Posted on Wednesday 31 May 2006
Then now is the time to WIN A FREE CUSTOM!
Today is the last day! Enter the contest now. (Don’t forget to read the rules here.)
Posted on Tuesday 30 May 2006
This pair of socially conscientious minimates available online now!
By Fujis
On Sunday, May 21st, pictures of 2 minimate exclusives from Bad Apple Comics surfaced on the Art Asylum forums courtesy of monkey13. Whether or not they were posted online before then isn’t clear but doubtful since some of us, who shall remain nameless, spend more time than they should scouring the internet for minimate pictures and information.
Bad Apple Comics, based in Orlando, Florida, has teamed up with the American Red Cross to deliver the second and third minimate exclusives of 2006: The Bad Apple Comics minimate and the American Red Cross minimate. Available at their Orlando location for only $10 a pair (with online ordering soon available) and with proceeds going directly to the American Red Cross I think these guys should consider changing their name to Good Apple Comics.
You can swing by Bad Apple Comics at 8110 S. Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando or go to their website and order them online!
Posted on Monday 29 May 2006
Groucho Marx minimate by David Parsons.
By Fujis
It seems almost impossible to find something minimate-related that isn’t connected to the DAVE school. Case in point: Groucho Marx. Groucho was created by David Parsons while he was at the DAVE school - in fact, his was the first class to render and animate Minimates.
There are some distinct differences between Groucho and the actual Minimates themselves namely an articuated foot, a different knee joint, and a different hand shape - though whether these were design choices or not I cannot say. It would be interesting if Minimates had an articulated foot. It certainly would allow for even more dynamic poses.
Seeing this classic film star in Minimate form makes me think that eventually this is something that Art Asylum should pursue. Not necessarily The Marx Brothers but film properties - certainly modern film properties but also classic, iconic film characters. While I doubt a Marx Brothers Box set would sell very well perhaps a Charlie Chaplin exclusive would.
What classic films or film characters would transfer well into Minimate form? Leave us a comment and let us know!
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Check out David Parson’s animation/modeling/vfx website here.
For more info on the Marx Brothers click here.
Posted on Saturday 27 May 2006
By Jatta Pake
Recent discussions have swirled around the Minimate collector fan community about the possibility of getting more exclusives or non-currently licensed Minimates. What makes this discussion unique to the toy collecting community as a whole is the actual existence of such a discussion at all. Meaning, collectors of GI Joes or Marvel Legends or Justice League Unlimited toys are not discussing new non-licensed exclusives because the possibility can’t exist. The GI Joe toy is as much defined by its style, articulation, and sculpts, as it is its license. You won’t see Hasbro making Spawn-styled GI Joe toys. But we could see Spawn-styled Minimates. Minimates are defined only by their style, articulation, and sculpts.
Art Asylum, the designers of Minimates, further enhanced this discussion and excitement. Last year, they began advertising the possibility of “Retailer Exclusives” with ads pictured above. Companies or sponsors could now have their logo printed on a colored blank Minimate. Anyone willing to fork over the fees could have a custom Minimate made. The success of this venture can be seen in the popularity of SillyGooserTC’s recent ECCC Minimates and Bad Apple Comic’s recent American Red Cross Minimates. In both cases the Minimates were created for and sold by retailers who provided the production capital to Art Asylum to acquire the product.
I expect other retailers to follow suit, hoping to take advantage of the popularity and buzz generated for Seattle’s SillyGooserTC and Orlando’s Bad Apple Comics. The side benefit of such success is that new exclusive Minimate production prices may fall. Art Asylum will be able to offer better discounts to retailers because more orders are coming in. The bad side will be a flood of new blank Minimate exclusives on the market (if you consider that such a bad thing). But if many exclusives are easily available, collectors may lose interest in getting the new releases, and the exclusives will remain unsold.
I haven’t talked to anyone at Art Asylum so this is purely speculation on my part. It may be a non-issue as factory production capacity limits the number of Minimates created in a year. But dangers remain.
The collectible market tends to follow predictable patterns. First, a company stumbles upon a wildly successful product. I will use Wizards of the Coast as my example. Their product, Magic: The Gathering, hit the scene with a thundering boom. The first run of the Magic collectible trading card game quickly sold out of comic book stores. Wizards of the Coast struggled to expand production to meet the massive demand of this new game. The second and third printing proved to be so popular, that comic book retailers began to hoard packs and sell only individual cards.
In the second stage, the company over produces the product based upon retailer-exaggerated demand. Wizards of the Coast encountered this with their later sales. Huge runs of expansion packs were created which sold poorly at the retail level. The Magic boom turned into a bust as even more cards flooded the market when collectors dumped their collections in disgust.
