With their 1:6 scale X-Men: the Animated Series figure line, Mondo Toys has a good, lucrative thing going. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that it was never meant to be a full line at all.
That first Comic-Con exclusive “Sad Wolverine” figure based on the meme was just meant to be a funny one-off. “That was a weird swing that really paid off,” says Mondo’s Peter Santa-Maria, who also goes by the name “Attack Peter.” Less of a swing, perhaps, is their new ThunderCats line, which should display well with the already successful, ten-year strong 1:6 Masters of the Universe. Although that Snarf figure, as seen above, looks absolutely terrifying.
“If you light something from below, like a campfire, it looks a little creepier!” insists Santa-Maria, showing off a better-lit photo from his phone. “He’s meant to be like a Jim Henson-esque real-world maquette.” Adds his colleague, Hector Arce, “The goal was when we do the ThunderCats line, similar to MOTU, is to get into concepting what could be a ThunderCats film. Push the realism, keep the spirit of the character, keep the silhouettes, keep the color palettes, but treat them with the same reverence that we’ve come to expect.”
While MOTU and ThunderCats seem compatible, and other companies have shared parts and body bucks between the lines, Mondo will not. Arce tells us, “These are all brand-new sculpts, this is all brand-new tooling; we would never cross the two IP into sharing parts.”
Behold a Pale Horse
Having taken a big risk with a $500 Battle Cat figure — “It was so expensive to make,” says Santa-Maria — the company arguably took a bigger one by creating an all-new character in the same size and price range: Scare Glow’s nightmarish new horse, Scare-Mare.
“We were planning a new Scare Glow because the other two that we’d done both sold out in minutes, and they were usually brought out as Halloween special editions,” says Santa-Maria. “We were really just reusing tooling – using a Skeletor body with the decal bones on top, so I wanted to create a new Scare Glow that fits in with everything we’ve done in the line since; that really has that Mondo spirit of reinterpretation of the character.”
“So as we were doing that we thought it’d be really cool if Scare Glow had a mount of some sort. He doesn’t have one, and he’s one of my favorite characters. Skeletor has Panthor, He-man has Battle Cat, She-Ra has Swift Wind, so we were like, what would be Scare Glow? Scary death horse, right?”
Death Becomes Them
He continues: “And it sounded cool, so we got to designing, and first of all, asking Mattel for permission to even think about the idea, and they were very gracious, amazing partners and said ‘Yeah, let’s see what you got.’ So we went to work, and we brought the character to life and Mattel loved them, so we were like, all right, let’s go. It’s now officially canonized the characters.” Arce notes that there’s already a Funko Pop in the works, and Scare-Mare will appear in the Funko Fusion video game. As for Mondo’s Masters of the Universe, a 200x-style He-Man is up next, to kick off a whole sub-line based on the Mike Young Productions 2002 cartoon.
But scary stuff in general, in the minds of Team Mondo and many other collectors, is under-utilized in the 12-inch scale, and they aim to remedy that with Mondo Showcase, the new official name for their collection of (so far mostly Universal) horror-themed figures that includes M3GAN and They Live’s John Nada. New for Comic-Con is the Gill Man, who will feature “a soft body, silicone or soft PVC with an armature inside,” per Arce, as well as an interchangeable head from the movie Revenge of the Creature. They’re well aware that other figures of this sort sometimes have problems with rotting or tearing, but Arce says, “There are some good examples out there that we’re using as reference…I definitely think that whatever we create will outlive you. That’s the goal.”
Who Else Ya Gonna Call?
For more family friendly scares, Mondo’s moving into 6-inch figures with The Real Ghostbusters, based solely on the animated series and not on original Kenner toy designs. “Stuff that you saw in that cartoon that you wish there were toys of,” says Santa-Maria. The hero versus ghost two packs, costing around $202, will kick off with Peter Venkman and Sam Hain, and Egon Spengler and the Boogeyman. Santa-Maria prefers 12-inch to 6-inch generally, but felt that in this case, the fans spoke loudly.
“Alex, our sculptor, created virtual sculpts for fun, and he posted ’em, and it kind of started this viral moment of toy collectors going, ‘We need that.’ And we’re like, ‘We definitely don’t have the rights; can we get the rights?’ And it started this whole chase. We have a couple diehards in our company that are Ghostbuster fans; everyone’s like, we want ’em 1:12. We can do them 1:6 later, but we want 1:12. We’d been wanting to get into 1/12 and see how that works and how we could approach that, so it worked out. It wasn’t so much about a cost thing –- the goal is to build out a very deep line if we can.”
Back in 1:6, they’ll start a Spider-Man animated line, with Spidey and Venom. “We just frontloaded it with — if you could only do two characters, and something happens and we couldn’t continue, get Spider-Man and Venom out. And we’ll go from there,” says Santa-Maria. New Batman Animated figures include Clayface, Scarecrow, Batman Beyond, and Poison Ivy.
Voice of a Generation?
A casual fan can’t help noticing that Mondo leans heavily into properties of the ’80s and ’90s. Is that a calculated move because Gen-X has more disposable income than younger kids? Perhaps less so than you’d think. “It’s not so calculated,” says Santa-Maria, “We really are just designing to please ourselves, and we happen to be of this demographic. That’s all we can do. If we try to second-guess what every other age demographic would possibly want, I don’t think we’d be as successful. It’s better if we stay true to ourselves and make the things that we want, that we don’t see out there, and I think doing that we resonate. We all grew up with the same stuff. We just are trying to please ourselves, and in doing that we’ve been fortunate enough to resonate with you guys.
Looking through the images below, we can see they’re doing a solid job of it.
