pop vinyl is like, taco bell in demolition man. it won the vinyl toy wars, in that, through brute force and basic nerd culture appeal (”nerds” are about the easiest crowd of people to appease and market to), it soundly crushed the entire vinyl figurine scene circa 2011, 2012 and now is the sole vinyl toy company left standing.
I didn’t even realize that there were other companies making that crap. But it makes sense why there only had to be one as you have to get the licensing to appeal to these heathens
They were really like, 3d illustrations, alot of companies popping up to do limited runs of a gr8 illustrator’s designs in like 2003-2008….
It all began in asia, namely Japan, with post-war period like, resin kaiju and other figurines which were a huge collectable hit toward the 90s, 00s because of the sentiment and nostalgia attached to them
But things really started happening around the turn of the millenium, in hongkong, with Toy2R, who in 2001 launch the Qee (like keychain, get it?) and in Japan with Medicom Toy’s Bearbrick as a sort of nostalgic throwback to this style of toy – who, thanks to labels like Bathing Ape, it gained traction among the urban aesthetic and fashion cliques across the ocean in like, Sanfrancisco, Los angeles and new york. So suddenly in north america, in cutting edge urban fashion stores, these Qees and bearbricks started showing up. And in these cases, they started getting fashion label exclusives made, establishing their in vogue status in the west
Hot on the heels of this trend, american companies sprung up to do their own take on the bearbrick, which is when kid robot enters the scene and takes it to the next step and introduced the munny and dunny, blank customs and had up and coming artists use it as a template for limited run collections. And it got insanely popular and helped launch it into a fan scene
By 2008, “designer toys” and custom vinyl was hitting it huge, it was massively popular as an underground art scene thing. It was around this time that I discovered it while i was in newyork, on and off again visiting and periodically living with my girlfriend as a shit head 18 year old at the time lmao.
Anyway, this landed kid robot deep in the illustration and by extension, comic book scene, especially as they started doing limited run license productions like the Simpsons and Marvel comics. The simpsons series was a huge hit, appealing to nerds everywhere rather than artist types. Eventually they started showing up in comic conventions, namely SDCC in san diego
and then this is where Funko enters the scene, a basic toy company that in 2005 had been sold to a nightclub manager keen to monetize the fuck out of it. Funko were already producing licensed bobbleheads under the “Funko Force” and other collectable for nerd properties alongside other venders at comic cons.
Which puts Funko in the same space as Kid Robot and independent venders showcasing their personal vinyl toy projects at the height of vinyl toy popularity in 2009, 2010. Funko saw this trend and in 2010 decided they should launch their own brand of vinyl toys like the Dunny, called Funko Force 2.0
It debuted at San diego comic con 2010. I saw it with my own eyes. I didnt care because i never gave a shit about capeshit when i went to comic con lmfao. At the time there were soooo many half assed attempts to ape the vinyl toy fad from a number of collectable companies, that it never leaped out at me. Even Disney attempted to do it.
I was too busy getting the Kid Robot SDCC 2010 Exclusive shit, still the king of the roost and still generally doing creative shit with the medium.
Kid Robot at the time were collaborating with Yo Gabba Gabba
I was a fool not to notice what was happening, really.
Funko Force 2.0
It was a huge hit.
They quickly released and doubled down on the next step of their Line of toys: Pop!
Funko shot for licenses over independent artist collections and it just kept printing money. Demand was mega high. Stores and vendors that started putting out blind boxes from KR and other companies threw that out in favour of the more successful and lucrative Pop!
in a matter of years, the vinyl toy scene got hyper saturated by Pop! and licensed vinyl collectables that we have now arrived to this:
The designer toy scene exhausted itself and all that remains really, in
this wasteland of creativity, is Funko Pop! and it’s derivatives.
I have some friends who were producing independent designer toys in 2010 and interest in their work sloped off heavily because the whole vinyl toy scene was now hijacked and defined by banal consumer nerd culture. Anybody past the year 2010, who would be getting their first impressions of vinyl, were seeing Pop! and it really turned them off of it unless they really only care for Pop!’s products and nothing else besides. So anyone still getting vinyl are really only going for Pop! And my artist friends, they are still salty over it lmao
RIP IN PiECE
and this is why I have to stifle my displeasure when friends show me their newest Funko Pop….
I was trying to find a picture of my goddamn entomology honors project but any evidence of this thing has disappeared into the void; instead, please have a picture of my Halloween costume in 2009, which I also sewed myself:
It took me five thousand years to make the first one, so if you’re willing to wait until Planet of the Apes becomes a historical biopic then I will sew you the prettiest damn mayfly you’ve ever seen
But the real reason I had to chime in was that Steve Rogers is my favorite superhero. Why? Because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930’s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding about the 4th of July) to a working-class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side.[1] This biographical detail has political meaning: given the era he was born in and his class and religious/ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that, complete with a picture of FDR on the wall.
Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother who insisted he stayed in school despite the trend of the time (his father died when he was a child; in some versions, his father is a brave WWI veteran, in others an alcoholic, either or both of which would be appropriate given what happened to WWI veterans in the Great Depression) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother died of TB.[2] And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.
Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.
gotta love a well-researched takedown of such lazy, hoary tropes as “Captain America is a monolithic aryan crypto-fascist”
Having straight-up seen people on this site suggest that Cap is an “Aryan ideal” and endorses white supremacy, I appreciate this on a deep level. You don’t have to be going for a doctorate in 20th Century American history to understand that Cap being physically perfect, tall and blond was meant to be a slap in the face to Nazism and Hitler’s wild ideas about racial purity, not an endorsement of it. Nothing says “fuck you” quite like your Aryan superman being a first-generation Irish-American kid from New York who hates your Nazi guts.
kototyph 