The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man bank has been such a huge success that I decided to look into two variants.  One will remain secret (for now), but the other one is here.  He’s a glow-in-the-dark blue variant (similar to the Minimate we did for San Diego Comic Con).  The head in the picture is the wrong one (the production piece will have the “happy” face), but the material prototype turned out so well that I had to share with you all.

Meh, it sounded funnier in my head, but let’s go with it.  The point is, the time has come at last for our bust bank line to branch out into the wonderful world of Clones and the almost limitless possibilities for variants.  The lead-off release is, obviously, the basic Clone Trooper.  Much like the R2 bank, the Clone is based on digital scan data and was painted by Ed Wires.  Look for him at the start of 2010.

Sometimes even the best of us guess wrong.  In this case, we were caught off guard at how phenomenally well the Battlestar Galactica figures were selling in Toys R Us.  Those poor stores are running out of figures at an alarming rate and the next assortment isn’t scheduled for another few months.  What’s a boy to do?  (more…)

Once he put his pod racing behind him, Anakin Skywalker got himself some fancy new threads and a swanky Imperial job.  Here he is as he looked in A New Hope, just after vaporizing Obi-Wan.  Sure, he was a friend and mentor, but you can’t expect a Sith Lord to ever forgive being called Little Annie.

Here we have the approved paint for the R2-D2 figure bank (what I am unofficially calling the “Quarter Scale R2″).  Personally, the droids were some of my least favorite characters, but I have to admit that Eddie really did a great job on this little fella.

For your viewing pleasure I bring you Kat’s painted casting of the Dawn: Back In Black PVC statue.  I asked her to make sure the piece maintained the maturity and sexiness of the original art and she came through with flying colors (pardon the awful pun).

OK, that was definitely not a clever title to be proud of, but bear with me.  We recently announced the Ghostbusters Logo Bank but a lot of the images that went to the publice were Photoshopped while our painters and factory contacts worked to get us an actual sample to shoot and show.  Well, the wait is over.  This is the actual approved product in person and it is every bit as awesome as we said it would be.  25 years later and people still love that iconic symbol.

I’m still not sure how Abomination ranks in the popularity scale of the Marvel Universe, but no one can deny that this is an outstanding companion piece to the Green Hulk figure.  Gabriel did a phenomenal job bringing the concept into 3D, but Eddie’s paints pushed this into the must-own category.

An icon is an icon. When we planned the Star Wars roto bank line, we knew there were certain must-do characters. Of course, you the fans knew this as well. Well, now it is time for Darth Maul. Having been the first (and best selling) of our Quarter Scale figure line, there was no way to overlook this Sith apprentice when it came to banks.
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Here is the final paint on the Marvel Select Wolverine vs Sabretooth figures.  It seems like this project was in development forever, but it was well worth the wait.