A Trip To the Dark Side?
As you may know, we just went live with our Prison Suit Trump Action Figure this week. He's turned out to be a pretty big hit but honestly we had no idea how he'd be received when we first announced him.
We're a bit out of our comfort zone here. Our stated mission has always been to turn our real life heroes into action figures and we weren't sure how people would feel about us dabbling in the dark side. But the numbers don't lie – clearly a bunch of you wanted to add a baddie to your collection.
It's not a huge surprise though. Everyone knows that it's the villains that sell movie tickets. And Darth Vader is far and away Star Wars' best selling character. (We're pretty sure kids don't even know who Luke is anymore!) So there's clearly a precedent here. Like it or not, bad guys are fun.
So we should make more of them, right? Well not so fast.
On the other side, we've also gotten plenty of feedback along the lines of "I already see enough of him" and "I'm so disappointed you did this". It was clear that some of our biggest fans felt pretty strongly that this was not the way to go.
Our house is divided. What's a brand to do?
We did what we often do in these moments - we asked you for advice. First we sent out a survey just asking whether or not we should make more bad guys. Then we followed up by asking the people from each camp to suggest which heroes or villains they'd most like to see immortalized in plastic.*
The results were truly fascinating! We could tell you about them but we thought it would be more fun to show you instead. So we laid out this handy infographic. Have a look!
What do you make of it? And if you were us, what would you do? Let us know in the comments.
* Psssst... you can still add suggestions to that surveys if you want. Here's the Good Guys Survey. And here's the one for Bad Guys Survey.
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65 comments
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agreed creating bad guys gives them credibility and people that support those folk will buy them and proudly display them as heros….not villains… this is a slippery slope
Jeremie on
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Same. 100%.
Ginny on
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I wouldn’t buy a single one of the villains. Many have caused me too much angst already. I was getting stressed just reading their names.
Ginny on
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I wouldn’t buy a single one of the villains. Many have caused me too much angst already. I was getting stressed just reading their names.
Ginny on
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You’re seeing it differently than I remember it. I remember that Archie as always proven wrong, and often humiliated for his idiocy. In fact, Carroll O’Connor made it clear that he’d walk off the show if Archie ever was made to look “right”. The impression I got from lots of whites who felt very guilty for acting like him, or for knowing people like him, was that he opened their eyes to how insidiously bigotry is interwoven in our society. O’Connor had a black goddaughter who was an adult by the time of the series, and he was a very outspoken progressive liberal.
Natalie on
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Who would you suggest?
Natalie on