Legends Live On or Die Trying

By: John Denning
Date: Thursday, July 27, 2006

Welcome back to Out of the Box, where chase figures play hard to get and we're too macho to play their games. While everyone else was foolishly wasting their time enjoying the splendor of Comic Con and reporting on timely toy exclusives this past weekend, I alone remained behind to bring you this vital retrospective on the history of Marvel action figures using specious personal experience and the bare minimum of internet research. Behold my great sacrifice for your enlightenment.

Now as someone who can define their knowledge of history in terms of video games (my specialties include World War II shooters and the colonial era depicted in the classic Oregon Trail), it isn't easy to fill the gaps prior to my discovery of toys upon receiving a Millenium Falcon for Christmas in 1985. Luckily for those of us who are historically deficient, we can mark the origin of action figures as recently as 1964 when Hasbro coined the phrase. It was only a few years later that the first successful line of Marvel action figures would make its mark on the toy industry.

And it almost never happened. When Mego first developed The World's Greatest Superheroes line, it featured four DC superheroes. Popular toy history has Ken Abrams, son of Mego's chairman, Marty Abrams, asking where Spider-Man was. Few toy company moguls ever profited from ignoring their children, so while Mego's 1973 catalog showed only Superman, Batman, Robin, and, strangely, Aquaman (who must have the best PR guy in the world to keep getting such sweet gigs as a glorified fish whisperer), it was promised that Spiderman and Captain America would be available by Fall. Marvel characters went on to constitute more than half of the figures in the line, with a Spider-Man appearing in every series. In light of this, I'd like to ask that any of my readers whose fathers own toy companies to demand the immediate mass production of Multiple Man action figures (I alone am going to need at least 60 of them).


What is the secret of Mego's success? Interchangeable parts. While I'm fairly certain this was not a new concept (I seem to recall muskets built from interchangeable parts available for purchase at the beginning of Oregon Trail), it's good to see the toy industry take a 100-year old innovation at the time and freshen it up. Taking their previous Action Jackson figure, Mego offset the cost of royalties for licensing the DC and Marvel characters by simply adding new heads and costumes to stock bodies. This kind of creative shortcut in toy production still stands as one of the most effective in the industry. Even among collectibles, Mego set a standard for rare factory error variants by repeatedly making such mistakes as turning Superman's symbol upside down and painting Robin and Aquaman the wrong colors. Thankfully, even variant paint jobs can't make anyone pay top dollar to buy an Aquaman.

Meanwhile, between the fizzling of Mego's superhero line in 1982 and the modern Marvel Legends, Toy Biz took license with Marvel heroes and explored a number of concept lines that have since become the realm of DC Direct and McFarlane. Producing lines around now-embarrassingly pointless uber-events like Secret Wars and the Famous Covers series, Toy Biz originally treated superhero toys like anything else in the industry at the time. You had to have a consistent theme throughout the series as justification, preferably with an association to some proven seller like the Secret War crossover or a recognizable image such as the famous covers. While none of these series sold to a highly significant degree, these concepts have since been revisited and used to greater effect thanks to blockbuster movies and graphic novels that collect fan-favorite stories such as Batman: Hush which has its own continuing toy lines that mutually fuel each other's sales. Likewise, McFarlane Toys digs through past Spawn covers to design figures that appeal by association with the comic.

The lesson in all this being that the toy industry, like any other, learns from its past, rehashing successful gimmicks with modern twists. From all this its worth looking at why Toy Biz's Marvel Legends line sold so well, and whether Hasbro seems to have the insight to continue the trend now that they've acquired the license.

Ironically, Marvel Legends success as a collectable toy line was first motivated by an impressive number of articulation points in the figures, the standard measure for how much fun a toy is to play with (Spider-Man isn't half as cool if you can't have him doing the sign of the devil), rather than how good it looks in the package. They started with only four figures in series one, sticking to classic characters like Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, and, um, Toad (I suppose every quartet needs its Ringo Starr). While the first few series had entire figures that were hard to find, by the time Toy Biz fell into the groove, their tactics for increasing sales fell into two major styles: variant heads and paint jobs, and the Build-A-Figure.

The beauty of Build-A-Figure is not just that you have to buy all the figures in the series to build it. You can put the best pieces with otherwise low-selling figures (show of hands for those who promptly lost their Professor X toys once they got the Galactus head they really wanted). You can encourage sales with both collectors who buy whole series, and fans who've got to have that sexy 16" world-devourer. You can even go the extra mile and create the Wal-Mart Exclusive Ant-Man series that requires you to buy not six, but ten whole figures to complete the BAF, including a left hand that is only available with the rare Wolverine variant figure. It just goes to show that Wal-Mart can out-evil anyone in the business. Attaboy, you gorgeous corporate monstrosity, you.

Now the Marvel Legends legacy passes to Hasbro, and we wait to see if they can continue the ever-growing complexity of the line's collectability. With the first announced series, they have already received criticism for the random choices of figures, including a recently deceased x-man, a movie figure (something Toy Biz had initially stated would not be included in the line), and an Ultimate version of Iron man. These criticisms are somewhat bias in light of such Toy Biz series as the Legendary Riders, which not only focused on each character having a vehicle instead of a BAF, but also featured an extremely random line-up and Vengeance, one of the worst-selling Legends of all time.

The real challenge for Hasbro is people's distaste for change, and Toy Biz has been the figurehead of Marvel toys throughout the modern era. While their first series looks geared to flop in the face of fan favoritism, as long as there is a fanboy division between Marvel and DC, Legends will sell. For my part, I continue to encourage shopping based on enjoyment of the characters themselves. All hail the great spineless Mojo in series 14! Mojoworld is all worlds!

Next week we step away from the Toy Business 101 and take up a debate that engages both casual shoppers and true-blue collectors alike: what size is your action figure? Until then, we here at Out of the Box will buck the industry standard and bust out the true Legend with our 18" Lord of Darkness. Tim Curry never looked so good.