Stikfas just barely squeak in under the Throwback rules. They don’t really throw back that far, not before the turn of the century, but they’re over a decade old now, which just makes me feel even older. It seems like I just asked my local comic book store guy to order me a set of two from the Previews catalogue, and a bit later he had them sitting in my pile when I came by to pick up my comics. I had been very intrigued by the regular ads that were popping up in Toyfare magazine and couldn’t wait to try the little guys out. They were every bit as much fun as the pictures promised.
Stikfas, in the beginning, were little black plastic chunks of imagination. Without backstory, face, character, or anything but a simplistic design that they allowed you to do whatever you wanted to with them. The Internet quickly showed the depths of talent in customization, stop-motion animation, and pure creation that were opened up by the little guys.
The line branched out to include all different types of characters based around that initial black body. There were angels and demons, ninja and samurai, dragons, robots, skiing kids, vikings, guitarists, gangsters, nurses, and on and on, all rendered in a strict simplicity of form that hinted at complexity without getting too bogged down in it. I never went completely nuts with collecting them, always being satisfied with one at most with a few extras of some of my favorites. But they all started out with the first all-black blank slate.
The initial figure came with plenty of weapons, each properly “stikfaed-up” to be simplistic yet evoke exactly what they were supposed to be. There’s nothing better than buying a figure and getting a ton of weapons with the figure for it to use. As the line went on, even better weapons were eventually added, and then it got nuts.
He’s small and light, so it’s pretty easy to pose him in a wide variety of gravity-defying poses, and with just a few tweaks, he’ll find that sweet spot of balance and hang there forever.
In a weird way it took me back to my school years when a few properly shaped twist ties could be turned into a fully articulated human being that would occupy me while the teacher was droning on and on about something I already knew. There was no character or backstory to those little guys either, and this was pretty much the same thing except in a slightly more technologically advanced way. Don’t look at me like that! You gotta do what you gotta do.
Like most, I made a few stop-motion movies with these guys, and even used the freeware 3D program called Blender to make a fully articulated 3D version of one to use as a virtual stunt double to recreate that Matrix-styled hover/camera-spin thing they loved to do. Remember The Matrix? Whoa, amirite?
Their ball-and-socket joints meant they had a wide amount of expression in their articulation, and the fit was snug enough so there was very little chance of arms randomly popping off in those early assortments. Unfortunately, when Hasbro took over the brand the plastic seemed to get cheaper and the connections were a lot weaker. Price of popularity and mass-market appeal, I guess. They went from local comic store to Toys R Us … and then being discounted by Toys R Us, and then only a handful of new releases came out, and then not even that. it was a slow, gradual demise, but that doesn’t take away the excitement of seeing what brand new concept would get the Stikfa treatment.
Stikfas hit at a time when the 5-inch Marvel line was dying, and this new 6-inch line called Marvel Legends was just starting up, and who knew how long that would last? For a brief time, it had the most play value of any toy out there. And it all started with this little black chunk of articulated plastic. Not bad at all.