Wizards of the Coast eventually responded by limiting the number of expansions and printings, which settled the market. Rules changes restored integrity to the game, and the purchase of Dungeons and Dragons diversified their brand portfolio. But the cycle of boom and bust should not be forgotten.
How do you break the cycle of boom and bust? One solution would be to allow the “core” Minimates to be produced as much as the mass market will support. In this case, the “core” Minimates would be characters recognizable and popular with the larger market. For example, millions of Spider-man Minimates can be made and sold at the mass-market level. Other lesser-known characters, such as Gwen Stacey, should remain limited to the specialty market. Art Asylum and Diamond Select seemed to have already adopted this strategy.
Blank Minimates alone would lack uniqueness for collectors but Retailer Exclusive blanks each have printings making them unique. This combination of uniqueness and non-uniqueness has resulted in the brisk sale of Wizard World blanks but falling values of any of the “white” blanks. The “New York Toy Fair” white and the “Free Comic Book Day” white lowered the demand for the later released “Wizard World Chicago” white blank. All blanks are presumably cheaper to produce, but their values to collectors will fall as more are produced.
So a solution will be needed for the Retailer Exclusive blanks as well. Too many blanks will saturate the small specialty market and eventually leave many unsold. So if you are Art Asylum, how do you expand exclusive sales within a small and limited growth market segment of collectors?
One word: army-builders. If the number of buyers in your collector’s market is limited, you can increase sales by selling more Minimates to the same buyer. Since the buyer only wants one Minimate of each unique character, attempt to sell them more non-unique characters.
There seems to have been an initial attempt at the army-building sales model taken by Art Asylum and Action Figure Express with the release of the exclusive Lord of the Rings Elves. I don’t have access to the sales figures for these Minimates, but a lot are being given away for free. It would seem that collectors didn’t jump at the army-building possibilities.
I think the possibilities for successful army building exclusives remain. For one, the Lord of the Rings had passed its expiration date. While an immensely popular movie, the Lord of the Rings product sales slowed overall for this brand. Fewer collectors wanted to build an army out of these characters.
I believe another drawback was size. The Elves were 2.5” in size. I just don’t think the 2.5” size of Minimates were as popular overall as the 2” size, and this was made even less so with army builders. Who wants to have an army of elves towering over their X-Men? It just doesn’t look cool.
But what about an army of S.W.A.T. team officers in battle armor? I can envision a mob of S.W.A.T. officers trying to take down Rhino. Or how about an army of ninjas? The ninjas could pile up on a Battle Damaged Daredevil. The possibilities are almost endless:
Army men
Navy men
Marines
Police Officers
Samurai
Hooded Thugs
Suited Mafioso
Sunglassed FBI Agents
Nazis
Biker Gang Members
Street Thugs
Firefighters
Medics
If you create licensed Henchmen, you could have a virtually endless supply of Hand, Hydra, AIM, and Skrull minions for the Marvel line alone.
Releasing an exclusive based upon an army building character would entail risk, but I think the gamble could be hedged by including popular accessories. For example: The generic Ninja above could include a basic paint design on a black blank. Then add an entire plastic tree full of cool accessories like knives, staves, swords, nunchaku, pole-arms, armor, and other weapons.
So what do you think? Should we encourage the future of retailer exclusives to include Army Builders? I think so.
Let us be heard! Like a million Minimates marching on Washington, demand Art Asylum give us Army Builder Minimates!
Posted on Thursday 25 May 2006
By Jatta Pake
Photo by Monkey13.
Minimate fans were shocked this week to learn the arrival of two new exclusive blanks - the Bad Apple Comics black blank and the American Red Cross white blank. Stay tuned to Minimate Headquarters to find out how you can get your hands on these new Minimates! Thanks to monkey13 for telling us all about these new ‘mates!
Your Batmobile will soon get a little competition from another fast driving Minimate - Speed Racer! This blurb is from the Previews magazine, and it says Speed Racer and Racer X will ship in September. Go Speed GO!
Posted on Wednesday 24 May 2006
Wilson Fisk ain’t bowing to no blank!
Wilson Fisk aka “The Kingpin”. File Photo.
By Fujis
In an uncharacteristic move Wilson Fisk (aka The Kingpin) made a statement regarding the recent events surrounding Evil JP and his world domination.
“I am a great believer in freedom,” Fisk said, “It is one of the things that makes this country great. We do not bow to overlords or dictators, this country was not founded on the ideals of totalitarianism. The reign of this ridiculously named Evil JP will come to an end. And I, Wilson Fisk, will make him pay for his insolence.”
