DIRECTORS CUT :: TODD MCFARLANE Q&A WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Justin Luczejko and Tim Cairo

Do you have a Roger Staubach figure coming?
We have him high on the list for the legends obviously. I’m trying to think if we got that contract done yet, though. I know we approached them and I think he actually finally said yes, but I don’t know if the final contract is done or not. So that’s not an official contract yet.

Alright I’m going to shift it over a little bit, to sports. I have season tickets to the Phillies.
TM – Aw, cool.

We were talking about the most losing franchise in sports history.
TM – It is? The Phillies?

Yeah. Over time, we’ve been a team for about 125 years and they won one world series I think they over 10,000 loses.
TM – Wow

We celebrated 10,000 loses last year or two years ago. So, we’re going to talk about that.
But if you’re going to lose it’s better that a city that hasn’t really touched the height of championships got one so now North Carolina gets to go, ‘wow, cool, hockey,’ and maybe they pay attention to it a little bit more. You know just like the NBA final.

For about 5 minutes.
Well hopefully there’s a little more…there’s usually a year or two residual. But, you know, even with Dallas and Miami making it to the NBA, I thought that was cool because neither one’s had a championship; one of those cities is going home with the championship, that’s cool. Get people excited. You know how it is when things are going good, when the Eagles made it the Superbowl, the whole city gets electric.

Were you in Edmonton for the Oilers playoff run?
No, I go, ‘I’m not going against seven cause I’m not going to win it on that opposition; there’s no fun in winning it on an opposition. The best championship is when you win it at home. So I go, ‘if they have a chance to win the fourth game at home, I’ll be there.’ And it just didn’t work out that way.

As part owner of the Edmonton Oilers, are you a fanatic with the team?
No because I’m here in Phoenix so I have to do it at a distance. I’m the only one of the minority owners that’s not in Edmonton so they all get to have more fun than I do with it.

How come Edmonton?
Edmonton’s in the province of Alberta, in Canada. And I was born in Calgary, Alberta which is just a few hours south. There’s a big rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton in terms of hockey. But you know Edmonton is also where Gretsky came from. So I was a big Oilers fan. You know, a kid living in Calgary rooting for the Oilers I was already blasphemous enough. Fast forward now about 20 years and Winnipeg had just moved out of Canada, they moved here to Phoenix, so it’s kinda cool for me. You know all the people in Winnipeg are heartbroken. A little bit later, the Quebec Nordiques ended up moving down to Colorado to become the Avalanche. Then all of the sudden it looked like the Oilers were going to go. The previous owner, got in trouble with the banks. They seized control of the asset, which was the Oilers. It triggered a clause that said if anybody outside of Edmonton makes a play for the franchise then it automatically starts a clock that Edmonton has 30 or 60 days to come up with a fixed number in that amount of time. And if they come up with that amount of money in that amount of time, no matter what the outside offer is, the bank must take it. And so I just happened to have someone visiting from Edmonton when that happened and I made a couple phone calls. Canadians were worried that every team was gonna start leaving. If Edmonton leaves, then Calgary is gonna go sort of thing. So it became sort of a bigger issue and I went, ‘Yeah, that’d be cool.’ So, we went in there and some companies threw a few dollars at it. It helped keep the team there and they’re doing pretty good. Got to the Stanley Cup this year.

How was that?
Cool. You know cause we weren’t a top dog at that point. We came in 8th out of the 8 seeds that were there and we came up one game short even though our number one goalie went down. I mean the city got a pretty good run I have say although it would have been cool cause maybe as one of the owners they would have actually given me a ring.

Now were you at the Diamondbacks/Yankees?
Oh yeah. Game seven!

