Chewbacca and Buster Bluth. Doctor Who and The Big Lebowski. Joey Tribbiani, Hermione Granger, Bruce Wayne, and…a dancing baby tree.
The world’s largest characters have become the tiniest toys, and they’re making the biggest impact on the pop culture zeitgeist. Funko’s Pop! Vinyl line — a series of TV and film character figures recognizable by their squared-off heads and black eyes — has landed on a short list of must-have collectibles of the modern era, though it was a long road getting there.
“We started off with five characters in the DC Comics line. I brought them to Comic-Con in 2010, and got a horrible response from our diehard bobblehead fans,” the company’s CEO, Brian Mariotti, recalls. “But we were getting all these unique people in our booth — mainly women — that had never been in there before. And I knew at that point we had a hit on our hands.”
Five years later, Funko’s Pop! collection boasts almost
3,000 unique pieces via licenses ranging from
Star Wars and
Shaun of the Dead to
The Breakfast Club and
Orphan Black. (Most recently,
EW debuted the newest line: all six Friends, plus their pets.) The collection of 3.75 inch figurines stands out in the marketplace thanks to a whimsical uniform style, a fair price point (most retail for around $10), and perhaps most vital, a “something for everyone” approach to its offerings of TV, movie, and video game characters from both massive phenomena and offbeat darlings.