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Post Pulse Con 2021 Interview with Ryan, Dwight, and Dan from the Hasbro Marvel Legends Team
434 Plays4 years ago
On this special bonus pod, Erik sits down with Ryan, Dwight, and Dan from Hasbro's Marvel Legends team to talk about the latest Marvel Legends news following the 2021 Hasbro Pulse Con - hear how you can get your requests in, what their favorite legends from 2021 were, and more!
Follow Ryan and Dwight on Instagram, and Dan on Twitter!
Stay up-to-date on the latest from Hasbro @hasbropulse on Instagram.
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Intro and other voices by Joe Azzari
https://www.instagram.com/voicesbyjoe/
Theme Music is "Game Boy Horror" by the Zombie Dandies
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Transcript
Introduction to Adventures in Collecting
00:00:02
Speaker
Are you ready, kids? Get your parents' permission, check your mailbox, and grab your shopping cart. It's time for the Adventures in Collecting podcast. I'm Eric. And I'm Dave. Welcome to Adventures in Collecting, where we talk toy news, culture, and halls, along with our journeys as collectors.
Marvel Legends Interview Announcement
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome back to Adventures in Collecting. Eric here. Welcome to this special bonus pod of Adventures in Collecting. We had the opportunity to sit down and chat with the Marvel Legends team over at Hasbro following the wrap of PulseCon and their special Hasbro Pulse Premium subscriber event 1027.
Engaging with Hasbro for Character Requests
00:00:50
Speaker
to talk all things Marvel Legends. So without further ado, let's cut to the conversation that I had earlier today with Dwight, Dan, and Ryan of the Marvel Legends team. So the number one question that we get at Adventures in Collecting from people, like anytime we have access to anybody, and especially anybody on the Hasbro team, is when is X character coming?
00:01:20
Speaker
What's your collective or preferred way for fans to get those requests in front of you? All right, so yeah, I'll start it off. Sorry, I am not in my normal seats with my setup behind me, but still wanted to jump in on this interview. But that's a great question, Eric, and I think.
00:01:37
Speaker
No one has ever actually asked us that before. So I'd love to get Dan and Dwight's perspective on this because when we're at the cons or in these virtual type settings, you know, most people know that we can't answer like what figure is coming when, because that's a lot of our marketing and the excitement for figures, whether they're comic characters or upcoming movie stuff that is very, you know, spoiler sensitive. So I think
00:02:02
Speaker
What we do, you know, Dan and I, we love sticking in touch with the community. We watch a lot of like YouTube videos and live streams. And I think when fans put thoughtful effort into, you know, characters and provide a rationale for why they need to be done, you know, maybe there's an anniversary coming up or this figure has never been done in legends or it was done in Toybiz.
00:02:24
Speaker
15 years ago and can use an update. I feel like we're more receptive to that and those types of comments and feedback get our minds thinking more from a marketing perspective. So that's what I'll say. Yeah, for me personally, I mean, I don't think Ryan takes enough credit, but he and I lurk a lot on a number of different people and influencers and websites and
00:02:52
Speaker
I thought this was a really thoughtful question because it is I was trying to think of myself like how what was like the best way. I think, you know, some some websites do a really good job of having their fans like do you like most requested like characters and things of that nature. So if we see something like that, either on YouTube or on one of those websites, we definitely check it out just to see. To Ryan's point, I think
00:03:17
Speaker
those that make very thoughtful suggestions with a lot of consideration rather than just like, this is my favorite X, Y, and Z character, I think that's what catches our eye too, right? So because it has to make a business sense for it. So I would say like a preferred way would try to get like
00:03:38
Speaker
some sort of AI for adventures in collecting. You guys do an episode where it's like we pulled X amount of fans and this is the consolidated list. That'd be an easy way for us to see what the community wants. That's no guarantee that it will happen, right? But we try very hard to make sure that we get a couple in there that are definitely hitting things that fans want. That makes sense.
