March, 2008
March, 2008 |
|
|
|
|---|
1. What's with all the toys? I'm not exactly sure - I had plenty of toys as a kid. I think I've got some sort of latent collector gene that skipped a generation - my mom's parents were more practical about it. They would buy things at garage sales and flea markets, fix them up, and sell them out of their garage. So they were sellers, but they did keep some of their finds for themselves. All I know is that I've been collecting since I was a kid. I started with comic books and movie trading cards. My parents liked flea markets too, so I'd buy an old toy here and there when I could. Part of it was just compulsive, but I think I've kept collecting toys because there's something that I really love about seeing a cartoony design in three dimensions. Seeing some of my inspirations (like Ed Benedict, the king of the early Hanna-Barbera characters) 'made real' just makes me happy. My collection is pretty big! I started to photograph everything for insurance purposes a little over a year ago, and I'm still nowhere near being done. I've shot about nine hundred and fifty photos, and some pictures have up to four toys in them, so I'd say I easily have at three thousand or more. Of course, I'm still buying things, too. My office moves around a lot at work, so 99.9% of my collection is at home. Buying a good display case is expensive, so a lot of my toys are not displayed well. I have a lot of stuff on shelves in the basement, and some are still in boxes from my last move. I try not to keep anything boxed up, because I think it's pointless to own if I never look at it. My collection has always expanded and contracted, but in different ways. Originally, I would donate any unwanted toys to a museum in Wisconsin. I did that for about ten years. Now that I have a mortgage, I sell my ill-considered impulse purchases on eBay so I can buy other things. My collection's big enough now that I need to trim it down a little bit. 2. Is there a particular criteria to what is collected? Appeal, mostly - I just have to like it. Naturally, nostalgia plays a big factor. Craftsmanship is important, but I'll buy a badly made bootleg toy if I think it's funny. I focus the most on the accuracy of the sculpt, the paint job, and balance, which can be important in vinyl or PVC toys. A toy may look great in its package, only to sag a few weeks later because the sculpt is too top-heavy for those materials. It's heartbreaking, because it's clear a lot of hard work went into the toy otherwise. Sometimes the sculpt will be great, but the toy can't stand up on its own and really needs a base. That's one of my biggest pet peeves. |
3. Are you a competitive collector? That is, do you have rivals? Not anyone that I know personally. If you buy something at a toy show, the dealer that you're buying from is a rival in a way, because he already has what you want. If you buy something on eBay, the people bidding against you are rivals. But I've never noticed an alias that pops up again and again on different auctions. I don't have a collector Moriarty to my Holmes. 4. Is there a toy holy grail that you seek? Not really. I do have some things from the fifties and sixties that I'm trying to get for less money. Two that I'd really like to own are the Bedrock Band (a battery operated Fred Flintstone behind a drum kit) and the Kooky Spooky Whistling Tree (a tin tree toy that looks like something out of The Wizard of Oz or H.R. Pufnstuf. They both show up on eBay fairly often, but I can't pay what other bidders are willing to spend, so I lose a lot! 5. About the Happy Beaver toy, is this your creation? How'd you do that? I designed the "Happy Beaver" toy, and financed its production. It wasn't difficult, for the most part - the cost was the most prohibitive aspect. I'd been selling t-shirts with my artwork on them, and I was looking though old drawings for a new design. My wife spotted this doodle of a beaver that I'd done a while back with a Sharpie on a scrap of paper. She loved it, and thought I should make a beaver T-shirt. Well, she certainly had something, because that design sold far better than any of the others. I'm not exactly sure when the idea of making my own toy crystalized in my head - I think it'd been gestating for quite a while - but when it became a real possibility, the beaver was clearly the best choice for the first figure, having proved its appeal already. I drew up a turnaround of the character for the sculptor to use as reference. I've worked in animation a long time, so I was used to that - it's the first thing you do once you've chosen a design. I then talked with Vin Teng, a sculptor that I'd seen at the San Diego Comic-Con for several years. I was always impressed with how he could sculpt stylized designs, so I contacted him to |
The studio where I work has a lot of different connections, and they work with Gentle Giant quite a bit. I love their merchandise, so they seemed like a great choice for the next step - finding a go-between to talk with the overseas manufacturers. Gentle Giant was great - they helped me to pick a factory, they painted up a color model for reference, and supervised everything once it left my hands. All that I had to do was put down a deposit, approve the color model, whip up the box art, and wait. I got everything back right before last summer's Comic-Con. Selling them at a booth there was a big thrill for me! Once Comic-con was over, I had a 'premiere party' to help promote the toy. Brian Flynn and Dora Drimalas hosted it at their Super 7 store in San Francisco. They've been a huge help with advice and support. They make their own toys, so they're very enthusiastic about newbies like me who are just starting out.
I made five hundred of them, and I still have some left! You can buy one at my website (jeffpidgeon.com), or at the Super 7 website. The thing that's been kind of funny is that I'm starting to get emails asking me about toymaking as if I'm some kind of veteran, even though I've only been doing it for a year! I love it, though, and I'm happy to help. Right now it's a very expensive hobby, but I'd love to be able to build a business out of it! I definitely want to make more characters. +1. Are there toy design gods that inspire you? Michael Lau, Eric So, Steven Silver, Marvin Glass, Tim Biskup, David Horvath, Ole Kirk Christiansen, Patrick Morgan, Brian Flynn, Nathan Jurevicius, Randy Bowen, Todd McFarlane, Mat Falls... there's tons of great toy creators out there! +2. If you could be a toy, what kind would you be? I'd like to be a Clerks Inaction Figure. I'm pretty close to being one already! Now that I think of it, that's my toy grail - to have an action figure of myself designed by Steven Silver. |
|
