Craig Drobis is the SVP of Marketing for boys action figures and collectors for Jakks Pacific. Craig will be answering your questions for all Ask Jakks submissions. ToyHypeUSA will be sending him monthly questions and we will have your answers back on or around the beginning of each month. Send us your questions to [email protected]. Send in your questions by October 15th.
Jakks Pacific products can be ordered on Entertainment Earth, BigBadToyStore, Megalopolis: City Of Collectibles, Hobby Link Japan, and Amazon.com.
I wanted to follow up about the Kooba army builder set from last month, and ask about the Kooba with the Football Helmet (named Chargin’ Chuck) that was in Super Mario for Super Nintendo, and other game appearances. If possible, could this be a character to consider for Bower’s Castle?
You know I love hearing suggestions of characters and themes to do. This is another one for consideration. As usual, I just want to everyone to know we really do consider all characters and work with Nintendo and our development team to select the characters we believe have broad appeal and fit the themes we are building. So nothing is off the table and we appreciate the recommendations.
For the next large scale playset, do you think that Jakks would consider the Hooktail Castle, the castle that appears in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door?
This is another good suggestion. We are really pleased with how Bowser’s Castle has been received and continues to sell. However, in particular for the big sets, we have been looking for locations which appear across multiple games and common thread rather than very one off specific games. So, never say never, but this one is pretty specific.
I was surprised that Mega Man: Fully Charged did not get any new announcements aside from what was shown at SDCC. Are more waves coming in the 5” and deluxe figure scales?
At this point there are no additional waves in production. This is one of my favorite lines at Jakks with how well all the figures came out. Our design and development team did a great job on this line. However, the Sales of the launch toys and waves haven’t justified us continuing on to the next waves at this time. We do have the Mega Man X Megabuster which is new for this fall and should be coming to GameStop very soon. We are very excited about that addition and we will continue to develop game based Mega Man items going forward.
For classic Sonic the Hedgehog, is offering the bendables in 8-bit deco or even possibly a 2.5” or 4” figures with this deco something that has been considered?
The launch of the Sonic line has been great. We really appreciate the response to the 4” bendable figures and will definitely evolve the line over time. If we are to do an 8-bit figure, it likely wouldn’t be in the 4” scale, but maybe in the 2.5” scale, as we have done with Nintendo. There are no near term plans for 8 bit but there are some anniversaries on the horizon where this treatment may make sense.
Have there been any new developments on Big Figs as a line? I recall that WWE’s John Cena and Evolution Rebirth Batman are the only two figures released this year, and the fact there were no mentions of Big Figs from the Jakks panel at SDCC implies that nothing is currently happening. Has Jakks looked further into a subscription made-to-order option as companies such as Super7 are doing with Masters of the Universe Classics and ThunderCats Classics? Or is the Big Figs line in general still on hiatus?
Unfortunately there are no new developments of the Big Figs line going forward. The releases you mentioned are the last for now. We have looked into a subscription model and may be able to execute it in the future. However, that is not where our strength and focus is at this time.