00:04:05
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, I think one, checking those kind of year end or year beginning polls that get posted on different communities is a great way to kind of see a collective group thinking. I also like seeing what the customizers make out there. So even if they're not directly asking for a figure, when you see how they can turn other figures into other things that
00:04:32
Speaker
they wanted, you know, for themselves. It kind of just kind of sparked something to remember, build formulas and stuff to kind of think about how we can turn some of those kind of fan desires on when the opportunity arises. And then I also have Jesse, and Jesse will constantly send us updates on things that he's been seeing out there as well.
00:04:54
Speaker
I honestly don't need to turn on the internet very often to get bombarded with things from Jesse and the likes of Ryan and Dan when they're cruising the boards and finding tons of stuff as well. So I think between those few channels that I use as well as what the rest of the team hits us with is a really good way to get your request out there into the ethos and hopefully find a home somewhere on a shelf somewhere down the line.
00:05:23
Speaker
Awesome. I would also like to play grammar police, just if I could, because what, you know, I feel like people, if they have requests, they should just own it. Say, I really want to see this character. But what I feel like a lot of people do is they use everyone or no one as a proxy for I or me. They'll say, everyone wants this figure. And it's like, dude, you want that figure. Or they say, no one wants this figure. And it's like, that's just, you don't want that figure. So yeah, just be, you know, speak the truth, right?
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, true. There's a lot of characters out there.
Innovations in Marvel Figure Designs
00:05:54
Speaker
Speaking of new characters, you guys have talked at length about the Vulcan that you announced at PulseCon, and you've talked about the fact that he's going, in all likelihood, this body mold is going to be replacing the Buckycat mold.
00:06:11
Speaker
But what I wanted to know is kind of deeper into that, did you go into the design of the character knowing that you needed to replace that mold? Or was it something where you were designing the character and then once you kind of got those first test shots back, were like, wait a second, like this is way better than we thought it could have ever come out. And like now we can see it replacing this mold going forward.
00:06:34
Speaker
No, I think we actively sought out for a good base body equivalent to do that for. Over the past couple of years, we'd have characters that required just funky boots or weird shoulder pads, and it never allowed us. And because it was only a partial kind of piece, we always just kind of defaulting back to the bodies we had and fitting those parts to it.
00:07:01
Speaker
And then when we came across the Vulcan's design, we're like, oh, fantastic. We finally have an all clean body, um, that gave us the opportunity and the time. And, uh, honestly, we had the budget at that point in time in the year as well to take the money aside and focus on making an all new base body that we will hopefully get multiple years out of going forward and kind of aligning those, those points of development, uh, around, you know,
00:07:31
Speaker
what is that character and kind of laying out. We lay out, we lay out the whole year, you know, a few months before the year, but it evolves and changes throughout the year. But kind of when you can lay out, you know, half a year's worth of build a waves and you're like, okay, cool. Look, we have all of these characters that we want to get accomplished. How are we going to do that? And then you can kind of start checking off what gets billed from where, what is all new.
00:07:58
Speaker
You know, like Psychoman was all new and it was great, but that was a very much a one-off. We're doing it this way. It's like, oh, cool. We have a great body that we can put in at this point in the year. And then we can think about going forward where that could be used in the line to, you know, replace the, you know, Bucky cap in this instance. Well, the Bucky cap mold served us well for, for served us fans well for many years. So thank you. Thank you for your service, Bucky cap.
00:08:25
Speaker
Or pour one out for Buckycat. There we go.
Marvel Anniversaries and New Figures
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah. So one of the things that's kind of always coming up with Marvel because of how long it's been around is these anniversaries, right? So whether it's the anniversary you guys are celebrating right now with the Marvel Legends anniversary and Toy Biz, specifically the 1960s is a huge decade for Marvel. There were a lot of new characters that were created in a lot of anniversaries coming up. But Marvel is marketing 2022 as the year of vengeance.