You were there?
I got a bootleg tape of it. Coming right after the 9/11 attacks, then it got back and they were getting pretty tight with security, so I snuck in a little camera and when it got down to the ninth inning, the bottom of the ninth and we were losing 2-1, you would have thought we were losing by 10 the way the fans were reacting. But that’s because they’re not used to it. They were arguing and I go, ‘If this was New York, game seven, and they were down 2-1, everybody’d be standing at their feet, they go, ‘Are you kidding me? We’re going to win.’ You know, we were nervous cause just hadn’t been to the dance before. So I pulled out my video tape at that point and I go, ‘I’m taping the last inning because, boys and girls, we are going to get two runs and I’m going to have it as winning in the bottom of the ninth in game seven.’ I kept saying it through the whole series, I kept telling people, I go, ‘Listen.’ And the match still works, the match still works here too, same with the dukes got a little bit nervous at Edmonton. So you go, ‘the best series we remember are the ones that go to seven games; I don’t care what the score is.’ The only way you can get to a game seven, you must let the bad guys win three of them. They have to. So I don’t care when they win them. Fine, good, you got your three, now you’re done. So just like the Red Socks, I don’t care. We’re gonna let you win the first three, what do I care? Now we’re coming; now we’re going to win four. Okay, fine. So, with the Diamondbacks, fine, I go, ‘If we had won four in a row, would anybody be talking about the 2001 series?’ No, it would be a forgettable series; nobody would care, even if we smoked them. But because it was seven and won and at the bottom of the ninth, that’s what they’re going to remember, and the only way we could get there was by Yun Kim serving up those 2 home runs was the only way we got there. So cherish it.

You have that whole thing on tape?
Oh yeah, me getting crazy. Oh yeah, that was awesome.

Have you met any sports players who collect your sports figures?
Uh, I’m trying to think…Usually you’ll get that more from running into people that are like in bands or the Hollywood people because it’s outside of their realm. So, a sports guy that collects sports stuff…I’m trying to think of…I mean I know there’s guys out there cause I’ve read about them that have big collections and stuff like that. But umm, no I don’t think so.

Are you going to direct an episode of the Spawn: the Animation series for us?
Umm, well it depends. Animation’s sort of a weird one, it sort of depends on where you give the definition of directing. Usually the people who handle each one of the actual episodes, I usually give them the credit for that, then I end up sort of becoming more of a producer. I sort of produce and direct but in animation that line sort of gets very blurry, because again I’m working on all the story boards and the scripting and making sure the models, I mean although you have a Director… unlike a movie where the director is sort of the guy pushing everyone around in animation that’s sorta a guy like me, the head producer. I’ve gotta sign off on everything and okay it. Every sorta medium has its own definition of who and what they are. If it’s in TV the big boy is the Exec Producer whereas in movie the Exec Producer is not really a deal. The true Producer is, but he doesn’t direct it the Director does. So when we get into those sorta Hollywood ones that I’m involved in I put myself right at the front of all of them just like I do with the toys.

So, how about the record covers? Do you have anything else planned? You have 4 of them right? Is there any you wanna do?
No. I don’t really go searching for that much so I’m not thinking about one that I missed and so that I can then take that idea and shift it over. It’s better, the way for me to be sort of clean minded about when they bring it in to you is when you’re completely devoid of any thought process and you go, ‘ok, what is the task at hand here? What do we have? What’s the album cover called? What are we trying to convey? Who’s the audience? Who’s the band?’ I mean all those things, and go, ‘ok what would be appropriate for this sort of deal that we need to put together right now?’ And you just sort of get through it. I’m a frustrated athlete, and I lament about that. Other than that I don’t lament about many other things.

