Jesse DeStasio of Toy Pizza fame reached out and asked if we want to do a Q&A about his new Kickstarter,
Action Figure of the Month Club. Of course we scraped up some questions from some conversations we were having with friends about the topic, and dumped those here for you. Thanks for answering, Jesse!
He was also kind enough to share an original illustration of the
Device Ninja Poster artwork, so enjoy!
Click here to see the Kickstarter with 15 days to go.
1. How will Action Figure of the Month affect your semi-regular surprise Toy Pizza drops? Will those still continue? - Glyos News Dump
We
will still have drops in the store throughout 2019, but they will be
smaller in nature. Also, instead of All-Ins once or twice a year, the
focus will be smaller boxsets that tell a specific story (the recent LA
Knights set is a good example). -Jesse DeStasio
2. Will any of the figures be available in Toy Pizza drops after they go out to club members? - GND
Yes,
pending availability. It's a bit of a moving target at the moment, but
the intent is any surplus will be on the store sometime long after the
AFTOM club has been fulfilled. -JD
3.
Do you plan to reserve anything specifically for the club - for
example, glow in the dark, or metallic paint, or some other feature? - GND
Yes
to all of those. Ultimately it will be depend on how many backers we
get, but I'd love to see really cool styles go out to club members. -JD
4.
Will the club be 100% Toy Pizza characters and IP, or might there be
guest appearances from other members of the Glyos family? - GND
I
would say it'll be 90%-99% Toy Pizza related. There are a couple of
interesting opportunities that have presented themselves, but nothing is
solidified yet. I also did some polling and overwhelmingly our
customers wanted to keep it just KOTS. But....if I saw an opportunity to
collaborate that was too good to pass up, I would take it. -JD
5. Do you have any plans for some sort of ridable thing - a vehicle, a creature with a saddle - for your toy line? - GND
Sadly,
no. No vehicles, no beasts of burden. The days of those anniclary items
being affordable are long gone. As much as I would love to have
something like that, the tooling burden is too great and your customer
base is much smaller. Sad. -JD
6. Do you expect to have newly tooled parts or entirely new figures in every month's drop? - GND
Depends
on how much we raise. Right now I think at least 1/3 to half of the
months could end up being new parts or entirely new figures. The nature
of planning something with so little runway means we'll be relying on
our existing tools to get the first few months done. But the good news
is "existing tools" includes two very big projects no one has seen yet.
So even in those cases, there will be some newness. -JD
7.
The Glyos-compatible community is tightly knit, but sort of hard to
follow all the goings-on. Is there any chance you might include
call-outs to other compatible figures in the boxes as well? - GND
It's
an interesting idea, but we don't have boxes (just pvc bags) and there
isn't much opportunity for cross-selling. In that polling I mentioned
early, I was surprised that the feedback from customers was they want a
more pure-KOTS experience. I admit KOTS is a bit of an anomaly as far as
other Glyos lines go...there is a much more metered cross-over with
core Glyos. -JD
8. Is there a
core action figure-adjacent kind of toy you want to do but haven't done
yet? A playset, figure stands, or other distinctive display or storage
items? - GND
I'd love to do it all! I have designs for a
couple mechs that would be financial suicide. I think at the end of the
day we are a figure company and for the immediate future we have to keep
growing that business. -JD
9.
There have been a number of Kickstarters and other projects making
brand-new NES and GameBoy games lately - from ROMs to actual full
manufacture of a cartridge. When do we get the Knights of the Slice
8-bit extravaganza? - GND
Ha! I dream about this all the
time. Drew Wise, who's probably the best pixel artist out there, and I
have discussed a Snatcher-style RPG done the old school way. Like an
interactive narrative. The problem with ideas like this is- it's very
difficult to take myself off the actual production of the figures to do
other things. At this moment we have 4 different products in different
stages of the production cycle amongst three different factories. If I
skip even a day of answering emails, the wheels come off the cart. -JD
10.
With sporadic releases from Hasbro and Mattel, it's entirely possible
your Action Figure of the Month project may be the only 3 3/4-inch
action figure being released during several months in 2019. Do you plan
on doing anything special to reach out to fans of the size that maybe
haven't taken the plunge on an indie figure or a Glyos figure yet?- GND
Absolutely.
In many ways this campaign is tailored more towards new fans than
current fans. I wanted to create a great jumping on point for people who
might be new to the hobby or have been on the fence about Glyos or
KOTS. My hope is, by tapping into the idea of the mail-away surprise
figures we all got as kids, there would be a universally happy memory
people would embrace. So far, the theory's proven true. -JD
11.
To date, your figures have primarily arrived bagged. Will we ever see
special carded or boxed editions of your Glyos-compatible characters?
Perhaps little white boxes with bags that say "Toy Pizza" on them? - GND
I
have started doing our first carded figures within the past few weeks,
with a official launch of them at DCON later this month. It took a long
time to find the right printing house and the right approach. Each
carded figure will be hand deco'd or have resin pieces and the cardbacks
will be hand drawn. -JD
For the club, the packaging
is super-super important to me. I've budgeted a quarter of the entire
cost to solely go to how these will arrive. While the plain white mailer
is appealing to me and you, we do have a lot of younger customer that
that would be lost on.
But yes, I'm zeroing in on what our
presentation will be and it's one of the most crucial elements of what
will eventually arrive in your mailbox. -JD
12. Will all of the figures in the subscription program be Glyos-compatible? - GND
Again,
with a couple opportunities on the horizon it's tough to say. But I
would say i'm 90% certain every month will be Glyos-compatible.
For me to break the streak of having each month work with the other, it would have to be such a tremendous bonus. -JD
Wave 77! What is assumed to be a Kenner Snaggletooth Pheyden joins more ninjas Marvelous and Teenaged Mutant. This is another fantastic drop and a lot of it - but not all of it - can still be bought. Click here to see the November 29 2018 Onell Design drop menu.
After a wonderful run of Adventure People tributes, Onell Design turns to a galaxy far, far away with Greeden.
Based on a very specific style of figure from Kenner, their 1979
off-model Cantina aliens were official products with the kind of
authenticity usually reserved for bootlegs. Thanks to a lack of good
scrap and apparently lax approvals, we got a figure with a good
approximation of the mask - but a costume that seems out of a daily
sci-fi newspaper strip. Never being one to miss a good tribute, Onell
Design ran with Greedo's look and applied it to Pheyden.
I was expecting a glow-in-the-dark version of Jack Asteroid - which we got - but to get a new character like Zero Gravity too? I'm surprised. He costs more than the original Jack Asteroid figure and has less paint, but the dude friggin' glows.
The fully Glyos-compatible astronaut has alternate bent/straight arms
and can be taken apart at nearly every point of articulation, and then
some. That little moon ingot pops off, the helmet dismantles to 3
pieces, and the figure has an ab and a belt joint. The mold should
look familiar - it was first released as the glow-in-the-dark Alpha
Phase Metamorpho in 2010, and was subsequently released as multiple
Metamorpho and Jack Asteroid bodies, most of which was reused for other
figures in the first couple years of the line. It's the perfect generic
humanoid template, they could keep more heads coming and I'd probably
buy even more redeco figures.
Some of these are really clever. The Glyceptor
references Fisher-Price's Adventure People Alpha Interceptor pilot, a
blue-capped human inside an orange space suit with silver gloves and
some distinctive markings - which this deftly references. The clear
Sarvos helmet has a lot of color on and under it, giving it a magical
otherworldly quality that does a good job of selling the idea that this
might be from some weird part of space.