Funko Goes Pop: The Death of Fake Nostalgia
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Interesting video about the demise of Funko Pops and how the corporate entertainment industry in general treats nostalgia as a product to sell low effort garbage, wether its movies, comics or vinyl landfill bobble heads.
They killed the comic book stores in the same way. In order to get the good issues they also need to buy all the trash that is just going to sit on shelves for years until they get reduced to basically zero or given away for free.
I bet millenials make fun of boomers for their beanie baby faggotry and then suck the dick of Funko pops
And I'm just here wondering if everyone really forgot all about PEZ.
I STILL have a stash of Pez Dispensers just waiting for them to go up again!
I think my big issue with Funko Pop, aside from them not really looking like they're supposed to, is that they relied on liking the character that is represented as the funk pop thing.
When you could just spend a bit more and get an action figure or a lot more and get one of those desk stand model things that looks exactly like the character.
They felt to me, like they were a lesser version of the thing they meant to be. An inexpensive alternative. To me, who just never understood them, buying one felt like saying "yeah I like that movie/game/whatever ... but not enough to buy a licensed toy that actually looks like the thing I like." as very few of them ever did look enough like it should to be worth it.
I think a lot of it was the gamification of collecting them. The chance for a rare variant, the exclusive stickers from various retailers, the "buy for $150 and get a random exclusive", the collecting apps, etc.
I watched a few youtubers out of morbid curiosity and to them the stupid sticker on the side was more important than the figure itself.
Funko was never substainable because people, if they wanna buy that trash, will only buy specific characters. Now.. if they put out say an obscure character from an obscure movie like... dr weir from event horizon. And then release hundreds of thousands of that into the world. That shit is gonna sit there for a long time. Someome comimg along would have to like event horizon, the character or the actor. Multiply that with tens of thousands of characters..
There arent enough funko "collectors", the ones that buy every funko. My dad bought thousands of funkos during covid.. terrible terrible waste of space and ugly. Most dont sell for shit. Like 5 to 10 bucks. Shit.. after fees, taxes and inflation, lucky to make your money back. Not to mention wasting time and other costs to list them to sell.
Edit to change weird to weir.
That's what made them big ... and caused them to collapse. It happened to many companies, e.g. Magic the gathering (except they managed to recover by MASSIVELY reducing print runs and biting the bullet of decreased revenue). The whole collectible (fake manufactured collectibles and real ones) market was out of whack due to covid.
Mtg recovered by riding the pokemom boom and a final fantasy collab. The pokemon boom seems artificial as hell.
The Pokémon boom was due to the sneaker market collapsing and a bunch of “investors” getting involved, artificially blowing everything up for a few months.
Sneaker heads.. eugh.
How the hell have these things lasted this long?
Soyfaced redditor types and they got massively propped up by the pandemic when everybody stayed at home and spent their money on "collectible" junk.
There's a store near me, Chicago Toys or something like that, that is literally nothing but Funkos top to bottom. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe. That guy is going to be living on the street soon
When I saw them having multiple feet of shelf space at Walmart, years ago, I knew it was over. I never liked them, but the bubble aspect was so obvious, when they had depth and breadth of stock at normal retailers.
And, subbed. This was good, for sure, but the Ollie's vid had me genuinely laughing.