by Taylor Smart
Hello, and welcome to Monday Mini Madness! Monday will now be the day you can tune in for news, reviews, pictures, and all things mini figures. Today I will be talking about something that is pretty unique to mini figures and that is the blind bag/box. You’ve seen these in stores whether it be back in the toy aisle proper or even up on a shelf by the cash register. They come sealed in bags or boxes so you don’t know what you are going to get until you open it. Funko in my opinion is the leader of blind boxes with their Mystery Minis, they have a license for everybody: TMNT, Walking Dead, Disney, Marvel, DC, Game of Thrones, Hello Kitty, Horror Classics, Science Fiction, Adventure Time… That isn’t even all of them and it’s just one company!
Funko is not the only game in town though: Diamond Select Toys has TMNT Minimates, Lego has a regular line of mystery minis (currently on series 12), Kidrobot has Dunny, Labbit, and more, even Playmobil has them.
THE MEAT The price on mystery minis is a huge selling point. Say you’re in line to check out at the store and you see a blind bag/box from one of your favorite television shows or comics and it is only $3-$6. If you are anything like me you are going to shrug your shoulders and figure, why not? Then you get home and open it which is when one of two things will happen. Either you get a character you really wanted or you get one that you don’t particularly care about. If it is the former - great, you are happy! If it is the latter then you may go back and try again or you may give up and feel like you wasted your money (or you can trade these easily). In the latter situation I would suggest you not be too disappointed, you took the risk once and why not take it again, then if you get the character you really wanted they will have a partner to stand next to on the shelf or to beat down during the next play time. If the risk isn’t worth it to you there is always eBay, just be ready to pay a little bit extra to guarantee which character your getting.
Mystery mini figures are a ton of fun so I bought a few that I would like to share with you. Some I found while browsing a toy aisle and wanted to see what they were like, I have never seen or heard anything about these so this should be entertaining!
First off I finally grabbed a Guardians of the Galaxy mystery vinyl bobble-head by Funko. I am not a fan of the bobble-head style full size Pops, but I thought I would see how the minis are. I would be happy to have any of the characters in my collection but the one I want most is Groot. I ended up getting Rocket and he is great! If he is any indication of the rest of the mini bobble-heads I will be getting more soon. His paint is very crisp, with two spots of overspray on the back that you really have to look for and don’t detract from the figure at all. His tail touches the ground in the back which gives him a very stable stance.
Next up is a NECA/Wizkids Godzilla mini figure that I found sitting all by its lonesome on the shelf. I have never seen or heard of these and I looked around the store and couldn’t find any other evidence of Godzilla toys anywhere. The package didn’t give me much indication of what characters I might expect, the only thing the package told me is that the figure is based on the 2014 Godzilla movie. This being a Godzilla series I, of course, hope to get the king of monsters himself, which luckily enough I did! The figure itself is quite small, just under two inches, but has a good amount of detail. The whole body is textured and he has separate rows of back spikes which I was not expecting. Something else I didn’t expect was for Godzilla to be standing on a base. The base is a translucent textured blue water feature that adds a bit over half an inch to the total height. I like this figure a lot but it is very monochromatic (like the flick) so the trick is finding a good place to display it. It will need to be somewhere well lit in order to see any of the detail.
These last two I found while browsing Shopko and they were on sale for $3.00 a pack. The Playmobil bags (series 4) caught my eye because they had two different colors of bag, blue and pink. The blue seemed to be directed at boys (wizard, firemen, knight…) and the pink at girls (princess, fairy, mermaid…), after a closer look at the packages I decided to give one a shot. I was really hoping to get the mad scientist but ended up with the pilot/air traffic controller. The figure comes unassembled and has a piece that acts as an inner skeleton and holds the whole thing together nicely. I may give these another chance, I really want the mad scientist!
The second thing I saw at Shopko was a product called “Trash Pack” by Moose Enterprises. The packs describe these as “the gross gang in your garbage” and had interesting looking garbage monsters on them, and the biggest selling point for me is that you get two per pack. These turned out to be a bit of a disappointment; something that the package doesn’t tell you is that these figures are pencil toppers. I was expecting them to be vinyl, slightly larger, and a bit more detailed. Most of the room in the package is taken up by the individual miniature garbage cans that each character comes in. One of the characters I got is an ultra rare and is sticky, this allows you to throw him at the wall and then he rolls down it, which was quite entertaining. The figures themselves don’t seem to be as detailed as they should be making it easy for me to pass on these in the future
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NEWS: I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything new since Thursday, I’ll keep my eyes peeled to bring you something next week! If you’ve got any questions or comments feel free to let me know.