As you may know, we just went live with our Prison Suit Trump Action Figure this week. He's turned out to be a pretty big hit but honestly we had no idea how he'd be received when we first announced him.
We're a bit out of our comfort zone here. Our stated mission has always been to turn our real life heroes into action figures and we weren't sure how people would feel about us dabbling in the dark side. But the numbers don't lie – clearly a bunch of you wanted to add a baddie to your collection.
It's not a huge surprise though. Everyone knows that it's the villains that sell movie tickets. And Darth Vader is far and away Star Wars' best selling character. (We're pretty sure kids don't even know who Luke is anymore!) So there's clearly a precedent here. Like it or not, bad guys are fun.
So we should make more of them, right? Well not so fast.
On the other side, we've also gotten plenty of feedback along the lines of "I already see enough of him" and "I'm so disappointed you did this". It was clear that some of our biggest fans felt pretty strongly that this was not the way to go.
Our house is divided. What's a brand to do?
We did what we often do in these moments - we asked you for advice. First we sent out a survey just asking whether or not we should make more bad guys. Then we followed up by asking the people from each camp to suggest which heroes or villains they'd most like to see immortalized in plastic.*
The results were truly fascinating! We could tell you about them but we thought it would be more fun to show you instead. So we laid out this handy infographic. Have a look!
What do you make of it? And if you were us, what would you do? Let us know in the comments.
* Psssst... you can still add suggestions to that surveys if you want. Here's the Good Guys Survey. And here's the one for Bad Guys Survey.
65 comments
Hi Bridgit,
Ready for a fascinating fact? We actually tried to produce a Dalai Lama Action Figure in 2018 but it turned into a complete fiasco. No factory would touch the figure once they realized who it was out of fear of getting on the wrong side of the Party. Come to think of it, we should really write a blog post about that whole crazy episode someday. It would give us an excuse to share the pics of the sculpt, which was amazing. He was quite probably the best sculpt Mike ever made for us to be honest. Sadly he got either lost or destroyed somewhere along the way and the pics we have are all that remains of him.
Ok, truly belly laughing, Kathleen over your hysterical description of the orange man, and your shelf. Thanks for that. There is so little to laugh at lately. I too voted for the good guys, but thought if ever buying the villain, it would be him in the orange jump suit. But then—there is the shelf with Pelosi, RBG and Kamala, and I too, think they would be repulsed standing next to him. Hmmm. What to do?
I am with the good guy group. Unless the villains are sporting orange or handcuffs/leg irons 🥳
I love your little guys, but we don't need to give the bad guys any more energy. I say let them go, focus on the positive. Give us heroes. I would like to nominate the Dali Lama as a hero to emulate.
Very astute comments. Actually, now that I have my prisoner Trump figure, I’m not sure I want to display it. I get aggravated looking at it.