ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

The most frustrating aspect of Toy Fair is that whole pesky ‘look, but can’t buy’ thing. There are palettes full of freshly delivered awesome at every turn, and almost none of it can come home with you. No, nearly everything that you come across is at least six months away from being a produced reality that you can welcome into your home – and the subsequent delayed gratification is just a bit itchy.

If there was one location at the Fair that held the highest concentration of teasery, it was Toy2R, who have a hand in far more toys than I’d originally realized.

The most significant tingles began when I saw the upcoming line of Domo Qees, which feature the popular character in a huge variety of very interesting colorways – clear, chrome silver and gold, woodgrain, rainbow, plaid, and a whole bunch more that work excellently together or on their lonesome. These guys, which measure about 2.5″ tall, will be blind boxed, include the typical ratioed distribution, and include ‘Creata-A-Qee’ pieces that can be used to assemble bonus figures. Major action figure lines have been pulling that trick for years, and dammit, I love it. Building a giant Galactus from the spare parts in my Marvel Legends is one of my better toy collecting experiences.

Jason Freeny seems to be the Toy2R artist of note this Toy Fair, and it’s a completely deserved position. Not only are his Yolkel customs going into official production, but they’ll be producing an actual Qee based on Freeny’s ‘anatomical’ design series. While the piece is still in the conceptual stages, Toy2R is playing with the idea of making it a highly detailed 12″ piece that comes apart like a science class anatomical model. If science class and animals were a whole lot cooler.

I know that ToyCyte’s own Jeremy is all about the Jumping Brains by Emilio Garcia, but Toy2R only had a prototype of the black colorway on display. I love brains, and I love jumping, but since the full-scale brains are a little outside of my usual range of collecting, I’m excited to hear about miniature, blind-boxed versions that are being worked on. Add ‘translucence’ to that whole ‘jumping’ and ‘brain’ thing and you have me buying a case just to score one particular colorway. Not only is the Jumping Brain an neat toy, but it’s pretty much universal, even among that sad subspecies of humanity, the joyless non-toy-collector.

Toy2R will also be producing Little Big Planet Qees, which leaves me wondering where these will intersect with Mezco’s miniature, highly-detailed LPB figures.

Woodgrain is the colorway of choice, which I love and hate simultaneously. I love it because the pseudo-natural look is deliciously ironic, and I hate it because my own creative woodgrain efforts, dating back some years, now look sad in comparison. In addition to the aforementioned mini-Domo colorway, there’ll be a Horvath Bossy Bear, and a couple of small Qee sets done up all forest-like. My collection of designer figures of trees will have some good, albeit naked, friends.

And speaking of Qees, Futurama! The final DVD in the ‘rebirth of Futurama’ set is about to be released, and while I hope for infinite returns for the show and everything it births, I admit that I miss Toynami’s brief and rare Futurama I-Men line. There’s some really unusual scale between these two Qees, and an aesthetic divorce from the Simpsons Qees, that prevent them from being great, but throw a Professor Farnsworth in there and I’m sold anyhow.

Toy2R was bustling with activity during Toy Fair, so there wasn’t really an opportunity to delve too deeply into the guts of the operation, but the year promises to have a lot of quirky awesome from them.