I still wanna talk about baseball…
[Todd starts showing me and imitating Nolan Ryan and Steve Carltons patented pitching moves] Nolan Ryan does that, holds it right here. But Carlton was one of the few guys that had a big leg kick; he got his balance by putting his hands down. So the wind-up is, this is the only way I can do it, the wind-up is here so the hands are right here and this is at the big leg kick, where now you got guys like Langston and Hoffman and they do it up in here and they come in here. But Carlton was cool and everybody sees pictures of him now and they go, ‘Wow, how does he get his hands down?’ So we’re actually making Carlton right now. So I do a lot of poses, cause I actually have to get them to sit there. Cause the thing is that from this angle right here, you can’t really see where the hands are. Right? So this is the toughest thing about looking at photography with sports. Where are the hands? So they actually thought that the hands were here. And it’s like, ‘No, those go right in the nuts, the hands go right in the nuts and the shoulder comes out, I mean you’ve seen it before, right here.’ So I go, ‘There’s only two Carlton poses, there’s that one and then there’s this one here, where he’s like right here, that to me are definitive Steve Carlton.’

Is the Carlton gonna be a Phillie?
Oh, Yeah. So hopefully we’ll do two of him. And we’ll do one with the big leg kick and we’ll do one where’s he’s actually broke open and we get to put them in that cool powder blue. The one thing that they’re completely lacking in major league baseball is all the cool piping they used to have down the pants and on the leg. So, the powder blue ones they had with the big red and the white trim, and then even the pinstriped one, but the pinstriped one still had the big red here and here. I’m pretty sure it goes up here too. So you got the ribbon going down, it’s just cool. But now, a lot of the teams, they’re so simplified that if you turn sideways you can’t even tell what team it is. There’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here. Or they put this little pinstripe.

That’s why you like that Nolan Ryan Astros piece up there?
Yeahhh. Ya know, again, it’s funny that people made fun of because that was when they had the elastic waistband instead of the belts. But the elastic waistbands allowed you to do then do these big stripes. So you’d have stripes here, and here, here, here, here, sometimes maybe over this, but it’s cool compared to the blandness of what they got now. It’s just terrible. I mean, you look at some of them, and you got one little red piece right there. But you know it’s not nearly as interesting as what it used to be.

Who actually decides what players you are going to use?
That’s me, I get to pick it. I’m the biggest sport geek in the company.

You don’t actually get down and dirty with clay and mold the prototypes do you?
I pick the poses in advance so I know what I want even before these guys do it. And then we do it in a soft clay and I get all the pictures and I mark them all up or I get a video link up with my department in New Jersey so I can go on and go, ‘Let me see it.’ So I can sit there and go, ‘No guys, the hands here, like here, you see where the elbow is? It’s like right here, at the bottom of my collar bone, you got it up here.’ So if you haven’t played ball, I mean I’ve played all these positions so I understand how you move in each one of them and again, what you’re supposed to do in each one. So, backwards passes, although those are nearly as elegant compared to these guys, I still, I’ve done the backwards passes before. So, as an athlete, I know what all these guys try to do, so I can actually sort of emulate it. So a lot of times I’ll get it for the pose and go, ‘No, you know, it’s here.’ But again, it’s a subtlety of coming over from here and they would go like this, and it’s not it’s not good, they understand what I’m looking for and they go, ‘Ok, here’s a guy that’s calling us out.’ And I go, ‘Uh no, you’re almost there but not quite. So what you do is you gotta go here, I mean if you’re going to swing, you’re going to follow through so now the bat has to get wrapped and the chin has to get buried in the shoulder.’ And then, when you’re standing here, that foot’s got torque on it too. So that foot has to actually come off the ground a little bit this way, just because of the torque you got on it. So now it’s bend here, push here.

What about creases? Do you get all into the creases of jerseys?
Oh Yeah, absolutely, I go guys, ‘I got one of a guy and he’s going like this, like here, I got Andrew Jones. I mean I like the tight stuff better than the baggy stuff that these guys wear. So sometimes we cheat it a little bit. You know because the deeper you make, the tighter you make it where you get a control of lighting on it, then you get some realism in there. So that one actually came out pretty good cause it’s got more wrinkles than some of the others. With the control of lighting, you know you get it and you go, ‘Ok,’ and you make the face right and go, ‘Ok it likes like him.’

