The World's Coolest Toys: $9,000 Life-Size 'Iron Man'

Yahoo Makers
Updated

You spent HOW MUCH on that toy?

Maybe Skynet makes them do it. After all, what other explanation is there for someone to dropping more than $6,000+ on a life-size T-800 Endoskeleton from “Terminator 2”? Or other as much as $9,000 on a six-foot-tall Iron Man MARK 42 figure or Han Solo in Carbonite?

After all, these are not your run-of-the-mill decorating item, or something you see nearly ever on those HGTV remodeling shows. But for someone like Steve from Indianapolis, IN - who asks his last name be kept part of his secret collector’s identity - it’s no big deal. In fact, his family and friends almost expected it.

“We all have our 'grails' that we want to obtain, whether that be a new motorcycle, a fancy car, a nice vacation etc... one of mine just happened to be the life-size endoskeleton,” he says. “I’ve been talking about it for so long, they were glad to see me obtain one. ”

“When you’re younger you’ll see something like that and think ‘wow I wish I could get one of those things one day,’” Steve says.

It helps that Steve’s wife is herself a collector, and has thousands of My Little Ponies to her own name that are kept upstairs away from her husband’s basement toy hoard. After all, who knows if all those sci-fi figures can stand up to the magical powers of rainbow-colored horses?

While little $10 Funko vinyl figures are all the rage with everyday fans, the serious collectors have their own world of amazing figurines with amazing price tags created by specialty companies like Sideshow Collectibles, Hot Toys, Beast Kingdom and Gentle Giant.

For those fans, the exclusivity, the quality of the craftsmanship, and the sheer awesomeness of owning a life-size sculpture of your favorite movie character makes it all worthwhile.

As collector April Strong of Cheyenne, Wyoming, says, “Do you buy a BMW because you like cars or do you buy a BMW because it’s the best car?”

Collectors

You might think only the Tony Starks and Bruce Waynes of the world can afford a $5,000 action figure. But that’s not true, says says Mike Tolentino, a project manager with Sideshow Collectibles.

“Anyone from your starving student eating ramen who saves every penny to buy their statues to big name movie producers to royalty in Bahrain and other countries,” says Tolentino, himself a collector. "Everyone who loves that fantasy, sci-fi, comic world and wants the characters they grew up with on their shelf.”

For Steve, who works as an inventory control manager, the T-800 ruling his basement is about making a teenage wish come true. He began collecting action figures in 1992 at age 16. He started out with McFarlane’s 3 ¾’’ figures and over the years his collection expanded to include Sideshow Collectible statues and grew, and grew. And grew.

It’s hard to believe, but McFarlane eventually ran out of items he wanted to collect, and his excess money began piling up. So, thoughts of the “maybe some day” figure began to take root. Eventually, he sold many of his 3 ¾ figures for the total of $3500, which went toward his Terminator prize.

While $6,000 seems a staggering price tag, he says the expense was something he could handle. “I’m one of those people who is very money conscious, it was one of those things I saved up and purchased without making too much of a dent.”

It’s not that easy for all collectors, though. “It becomes an addiction for many,” says Bum Jacinto of Houston, Texas.

New collectors often start out small, but for some the hobby can become an escalating pattern of “if I don’t get two of these toys, I can get a more expensive one” up and up the dollar chain until you're spending hundreds or more on a single item - a problem often discussed on toy collector message boards.

“When I was in high school,” Jacinto says, “I would spend $20 on a figure and then go to a store and see $400 things and think “who would buy that?”

In 2005 Jacinto won the grand prize at a Sideshow Collectibles event, and had to choose between a Sauron statue from Lord of the Rings, James Bond or the Green Goblin. Jacinto ultimately chose the Bond figure, but a later trip to a comic store saw him walking out with Sauron.

“That’s what started my downfall,” he says. “It’s like Lay’s potato chips - you can’t eat just one.”