00:08:55
Speaker
And there are still some some Ghost Rider looks that we have not seen in any form of action figure yet. Do you guys look for opportunities like that specifically to try to check some of those boxes and get some of those alternate and lost looks into the line?
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, with so many anniversaries, like you mentioned, the early 60s was a very ripe time for the Marvel to create a lot of iconic characters. We're not really able to tie into every specific anniversary. We've focused more on kind of broad anniversaries like Marvel Studios 10th, Marvel's 80th, which is obviously huge programs. But sometimes when we're just aware of things, we like to just put it out there.
00:09:39
Speaker
Right, last year was the, I think it was the 30th anniversary of the Infinity Gauntlet original comic series. So, you know, we did that classic Thanos. And then for 2022, it's going to be the 30th anniversary for the X-Men 92 animated series. And so we kicked off the DHS program in that. So we like to do, to sync it up where we can. With regards to Ghost Rider specifically, we've done a couple of cool versions. You know, Danny Ketch is still out there.
00:10:07
Speaker
We know fans want him. He's on our list. And I think we'll continue to look at various ghost riders specifically in the future. If we could, Robbie Reyes. He's on the list too. He's on the list too, ever. So I see Dan, you're doing your dance.
00:10:26
Speaker
Probably I want to get a slave the half centaur ghost rider just because it's just it's just it's just stupid and amazing all mixed together. So I want to get that guy in there somewhere. Yeah, there's some great designs in that world, even Blackheart. There hasn't been a Blackheart Marvel Legends figure in a long time. So
00:10:47
Speaker
So speaking of characters and looks, a lot of characters from the Marvel universe have appeared with some very unique looks in the Fortnite games with Hasbro now producing six inch scale figures for the Fortnite franchise and you know there's precedence for previous brand crossover you know with the the Marvel and Transformers
00:11:08
Speaker
crossover.
Marvel and Fortnite Crossover Possibilities
00:11:10
Speaker
Do you guys see an opportunity there to crossover with the Fortnite team or maybe expand the game reverse one now that that brand is kind of in-house too? Yeah, that's a great point and great question. You know, when the first skins of the Marvel characters came out in Fortnite, I was going crazy, you know what I mean? I really liked the look and I was like, man, those are really dope.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think there's always an opportunity. And like you said, we have this, you know, the benefit of now having an awesome six inch Fortnite line in. I will say there are a lot of complexities when it comes to those type of like crossover type of things. Right. I think the most recent thing that we did was the expanse with the transformer team. Right. And that took a lot of back end work. That's not visible to everybody. Right. In terms of business and things of that nature. And, um,
00:12:04
Speaker
That turned out pretty awesome. So I wouldn't say it's out of the realm of possibility, but I do want to point out that there are so many characters and there are so many different corners of the Marvel universe that we try to tackle every year. So I don't know if it's going to be anything immediate, I would say, right? In terms of the game reverse sub-line, Dwight is a big fan of the Spider-Man game and things of that nature. I'm a big fan of the Spider-Man look from the game too.
00:12:33
Speaker
There are, we're always looking for opportunities, right? Where we can grow. But that being said, we can't reveal right now that we're going to activate on anything. But I would say specifically for that Fortnite question, you know, there's probably a lot of other, you know, backend business stuff that we would need to tackle at this point. But yeah, it's not out of the realm of possibility. You mentioned that getting the Spiderman line, that Miles Morales, that's in the Armadillo bullet figure wave.
00:13:03
Speaker
That's like the easy winner of that wave. That figure is unbelievable. So I'm like, Jonah, I love J Jonah's like finger pointing. Yeah. J Jonah's J Jonah's easily one of the best likenesses you guys have done with that, that inkjet. But this figure like surprised the heck out of me. It really, really did. Like between the hands, the like shock hands, just the articulation in it. It's just, it's awesome.