Dr. Doom could not be reached for comment but it is assumed that Evil JP has ousted him from his castle in Latveria and is wielding his supreme power from there.
One can only hope that a conclusion will be reached quickly and that someone will depose this utopian dictator.
Posted on Tuesday 23 May 2006
If you’ve seen me before, raise your hand. Who am I? I am one of the most rare mass produced Minimates on the planet. I have four clear blue brothers and five clear red brothers. I was made to be a production test and my creation was not approved by the Marvel gods. My ultimate destiney from the time of creation was eventual destruction; but I survived. I survived because my makers could not bring themselves to cast away such a rare piece of art. I survived because of basic human emotion. I survived because of greed.
I am the Blue Sapphire Spidey.
The biggest challenge facing any discovery of a mysterious “clear spider-man” minimate involves the verification of the piece’s authenticity. How do we know it is real? The problems abound:
1. Any “clear spider-man” minimates in existance are probably held very closely by the folks at Art Asylum. Because their production was never approved by Marvel, Art Asylum would not want to risk them getting out into the marketplace. It would just look bad, and Art Asulum wouldn’t want to jeopardize their relationship with Marvel.
2. Bootlegs. Minimates haven’t caught on big time in Asia or East Europe yet, but when they do we can expect bootlegs to hit the market. Toy makers in these regions have made bootleg toys based upon American licenses for decades, and their manufacturing processes are bound to be a bit more sophisticated now with the evolution of technology. It is tough to distinguish fake Star Wars toys from real Star Wars toys, and it will be tough to determine if the “clear spider-man” Minimate we see is the real deal or a good fake.
3. Customs. The first time I saw Mini-Mytes customs on one of the custom con websites, I thought I was seeing a past wave of Minimates. I had no idea people customized Minimates, and I was certain these were produced by Art Asylum. It took some reading and investigation before I sheepishly realized these were one of a kind customs made for a contest. Any “clear spider-man” Minimates found could very well be high quality customs.
4. Your Imagination. Psychologists say that we sometimes see only what we want to see. Our brains can only process so much out of the environment that it constantly sorts out irrelevant information. But this can cause us only to see what we want to see, and that may mean we think a “clear spider-man” is out there when it is not. We selectively chose to see only the information that supports our belief.
5. Photoshop. Ah yes. That magical program that removes fat lumps and zits from magazine models. Is there anything it can’t do? There is a chance that any picture of a purported “clear spider-man” is in fact a photoshopped fake. But you would be able to spot one of those right away, right?
Congratulations if you said the above picture was photoshopped. It was. But if you thought the clear blue spidey picture above was real, be careful. You just may have been seduced by the magical mystery of the Blue Sapphire Spidey.
Posted on Monday 22 May 2006
A Toy Maker’s Study in Anthropometry
The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci
By Fujis
Created around 1492 Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a study of human proportion. Along with the drawing of the man (in two superimposed positions contained in a circle and a square) there are notes written in mirror writing, in which DaVinci explored theories of human proportion proposed by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Hence the name, The Vitruvian Man.
I seem to remember hearing years ago that the Vitruvian Man was one of the images that the S.E.T.I. program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) sent out as part of their “interstellar handshake” - an image that would explain our appearance to our alien brethren. But I can’t find confirmation of this.
The Vitruvian Minimate by Art Asylum.
In the image above Art Asylum has replaced the man with a minimate, suggesting that it is a wonder of anatomic perfection. Accompanying the figure is the latin phrase Primus Inter Pares which means: First among equals.
Clearly the coupling of these two elements suggests that Art Asylum set out to create the best block figure on the market. And, not surprisingly, they have succeeded - at least in the North American markets. There is something aesthetically pleasing about the proportions of a minimate, more so than other block figures. I am not proficient at mathematics but I would wager that the golden ratio could be found in numerous ways when examining it.
Other toys have also been given the Vitruvian treatment, although to a lesser degree of success than Art Asylum’s Minimate.
Vitruvian Legoman by Nanobonbon.
Can Lego figures even move that way? (and yes, that was a rhetorical question)
The Vitruvian Man remains one of the most referenced and reproduced images in the world today. A recent incarnation was created as a promotional poster for Spider-Man: The Other by Joe Quesada.
Vitruvian Spider-Man promotional poster by Joe Quesada.
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For more information on the Vitruvian Man click here.
For more information on Anthropometry click here.
For more information on the SETI program click here.
For more information on the Golden Ratio click here.