I have to ask you whether you’ve recovered from the Oilers’ loss yet?
Yeah, I recovered pretty quick.

Did you?
Yeah recovered, and trying to be magnanimous a little bit. Y’know we’ve got a fair amount of rings in that city, and a couple of trophies, and parades and all that other stuff. If we lost to Detroit I’d still be feeling it but I go if you’re gonna loose, loose to city that has never tasted that sweet victory because we’ve already done it and it tastes terrific.

Spread the good-news I guess.
Yeah. Y’know a couple years earlier Calgary looses (in the final) to Tampa Bay, although again both Calgary and Edmonton are sorta hotter hockey beds and with those city’s people have a bit of a Canadian bias y’know, “those cities (Raleigh and Tampa), I can’t believe they’ve got teams” but they do have teams and nothing you can do about it so wouldn’t it be cool if those teams in those cities actually liked hockey.

Yeah, were actually into it.
Yeah instead of them talking about NCAA college basket ball. So I go okay, now you’ve got Tampa Bay, and Carolina wakes up and you’ve got some people that wouldn’t normally be hockey fans who get bit by the bug and you get to introduce new people to the sport. Would I rather have had our victory? Absolutely. But let’s let somebody whose never had it do it again, which is like in the NBA finals it was the Heat and the Mavericks and the coolest thing about that was that either way, neither one of those teams had ever one the NBA Championships and one of those cities was just gonna get to go crazy. It’s cool, it’s a good feeling.

You’re a generous guy.
And I’m a Cup fan, so next year.

How realistic is your dream of owning a Major League Baseball team and if you did, would you want to own the Diamondbacks?
You know, franchises are getting expensive that is the reality so the best I could hope for is to be a part owner but enough so that I could still get my way onto the field. I mean, if an opening came, and it was in Pittsburgh or something like that, it would be like I operate with the Oilers. It would at least have to be a National League team so when they came here to play, I could at least go, ‘cool.’ But, in a perfect world, it would be here in Arizona with the Diamondbacks, and I could just cook out with them for the next 20 years or something like that.

You’ve made music videos, music figures and most recently the 3D album art. I see how the sports side of you transitioned into comics, how do the comics for you translate into music?
Music, in it’s simple terms, is just another form of art. Art comes in a lot of different ways and sizes and shapes and that’s it. You start doing the toys, you go, ‘oh, we can do music toys’ and, again, when you do the Hollywood stuff you need movie soundtracks. If you’re going to be filming stuff, then you go, ‘Oh, we can film music videos.’ So, it all starts to overlap at some point. Not that we intentionally go looking for it, a lot of it just sort of comes, and drops into our mitts, sort of by default. I mean the Pearl Jam video came about because the band was getting pressured, my understanding, by their label to do another music video. They hadn’t done one for about five years because they didn’t like music videos. Eddie Vedder was watching Spawn on HBO, and went, ‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve seen. Oh, now I got it! If we do it animated we don’t have to be in it and the label gets a video, everybody’s happy.’ So, that luck, that luck follows me.

What does the process of signing an athlete to make figures of them entail?
It’s all a big ploy as you might imagine. Enough people go like ‘aw how come you don’t get this guy and this guy?’ It’s not from lack of trying. Sometimes they just don’t want to sign up at that time. Sometimes there’s not enough money for them and sometimes they just think the product’s sorta cheesy. So what ends up happening is that we keep going back to them and when they’ll say no, we show them the follow-up product and we hope that eventually we sort of wear them out. I’d say about 80% of the time we eventually turn a no into a yes, sometimes faster than others. I mean Jimi Hendrix we went back to them for 5 years. It took us 5 years and they eventually went ‘ok Todd quit bugging us, we’ll do it.’ So that was awesome.