Galactus Production Update
00:13:28
Speaker
Um,
00:13:29
Speaker
So people, you know, all over the world are getting their sentinels. And now people are thinking, of course, like the next thing, the next HasLab. Do you have an update for everybody on where we are with Galactus? Where is he in production? We are at Check Model Build, which is where the digital scope files get sent over to our vendor and they start breaking that apart and
00:13:57
Speaker
laying it out for actual tooling models. So we're in the first stage of tooling models now, which is great because we are at production with the Sentinel, or we've wrapped production with the Sentinel, and we're able to take that and apply all of our learnings from the Sentinel into the model stages for Galactus so we can look at what worked well and what could work better.
00:14:22
Speaker
and adjust accordingly. So, actually, I think our engineer asked us to go into the office this week to review some new joints for some of the parts of Galactus. So, we're right at that early, you know, building the models so that we can create our tooling masters off of that. Awesome. Yeah, can't wait to see picture updates of that thing.
Favorite Figures of 2021
00:14:46
Speaker
Cannot wait.
00:14:47
Speaker
Um, so lastly, uh, you guys produce a lot of figures in 2021 and with 2022 on the horizon, and I know, uh, Dan, you posted, you guys are going to do your, your fun draft again, but, uh, I just have to ask, uh, each of you, what, what was your favorite, uh, figure from, from 2021? All right. Who wants to go first? I gotta think about this. Let's put Ryan on the spot since he's a, he's a, you know, a distance. Let's, let's make Ryan answer first.
00:15:18
Speaker
The question is, what is my favorite 2021 figure? Is that the parameters here? Yes. Well, I think an easy pick is MODOK.
00:15:31
Speaker
Um, because that was such a fun, a fun figure to do. Uh, I don't, I didn't have the toy biz one from back in the day, you know, getting to work with Tony and Dwight and even our packaging team on it, because we had to go to a closed box and they had to figure out how to dismantle him to fit in the box was kind of a cool thing that we had to plan out on the legend side.
00:15:51
Speaker
with Jason and Ben, which was a fun challenge. And yeah, I just think he looks great. The Mr. Potato Head feature that he can hold all the pieces inside of himself, I thought was awesome. When the team said, oh, we can't talk about it yet on a stream until we test it, until we like, you know, drop test it. I was nervous that we would lose the ability to do that, but I was glad it stayed in the same mode. All right, who's next?
00:16:18
Speaker
I got one. I'll go. That was a good one, Ryan. But I think for me, getting a chance to dive into the MC. I mean, actually, I can tell you right now who my pick is going to be for next year. But I don't think it's been revealed yet. So I'm gonna have to keep my mouth shut for a little while. But I already know what my favorite figure for next year is going to be. But going back to this year, I think my favorite was this big guy.
00:16:40
Speaker
I think the iron monger just turned out amazing. The scale, the size, the fake kind of working pistons and stuff on his back. All the little added, you know, swappable pieces for his forearms and just the overall just kind of giant hulking figure that he is, I think wins out for me. There's a lot that I loved from this year, but I think he's definitely top five material for me.
00:17:09
Speaker
I guess it's almost the end of the year, right? It's time for us to start looking back and making our top 10 favorite figures from the year ourselves. So yeah, Eric, I didn't tell us why we're drafting. So Dwight doesn't know that he needs to draft. This is how Brian and I cheat. We try to like tell him last minute, so he doesn't strategize. And then we just like do our own, like mock draft. You know what I mean? Um, so, uh, for me, it changes every day. So, um,
00:17:37
Speaker
I'm going to cheat and pick two. So one of them is definitely has to be a Shang-Chi. I think Shang-Chi just for me personally has a lot of significance, right? So for me to see like an Asian American type of representation in action figure form, even though it's not the first one, I know a lot of people are yelling at me, that's not the first, you know, whatever. I just mean, I just think for me to help develop that action figure line, I think it meant a lot to me personally.
