Naughty or Nice by Fresh Monkey Fiction

https://twitter.com/toybroreviews/status/1708684251393036410?s=20

Halloween has now been added to the Naughty or Nice Collection!

I'm a bit disappointed with the body reuse here. The santa buck is a bit distinctive size wise. I think this might have been better on a more normally built buck. 

So Santa and elf bodies with a pumpkin head...

Pass.

Yeah, this is a bit of a weird one. I get the theme, we want to do a "Naughty/Nice" dichotomy with a different holiday, but it feels like there's not enough there. It feels like it wants to go for a Jack Pumpkinhead vibe, but the body doesn't really fit my impression of that character. They feel like they'd work as weird mutant henchmen for a more singular Halloween or spooky themed baddy, a Green Goblin or Scarecrow or even Poison Ivy. 

@jakeekiss Yeah I picked up the one with the flannel shirt just because I can say he's a possessed/mutated farmer

But really disappointed in the lack of new tooling here body wise. Like we couldn't make a new 5POA body for the pumpkin elves? They could just be little kid trick or treaters with a simple body. When this was first teased, I was expecting new tooling because I figured any thing monster wise could be reused in Monster Force.

Now I'm really worried about wave 3 for Naughty or Nice because it was supposed to be more than just santa and krampus in wave 3

@thewyldman TBF, I don't think this says much about Wave 3. All waves are being run sort of as crowd-funded pre-orders to gauge interest before work begins. My guess is wave 3 will have more variety and a longer lead-time before delivery. These are slated 2nd quarter '25, while my guess is we'll see the wave 3 stuff go up for preorder in December with close to a full year turnaround.

Since these are mostly reuse the lead time on them can be shorter as it's just heads, lower legs, and a few accessories.

@jakeekiss These have more than a one year turn around considering they're slated for Q2 2025. With their heavy reuse, I'm curious when a more new tooling dependent wave 3 might hit unless they're planning to run these at the same time in the factory.

@thewyldman Oooh good point. I was seeing and typing '25 and my brain was thinking '24. That is odd. Hmm. Well, fingers crossed for the Naughty or Nice 3 wave then. I suppose we'll see. I'm glad they announced the small accessory pack for later this year since I only got cyborg Santa and that will let me display him as normal "undercover cyborg" Santa as well. I do still hope for a Ms. Claus (optimally, a cyborg Ms. Claus) and I'm still really tempted to grab the Mall Santa this year.

They might plan to run it all at the same time too. It's hard to say given the Monster Force AND the space line (Voyagers?) are also coming. They have a LOT in the pipeline for 1/12. It's kind of blistering how fast they seem to have ramped up. 

Not only that, but the sculptor for N&N has their own zombie astronaut and scifi figs that seem like they may come out through Fresh Monkey as well (and I'm really looking forward to those). 

I see the pumpkin guys haven't been funded yet according to their website so if you're feeling spooky this halloween give em a backing

I love Halloween, but these just aren't doing anything for me.  The NECA Monsters work better for what I have in mind for a Halloween display.  

I did end up ordering three of the Santas, though.  Checking it twice, and the reissues of the classic and jolly Santas.  Those all say December 2023.  Hopefully they arrive before Christmas.

@handsome Yeah mostly just preordered the two out of obligation and to let them know I wanted more Halloween related stuff

So I have to agree the lack of new parts for the bodies make these less good than they could be,  although, the torn pants on the Patch Pumpkin seem to be new.

I kind of like the Patch Pumpkin figure -  seems like an odd, pumpkin headed sort that is pretty dissimilar from any other pumpkin headed figures that have been made.    I don't like it enough to order it -  there isn't anywhere in my display it would easily fit -  but I don't hate it.

The other one though -  the green pumpkin head, the flannel shirt and the jeans tucked in to Santa boots just looks dumb to me.     Even if they had just reworked the figure to have work boots it would have worked better for me.  As is it's a non-starter.

I ordered a few of each Hauntling, mainly to use with the extra elf heads I have sitting around. I asked on the Facebook page about maybe doing an accessory pack with matching color elf hats and so on, seems unlikley if these don't hit higher numbers.

I found the "nice" Pumpkin guy to look more evil than the plaid shirt "naughty" one. But ordered both. I'll use the extra pumpkin Hauntlings heads around the "nice" Pumpkin guy, give him the axe and the exploding pumpkin from the "naughty" one, and maybe do something with the plaid shirt figure to make another Santa.

I hope they do have something new for Christmas though, Mrs. Claus and Reindeer seem like no brainers to me to match some of the themes like the military, pirate, robot, zombie looks in particular...

I’m curious for the inevitable Naughty or Nice/Monster Force crossover.

I need to see what Santa looks like when he’s geared up ready to fight the Forgotten King.

Regretting not asking about reindeer at Power Con, but did ask on IG and got a kind of coy response indicating that they’re on the radar.