What have been some of the best reactions from players when they first saw their figure?
People on the road bring it back or bring to me on video. I think sort of the steady reaction is they’re very thankful that it sort of emulates them and looks like them. I think what happens with a lot of the athletes is that because the product previously out there wasn’t very good their expectations were low. They think it’s going to look like a little piece of putty and when it actually looks like them they’re actually surprised and they’re taken aback. They’re actually like, ‘Whoa, that’s my glove, and that’s my shoes, and you got my tattoos, that’s cool man.’ I didn’t get a sense that they were ordering cases of them and handing it out to anybody on the block, in fact, I don’t even think they were giving it to their own kids. But some of them were like, ‘I can give these away’…sort of their own trading cards or sports game or something.

You tried out for the Seattle Mariners though right?
I went out for a lot of tryouts, but, the closest I came was at the end of college, I went and did my last tryout with a team called the Medicine Hat Bluejays. Medicine Hat is a small town Southeast of where I live and they were starting to put minor league teams across the border into Canada. So, I went out to this tryout and I gotta tell you, I was on fire. I mean there are those moments where everything is just working. Everything they asked me to do…the hitting was there, my arm was feeling better than it ever felt, and when they timed me and that was it, the running part. They just went, ‘oh my god, that’s it.’ That was always the one. They would get me to go back cause they couldn’t believe the time. They’d run me and go, ‘this time can’t be, cause if this time is true, you’re faster than anybody we currently have signed in any of our organizations.’ I remember a guy from Kansas City, I ran for him, he said, “this guy is faster than Willy Wilson”. I only have one tool, my legs, that was all I had. So at the end of it they said, ‘Kid, you’re Canadian, this is a Canadian town, we’ll phone back to Toronto and at the worst we’ll make you a pitch runner. We could use your feet.’ So I went back and they had an opening. They had drafted some kid outta high school and they’d offered him like eighty thousand bucks but the dad thought that he needed like ninety thousand, ya know like ‘screw you.’ So they had this opening and the next day I come back and they said, ‘oh, we made a call and the kid who needed ninety thousand, his dad decided, after four days of heckling, that the eighty thousand was good enough.’ So at that point, when you become the 26th player on a 25 man roster, that’s not very good. It worked out okay though, I was finally able to get some finality and just say to myself, ‘time to move on and go get some work.’ So…I broke into the comic books. Ideally, in my perfect world I’d play ball by day, or by night I guess and by day I’d be scribbling drawings out. I thought ‘oh, I can do both.’ But it worked out okay. Like I said it forced me to focus on one aspect of another business that I could get into and just be a frustrated athlete the rest of my natural life.

In regards to the story loosing merit as time goes by, why did you buy the Sammy Sosa ball? Isn’t that second best only to be passed in time as well?
To me the Sosa Ball was more about augmenting the story. The one Sosa ball was the 20th home run he hit in June to insert himself into the 1998 homerun chase and the 20th homerun in one month is a major league record held for 125 years. I believe somebody’s going to hit 74 homeruns before anybody hits 21 homers in one month. You can’t even hit 21 homeruns in little league in a month. So there’s that one, then I bought the Sosa 61 but that was tied to Maris. Then there was the 66th because at that point McGwire was 70 and Sosa was 66, that was the new number two mark. When Sosa hit the 66th he was actually ahead of McGwire, for about 45 minutes, it was on a Friday. Everybody kept talking about McGwire and all of a sudden, Sosa’s in the lead. McGwire may be the first person to break the record past Merris, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was going to actually win the home run title. He did, but it was Friday, and the season ended Sunday. When Sosa hit that homerun, he was up 66-65. McGwire went and hit five very quickly but I was putting it together, I thought, 66 makes sense in driving the story to 70.’ So, 715 is a pretty cool ball driving the story to ‘Bonds breaks Hank Aaron as the all-time leader.’ But for that ball, I needed to know I have the ending of the punch line, before I go backwards. I don’t want to spend a lot of money building up to this story, to find out that Bonds comes out three homeruns short, you know what I mean. So I go, if it went for cheap I’d go, ‘ok fine, I’ll get in there.’ But, I’m not going to overpay for something that, I can come up with another story. I can get his last homerun. I can get some kind of big Babe Ruth ball. I can get an Aaron ball, if he passes an Aaron ball. I mean there’s other ways to sort of tell this story.