Eventually, Jacinto had to tell himself that he couldn’t keep on buying everything he saw.

“There’s always going to be something new coming out. It can be a Sauron maquette, and the next year there’s a Sauron ½ size, and you think ‘oh, it lights up,’” he says. “Soon you have five Saurons and you think ‘how badly do I need more Saurons?’”.

“You have to reach your point,” he says. For him, the point was realizing a new Darth Vader bust he was eyeing equalled a mortgage payment.

But, it’s hard. “You think, ‘I grew up with that movie. I can close my eyes and repeat the script - I really love that movie.’”

The Cost

What exactly makes these darn things so expensive?

It’s the amount of work that goes into crafting high-end collectibles that drives the price, says Sideshow’s Tolentino, not demand.

Every piece is handcrafted from start to finish, beginning with simple sketches and pose studies. “We work with the licensors, will go look at the source material, we’ll watch the movie repeatedly - that’s a huge hardship,” he laughs.

“We take a lot of screen grabs,” he says, working to make sure they’re as screen-accurate as possible.

But the piece also has to be user-friendly, he adds. “Things will change - we have to think about it being handled by the customer and that they’ll need to move it around. So the price comes from that amount of time and research.”

For the novice, it helps to understand how toys break into size scales, based on their relation to the full-size figure. A collector can rattle these numbers off quicker than the alphabet, but the different options are dizzying.

Collectibles range from the 3 ¾ inch toys sold in stores like Walmart and Target, and climb up through what’s know as “sixth-scale” toys - which are usually articulated figures with hand-crafted costuming, with price tags that range from $250 to $400 or higher.

For collectors like Strong, Hot Toys’ sixth-scale figures are worth much more than their price tag. “The amount of detail is phenomenal. The clothing scale, the accuracy, what you can and can’t do with it... it’s like having a miniature person, only they can’t talk back.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Moving past sixth scale, there’s fifth-scale, quarter-scale - Sideshow’s “premium line” in which mixed media, lights and other bells and whistles kick in. Then there’s the half-scale, where non-poseable figures make their appearance. There are fancier maquette statues, full-body figures, busts, heads, helmets, and the list goes on while the prices go up.

It’s in the details

It’s the things every-day fans don’t think about that makes the cost worthwhile for hardcore collectors.

With smaller collectibles, actors often recall with glee the experience of being scanned for their toy figure, a right-of-passage for action stars.

“Yesterday someone showed me the toy and I pushed a button and my voice came out of it, and … my brain almost exploded. It was too weird, too weird.” Chris Pratt told HitFlix about his Guardians of the Galaxy toy.

But when you move into the world of larger figures, scanning can drop off and the sculptors and artisans move in. At Sideshow, that’s where the price begins to climb.

From preliminary drawings, endless rounds of consultations, to the “sculpts” which form the basis of the figure, and constant refinements until reaching the final product, Tolentino describes a time consuming process.

“it’s not a dead-on likeness, but it’s meticulous, talented artists doing amazing things with clay, paint - even fabric - which has a lot to do with the personality of the subject. The costuming is done so it will lay right as they are moved, not just when they are standing,” he says.

And it’s not simply a matter of making one design and scaling it up and down to the various sizes. Each line is unique and goes through its own development process.

“The amount of work that goes into it... human hands are touching these pieces from start to finish. They are pinning the buttons on, they are making sure the costume seams line up, they are packaging them.”

Sometimes what you see is what you want

For the doubters, sometimes it takes seeing it to believe it. Or being convinced to spend it. At the recent Star Wars celebration in Anaheim, fans got a close look at many of Sideshow’s upcoming offerings, including a life-size Yoda.

Tolentino claims that when visitors to the show saw the pieces first hand and the craft that went into them, they thought "wow, that’s way underpriced"’ and signed up to purchase before leaving.

As for Steve, who was also at the show, he says he didn’t need convincing. “I already had some on pre-order.

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