00:18:04
Speaker
Um, but the figure that I think I would choose right now is probably zombie cap. Cause I remember just, I just think it's so fun to play with every time I looked through its leg and I could like see like, like through it and I still see it like articulates. I always thought I'm always like, man, Dwight and the team did such a great job with that. And, um, yeah, and I'm a big fan of what if the show, so, and a big fan of Captain America. So yeah, that, that figure is just so play fun to play with. I get to just see it and, uh,
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah. So for today, that's probably, that's probably going to be in my draft if Ryan or Dwight doesn't snipe it from me. Oh man. Now I, now I feel like, I feel like I messed up your, your master plan. Yeah, I know. Now you get Dwight all, now you get, what about you, Eric?
Eric's Favorite Figure: Modular Iron Man
00:18:50
Speaker
What's your favorite figure of the year?
00:18:52
Speaker
So, you know, I'm primarily an MCU collector, but I got to admit my my figure of the year this year is a non MCU figure for like the first time since I've been collecting Marvel Legends. My favorite is is modular Iron Man.
00:19:07
Speaker
I was honestly, and kudos to somebody we all know, Jay Hernandez, one of his videos, he's been on our pod before too, but he showed off the video with a modular Iron Man, and I was just like, man, I need that for my little 90s Spider-Man side collection that I have.
00:19:28
Speaker
And yeah that was one where when i got him like he lived on my he didn't go straight to the shelf like he lived on my desk and i just kept posing and playing with them for for weeks it was. Yeah that was that was absolutely a knock out of the park from the painless articulation to like the pain i love the metallic hits it's just that figure is perfect.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah. Stop stealing, stop showing them my picks, man. That's probably going to be in my draft too. Shout out to Jay cause he, I don't think it's technically a 2021 figure. I think black suited Spider-Man is, you know, the figure that he revealed and reviewed, right? That, that would definitely be in my top 2022 items. Right. I don't think we're counting that right. Ryan for 2021, but, um, yeah, shout out to Jay and yeah.
00:20:16
Speaker
I think that's a good point you made there, Eric, about what makes it to the desk as opposed to the shelves. What are those characters? For here, right around me, I have Iron Monger, I have Hydra Stomper, I got 20th Cap, I've even got Lady J hanging out with some of these guys. So those are the ones that just kind of, the ones you want to look at a little bit more often, you kind of keep where you're working first before you go to the vaults in the basement with all the shelves and stuff.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yep. The other one that did that for me, the other, the one that would have been the winner had it not been for modular Iron Man would have been Surtur. Cause Surtur was literally just sitting on my desk with, he's still here. He's, he's right here. I can't, I can't put him in a shelf. I mean, first of all, he's too tall for most of the shelves, but, um, secondly, just the same thing, just the fact that something that large can move like that is just, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a Marvel legend for a reason, right?
00:21:16
Speaker
You're making Ryan mad. You're making Ryan mad. It's easily 1,000% cooler than that Quicksilver. 1,000% cooler than Quicksilver. I think I know what Dwight's favorite new toy podcast is going to be to listen to every week. Oh, man. And this is where I get blocked by Ryan. I finally get that Dwight follow, but I'll get blocked by Ryan after it.
00:21:42
Speaker
I'm netting zero. Guys, I think that's that's going to be time for me. So thank you so much for taking the time to chat with chat with me. This was super fun and I can't wait to see what you guys have next. Yeah, awesome meeting you. Nice meeting you man. Keep it up.
Closing and Listener Engagement
00:22:02
Speaker
Thank you, dear listener, for hanging out with us today. Subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen, and then tell your friends to do it. Thanks also to Joe Azari, the golden voice behind our intro. Our music is Game Boy Horror by the Zombie Dandies. Find more about them both on our show notes.
00:22:18
Speaker
Follow us on social media at AIC underscore podcast on Instagram and Twitter. Stop by and say hi. Show us your toy hauls and share your toy stories. Maybe we'll talk about it in a future episode.
00:22:42
Speaker
This has been a non-productive media presentation. Executive producer, Franca Blaui. This program and many others like it on the non-productive network is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license. Please share it, but ask before trying to change it or sell it. For more information, visit non-productive.com.