If Ryan Howard and David Ortiz somehow both his 25 homeruns the rest of the year and manage to get into a similar situation, are you out there buying their story too?
You know what? I’m always in the shadows, lurking. At the beginning of the year, Albert Pujoltz was at an 81 pace there for a while. And then he got hurt, but that’s the odds now. The odds go something like this: to break the record now, you need 74 homeruns, ok? So, assume you hit a homerun every other day. You must play a minimum of 148 games and you must bomb a home run every other day. Now, say you happen to go 3 days, 4 days without a homerun, that means you need to hit, well for every day you didn’t, you need to hit one. So if you went 4 days without, you need to hit 4 days in a row. You need to hit one to get you back up to the one every two days. So if you, lets say have the flu a couple days, or your coach sits you four or five games, lets say five games you just arent’ even in the line-up. That now means you’ve played 157, that means you have 9 games over the course of 6 or 7 months that you can’t hit a homerun at an every other day pace. Now, I used to think that was true with the 70 and I used to do the same math, and it got bolstered. But now we’re up to that other pace now. If all of a sudden the new trend is 45, 50 homeruns, if that is the new pace of homerun hitters, you are now 25 homeruns away from breaking that record. Even if you had fifty, you are almost 25 away. So, Ryan Howard, now he needs to get 9 more, if he hits 9 more, buddy you still need 24 more. Now, I’m hoping that I get into that group that I thought would be like Maris, which is that the record will now stand for 35 years before somebody basically breaks it again.

In your boardroom meetings have you decided when you do the Ryan Howard figure if you are going to do his home run bat point?
That’s interesting because we’ve looked at that one.
You have to do the point. It’s out of respect for Jim Thome when Ryan filled in for his position.
Oh really? Hmmm. We did that with Matsui, sort of. Does a guy who is a Philadelphia fan want him standing there doing the point or you know, boooooom, pounding the crap out of the ball?
Al Simmons – To me there is nothing better than that Pujoltz on deck pose.
JL – I go for the pointing pose.

Do you still get the feeling of astonishment when you sit back and look at the detail in the figures?
I’m not amazed that we can do it, cause I keep seeing that we can do it. What does it for me is capturing a move that we haven’t done yet. We have a cool goalie coming out the beginning of next year. I know it’s a pose we’ve never done before for a goalie.

As I understand it, there are basically 4 main stages to the completion of a mold for an action figure. Could you just tell us little bit more about the process and what your role is along the way?
You go through the different intervals; I’ll walk you through very quickly- all of it. You go look at licenses that may be of interest, or they come see you. And you say “yeah cool, let’s do it”. Then you’ve gotta sign a contract, then you do your concept sketches, and then you start your pink clay, because again, that’s a softer clay and I can make adjustments easier in that. Then we sorta get the pink clay where we want and we cast it in a harder wax and start adding all the detail. Then we start building the bases. Then we start painting them up, start doing the packaging, start figuring out the stickers, and the sizing of it, send it over to China they sort of shrink it all down, make their steel molds, take everything out of the molds, obviously its only one color at that point. We paint every piece of plastic we have because I want it to look like a model kit and or a statue. Once we put all the pieces together they are put it in the boxes, the boxes get shipped from China to Hong Kong, Hong Kong puts it on a boat to Oakland, Oakland off-loads it on a truck. The truck goes to Sacramento, we put it in our warehouse in Sacrimento, then all our trucks from all the stores come, we put them on their trucks they take it to the distribution centers from around the country, and eventually, once it’s in the store’s back stock rooms the stock boy comes… …The stock boy picks up a box, walks over to the bay, cracks it open at 7 in the morning puts it on the shelf, and somebody comes in and says, “Hey, got any more of those?” Let’s see, where am I involved? I am less involved in the manufacturing part per se on a day to day basis. But all the early stuff, all the creative stuff, and the conceptual stuff. Every one of those steps for every one of those toys has to get my autograph and if it doesn’t… then it doesn’t move. I’m there from license to concept to pink clay, green clay, paint job, packaging, where it’s placed in the pack, everything till I go, “yeah get that over to China and make a thousand of it.”

