Honestly still think Medieval Spawn is goofy as hell, but the new one is definitely a bit cooler.
Still think Super Patriot is pretty badass, and switching the arms on the figure was really fun. Had no idea he was from Savage Dragon or that Savage Dragon still exists.
I mostly know Savage Dragon from the crossover they did with The Maxx, which is the only vaguely super hero comic that I’ve ever really loved. I used to consider myself a Sam Kieth fan, but reality is that I only really like The Maxx and just find the rest of his work okay. He really needs his cowriter (whose name I currently forget) to keep him on track. Still has a neat art style, though.
The best McFarlane line was the completely non-comic based Total Chaos one. There was a bipedal elephant that must have weighed five pounds, this Hellraiser-esque pirate guy with a cannon mounted on his back, a bendy dragon thing, and a knight. Never did figure out if there was some kind of story line attached to these guys.
The Al Simmons figure is from Spawn, he was Spawn’s alter ego up until they decided he wasn’t and changed it to something else. The rest seem to be characters made specifically for that line though, yeah.
as well as medieval spawn i had both violator and clown, though they’re the same character, so i guess there weren’t that many spawn characters yet at the time.
violator doesn’t have actual articulation except for his jaw, otherwise, he’s a bendy figure. he’s okay, a pretty good gross monster
clown was shit. he had a headswapping gimmick that involved his entire torso opening up. the only articulation he has is his arms swivelling at the shoulders.
i didn’t have overtkill, but a friend did, and it was an okay figure. his head is a spring-loaded missile. the build quality wasn’t great though, and his torso split into two at the seam. it wasn’t too bad though, as he could easily be re-assembled, and since his torso was massive and hollow, he could be used as a kind of vehicle for smaller scale figures
Yes! I forgot there was an Al Simmons in there. Did Image United ever finish up? I think that was trying to bring back Simmons as Spawn. Youngblood returning to Spawn continuity too was kinda weird.
And I swear that Cornboy character got name dropped somewhere else. I think, much like Al, he was named after someone Todd knew.
No idea about Image United since I stopped following comics. I do have a hardcover book from 2005(?) that has origin stories for a few of the main Image characters, like Spawn, Savage Dragon, Shadow Hawk and something else, that were all written/drawn by their original creators. We learn that Savage Dragon is actually an alien overlord with amnesia. That was kind of the biggest thing for me since Erik Larson had spent over a decade steadfastly refusing to spill the beans on Dragon’s origin story (and after that book I was kind of sorry he had to be honest).
Does anyone remember those smaller non-transforming Transformer toys?
I ended up with a bunch of those as a kid and while they weren’t good as actual Transformer toys they were just about the best action figures in the world to make wrestle due to how well the legs worked. Could do shoulder breakers and tombstones plus all the other typical action figure wrestling moves.
Did anyone ever hear of Trash Bag Bunch? They were a line of small plastic figures, maybe an inch and a half tall, and they came in these black bags you had to dissolve in warm water. They weren’t labeled because it was marketed as like a mystery figure thing. Buy one for a buck or whatever and then see what you got. I had like five or six at one point.
As you can see they were grouped into two sets, the Trashors which were the monsters and the Disposers which were the human-ish good guys. All the ones I had were actually Disposers because I have no memory of having any of the Trashors.
Had a couple, and they’re still floating around here somewhere. Think I lucked out and got several of the cool robot dudes, so I never felt the neat to get more.
there were also toylines for robocop, rambo, aliens and predator. though the first two did at least have cartoons aimed at kids, and there were plans for an aliens cartoon that never came about.
the aliens toys were really cool, too.
they were mostly of various alien/animal hybrids, for example
bull
“night cougar”
spider
there was also this badass “a.t.a.x” marine, with clip-on alien disguise armour
also, regarding that terminator bioflesh thing, they brought it back for the release of terminator salvation a few years ago, apparently using the exact same technology, unarticulated figure and all
as far as i can tell, the big deals in action figures are revoltech and figma, who both offer well-sculpted figures of characters with excellent articulation.
as you might expect, most figures from both companies are of anime and videogame characters, but there’s also lots of really strange stuff, like the vitruvian man and co, for example
as for toys that are actually made for kids, i have no idea, other than that stuff like minecraft and five nights at freddies are big with really over with young kids, and have their own toylines
