There’s no avoiding them because they’re just so … everywhere.
What started as a specialty shop item soon spread to just about every retailer you can name, and it’s the impossibly diverse array of licenses that keep this juggernaut of a line chugging along with no signs of stopping. When they first hit in 2010, I found them charming. Being a fan of the super-deformed vinyl world, I bought a few. I was happy to see someone making a go of releasing popular comic book characters in this format after Hasbro’s similar, but more specialized, Mighty Muggs line fizzled. And, truth be told, I expected these to come to a similar fate — after a few quasi-interesting figures were released, I fully expected the now-ubiquitous Funko Pop! to slowly disappear because who the heck was Funko? If Hasbro couldn’t make this concept stick, then some new upstart wasn’t going to either. Uh … yeah. A prognosticator I am not.
Six years later, it seems no license is beyond Funko’s reach, and a property having its key characters released in the Pop! format adds a sort of “pop-culture legitimacy” to the property. Now, like I have heard mentioned many times by many people, I am feeling a bit of “Pop! fatigue” at this point, and I still cannot believe the sheer volume of these things that seem to be available everywhere I turn. But Funko keeps snagging licenses and releasing Pop! figures that I never, ever would have thought were viable in a mass-market collectible format, like the masked Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange or the Golden Girls or (*insert property here*). I continually feel as though I have to pick them up despite feeling as though I’ve more than had my fill of these things by this point. It’s almost a compulsion.
I’ve also seen some people compare the Pop! Phenomenon to the Beanie Baby craze of the ‘90s. I get that, but, at the same time, I don’t. I think the only point the two lines have in common is what started as a pretty niche hobby ended up with a whole lot of mainstream acceptance and participation. My mother collected Beanie Babies, so I watched her go through the all-too-familiar headache of trying to track down rare releases, but aside from that, I don’t really think a Pop! and a Beanie have that much in common since the Pop!s are tied to popular licenses and it’s those licenses that are the basis of the appeal. Like, for me, the appeal of the Gilmore Girls pops is the idea of having Lorelei and Rory in a collectable format. I’d be excited about their being released in any format in any toy line, but it just so happens that they’re going to be Pop! toys, so I’m excited to get those Pop!s. Does that make sense? The property is of chief importance, the medium (Pop!s) is very secondary. Beanie Babies were all about the medium and all the loopholes collectors had to jump through to get the rare ones. It was a different beast altogether, I think, though some of the hoops to jump through are similar.
Last year, we made the decision to par down “the collection.” When it came time to figure out what to do with the Pop!s figures, I had no idea what to do with them. Because there were mountains of them in every store that sold them, I assumed the demand was low and that they didn’t really sell. I was tempted to take what we had to Goodwill just to be rid of them, but I decided to try eBay to see if I could make our money back at least.
Well, I’m embarrassed by how much they ended up selling for. I could not believe it. That was my first clue that people were really into these things. I then learned that Funko often “retires” molds and many of these retired figures are very sought after by collectors. When I was at NYCC I saw a dealer selling some early DC Comics Pop! toys that had been retired, and prices varied from $20 all the way to $1,600. My jaw hit the floor.
We ended up selling a good chunk of our collection and kept just a select few. The Sex Pistols, The Misfits Fiend, Beavis & Butthead, and a few select horror-themed figures were the ones we chose to keep, and the rest were sold — and I thought I was done with them for good. And, despite being virtually surrounded by them in almost any retail setting, I did a pretty good job of ignoring them.
But then The Golden Girls, Labyrinth, Lemmy, Elvira, and Amy Winehouse were announced, so I had to have them, and then Conan, Red Sonja, and the Gilmore Girls were just recently announced, so my list of preorders keeps growing and growing, and I’m somehow okay with amassing a whole bunch of these things all over again.
So I guess I collect these things (no I don’t!).
What’s your story with the Funko Pop! toys? Are you a die-hard? A casual collector? Do you avoid them? Or are you like me and you TRY to avoid them but fail miserably? Sound off below!