When I was at your gallery I noticed that the actual sculptures are quite a bit larger than the figures themselves. Is it just a computer program that’s used to shrink those down or what’s involved exactly?
Yeah, you might imagine in the world of 2006 they have some pretty complicated machinery out there, so you can take almost anything you want and digitally, with laser enhancements shrink it down and keep the detail that you had. It’s sort of the simple equivalent obviously with a more complicated machine of taking a piece of paper on a copier and saying you want it reduced by 40%. It’s more sophisticated technology but it sorta does the same thing. So, once I’ve made my figure I tell the machine to make it bigger or smaller and then it takes that information and it uses a laser to cut the actual mold to the size that you want it, yeah cool.

Adult themed action figures, they already existed in Japan prior to your introduction of them here into the mainstream in North America. Right now it kind of seems that adult themed animation is in a similar position- accepted in Asia but not yet in N. America. Would you like to see this change and do intend to sort of initiating this with the new series?
Well, y’know we sorta did some of that with the Spawn Animation that was on HBO for a couple of years. People were like “Oh my God! What’s that? Animation that’s aimed at people over 7. Oh my God, that’s revolutionary”. And I was saying the same thing that you were- I was like, “how come countries have been doing this for decades! What are you talking about, this is nothing new!” We just have a stereotype here, just like the stereotype I talked earlier about for toys. I mean I work in these mediums where you say that you do animation, and they go, “oh for kids!” and you go “no not really”, and they go “oh you make comic books, oh for kids!” and you go, “no not really,”, and they go “oh you make toys, oh their for kids!” and you go, “no not really”. And the reason is because we take toys, comics, and animation and we say “oh it must be like Archie” or “oh it must be a Disney product” and its like, each one of those is just a medium that you deal with and depending upon what your content is, it doesn’t matter. If I do a comic book about the life and times of the Pope, that’s not necessarily something a 6 year old is gonna read. If I happen to do a dark drama, again that’s not for a kid. It’s a comic book, but its subject matter. If I happen to do a toy that’s Terminator, okay well it’s an R rated movie so that’s for older people, again if I happen to make Alien toys their for older people. They can’t get over that those mediums are no different than a DVD where you walk into a DVD store or whatever and you’ve got your 5 year old kid and your 65 year old Grandma and everyone comes back with a shiny little disc. And it all looks the same but the difference is the subject matter. But they’re all DVD’s, they’re all movies. And then one has got Dick Van Dyke for Grandma, and one’s got some cool stuff for the one’s that you and I pick, and then one’s some Disney product for the little guy. Okay, but it’s all the same thing. The definition of comic books is not that it’s for the kids, the definition of comic books is it’s words and pictures. Now within the confines of words and picture how many different kinds of stories can you tell? It’s infinite. What kind of subject matter can you use? Whatever you want.
When I’m making toys, I’m making it out of clay, what kind of position will the clay go if I sculpt it, I gotta tell ya: Any! It doesn’t have any intelligence, it will do anything I tell it to do. Okay, I want it to go in the shape of cool looking robot or monster. Cool, alright, this isn’t a Tele Tubby, and it just does it and it’s the same thing with a comic book. So the thing we haven’t come to grips with in this country is understanding that these art forms are very expansive. We just think that they are all very kiddy generated, why? Because the majority of the people that are saying that stopped being involved in those mediums as a kid. “Oh yeah I used to have comic books around as a kid- no more”. “I used to have toys when I was a kid-no more”, “I used to read comic books when I was a kid- no more”, the reason was because when you were a kid nobody was doing any cool comic books that were aimed at a forty year old, nobody was doing any cool toy that was aimed at a 37 year old, if they were you might not have quit. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective I guess, they ended up quitting because you’re right, everything on the marketplace is a cute toy and you’re now 27 years old, there was nothing there for you. So to me I don’t get it. I don’t get it when I walk into a toy store why, other than a bike and a video game, there’s nothing here for anybody over the age of 10.

