just had our logo on the chest in a cheap polybag.
That was my favorite.
There is something to be said for a nice
simple minimate.I am not the type of
minimate fan that prefers the plain, simple minimate body for all minimate –
sometimes all the extra parts and attachments are needed to hit that look but
sometimes a plain one look good too.For
Deadpool his looks can vary a lot depending on what the writer and artist needs
but there is definitely something nice about this one being just a basic
minimate.
DST has expanded our fleet of Stealth Tech
jets again, this time with a nifty translucent blue version!Even the pilot is made up of mostly
blue-tinted translucent plastic; which helps make this set even more of a win
win for me!I have to applaud DST for
taking a pretty cool idea in these jets and running with it; some simple tweaks
and it is a pretty cost effective rerelease that is not a straight rerelease
and will appeal to people of all ages.I
know my kids and other kids that have seen my collection light up even more
when they see the vehicles and generally the first ones they want to play with
are these jets(although the pirate ships are gaining popularity in that one
too!).
Phasing
Delorean with hover conversion including Jennifer Parker
One of the things I love about DST’s line
of minimate vehicles is the fact that it has allowed us to continue to get some
Back to the Future minimates!Jennifer
is what I would consider an important character to the first two movies at
least.Not a main character sure but an
important one none the less and I am glad to have a minimate of her now!DSTs design team did a great job with the
Delorean in its hover mode and the partially translucent-ness really adds a
great effect; making it look like it is in mid time travel, right before it
disappears completely!
Here we have the ship of the other
villainous pirate, captain Robert Deal.
This one looks awesome in the black and red colour scheme and that
emblem on the sail is intense! The Anne
Bonny character is said to be on Calico Jack’s side so this version is her in
disguise on Deal’s ship, not only a female pirate but a female pirate SPY to
boot! Rock on DST! Given the timing of
this ships release it may or may not contain the first female pirate minimate
as the second Femme Fatale box set was released on the same day and also
contained an Anne Bonny minimate, but in her regular look.
Glow
in the Dark Pirate Ship with Undead Cartographer
I am really happy to see DST getting some
great miles out of the tooling they made for the Calico Jack pirate ships; they
are doing a fantastic job making these ships unique enough to work for me.This one is very cool since it is a glow in
the dark one; making it the ghost ship of undead pirate captain Charles Vanes
as seen in the Calico Jack animated short DST had made.The undead cartographer that comes with it is
pretty cool, but pales in comparison to the glow in the dark version of him
that came with the carry case.
Today’s post is dedicated to KyeZ, my
co-blogging son!I can’t believe that he
is 9 years old today!Seems he is
growing up so fast!He really likes the
Marvel vs Capcom minimates and has been checking mine out since I got them and
had a hard time choosing which one would be his favourite.He really likes Dante and Iron Man but Arthur
is another fave and he told me that if he had the Zero minimate that one would
probably be his pick for best!I really
dig how well these minimates have turned out as well and have really brought
out some interesting ideas as I am learning about the characters that I don’t
know.
Some
people might think this is a boring minimate but I see him as a very smart bad
guy. He will make a team of bad guys and
have a big fight with the good guys.
With an ever growing collection of anything
storage can sometimes become an issue.DST did an awesome job with the collector’s cases, especially for people
who can’t or chose not to have their minimates on display.For me I only feasibly have room for my
Marvel collection to be displayed, plus the way I want to display them plays a
factor into that too.So I have been
adding these cases for storing my non displayed collection but this also
presents a small problem…how do I know what’s in the cases?Well I found the solution with a product that
is already in my house thanks to keeping track of the kids stuff especially at
school…Mabel’s Labels!With all sorts of
options and designs for labels I was able to find one that fit what I needed
and not only were they customizable to suit my needs they are decently priced
too!The ones that I used are the custom
bin labels and they are customizable to what you want them to say and you get
30 for $21 and shipping which is really reasonable, and fast too!Here’s the link!
While I can vividly recall K.A.R.R. in my
memories of Knight Rider I totally blank on Garthe. DST did another great job with capturing the
slightly different look for K.A.R.R….the evil vehicle counterpart to the heroic
K.I.T.T. . My only qualm with these has
been the tiny decals for on the dash…tough to get on but great attention to
detail at the same time! I really dig
how they made it that you put the tail light sticker on and then snap the
translucent cover over them…nice touch there!
Garthe looks totally pimped out, especially with his walking stick and
gold chain over his manscaped chest lol!
Loving it!