Your absolutely right, I guess I’m asking you to change that- you seem like the only guy who can get it done.
I’ve been doing it in all those mediums. I’m not a guy that’s capable of changing any industry. I’m just here to say that I don’t need to follow the status quo that everyone else has because they don’t understand it so God Bless ya, God bless ya. I think there is a hunger, there is a pool of people that will go to sorta adult themed animation and toys, and when I say adult themed y’know the stereotype is of porno, we use these words and then they go “adult themed toys, what is that!”.

Clearly its Triple X
Then you go, what words do you want me to use, “toys… that people…your age can buy”. Then they go, “I wouldn’t buy a toy”, sure you would, whataya like? Whataya watch on TV? What do ya like to read about? “Oh no, I like Shakespeare”, well what if I did something that’s based on one of Shakespeare’s plays? And then they go “oh”, and that’s it, that’s all you gotta do. I just gotta tap into whatever is sorta, that age group that I want, what are they going after. And I gotta tell you, and weshould all go “yeah, that’s a no brainer Todd”, if you’re trying to sell something to a 20 year old it is not the same thing as a six year old. So there’s no surprise here. No surprise with what I do. So I’m not trying to sell to the kids and the Moms. I’m trying to sell to the kids when they grow up.

Exactly, and it should be interesting to see what happens with the Lost figures, because it’s looking at a bigger demographic once again.
Right, or a different demographic, and I don’t think that its somebody who may be a huge fan of the show sees the toy and goes “aw cool” and picks it up is instantly is a toy collecting nerd. They’re just someone who goes “oh, I like that show on TV and I think it’s cool and I like Sci- Fi a little bit” and if I happen to have one in my house that’s all it is. I like sci-fi and I like this show- no big deal.

And it gets more accepted in the process, which is great- right?
Right, like I said, no different from having an Oilers hat. “so you like hockey?” “yeah”, “so you like Lost” “yeah”- it just happens that the logo happens to be a toy.

As someone who in many people’s opinion has defined the look of the modern comic book, what is your assessment of the status of that medium as opposed to 10 years ago?
I think it’s in pretty good shape. I think that each new generation that comes up adds a new flavor to it without going backwards. I think there was a time in the 50’s and the 60’s and even some of the stuff in the 70’s where things were sort of in a time warp, now part of it was that they were using the same printing process, and the same intel on how balloons were placed, and coloring was done the same way so it was sort of limited. Everything sort of fell into a formula, but I was fortunate enough to come into the business at a time where you could actually sort of experiment a little and do some things, and that pushing has continued there. What our group did, was if you consider art to be a sort of ongoing path, we added a couple of stones to that path and now the next generation has to add more and just make the path longer. The next generation might come up and do something 10 times cooler than we did. They shouldn’t be held to any of our standards is really the argument I had, y’know? Why do I have draw Spiderman the same way everyone else did? I think it would be a disservice for a kid to come in and to say to him, “hey try to draw Spiderman like Todd” because they might have some new funky moves, wouldn’t that be cool? It would be like ‘my god. nobody’s done that before’ - that’s cool!

Todd it’s been a real pleasure. I don’t want to take up to much more of your time cuz I know you’re busy. I want to thank you on behalf of everyone at Wonka Vision for making yourself available to do this, and all the best.
Yeah, you guys too. You guys rock and roll out there.