Funko ReAction Figures, multiple series and licenses, $9.99. Limited availability.
This fall I stumbled across the first ReAction figure I had ever seen. It was Sloth from “The Goonies,” but it looked like it had been made in the early 1980’s. Stiff and poorly sculpted, with a basic paint job, it only had hip and shoulder joints. It looked for all the world like my beloved old Kenner Star Wars action figures from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yeah, I’m that old, and I had tons of those toys. I still love them. This Sloth–where had it come from? Some kind of time warp where Kenner had made “Goonies” action figures? I turned the action figure packaging over to look at the back–and there was an entire lineup! Data, Chunk, Mikey…they were all there. What. The. Frick. I didn’t buy Sloth, because when all is said and done, that wasn’t a movie I grew up with. But I had to find out what was going on.
The line of toys was from Funko, most famous for their highly stylized vinyl figures and bobbleheads. There are hundreds of the Funko Pop! toys out there for just about every property imagineable. I did some lookin’ and found their lines of ReAction Figures…and was blown away. You can see galleries of all of them at their website: Alien, Back to the Future, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Escape from New York, Firefly, The Goonies, modern and vintage horror movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Predator, Pulp Fiction, The Rocketeer, Terminator…holy crap I love it.
A few examples:
Okay, I’ll stop. I’ll stop there. Because I want to post every single one of these. I mean…they’ve got Wash from “Firefly,” and he has tiny dinosaur toys as accessories! They have the frigging Gimp from “Pulp Fiction!” They have Sarah Connor, they have Pinhead, they have a transparent Predator! …I could drop a lot of money on this line of toys.
Even though I saw my first ReAction figure at Target, these can be hard to find in the wild. Barnes and Noble seems to carry them in every store (they have the best selection of Funko merchandise overall), but they’re also at many local comic book shops and specialty stores. At Barnes and Noble they retail for $9.99, which is fair considering the nostalgia, the attention to Kenner-like detail.
So far the only ReAction figure I’ve bought is the Rocketeer. Partially because I love the movie, but I love the design. The aesthetic. The art on the card, the action figure itself, the feeling it gives me of being a kid again. I want to bust it open, but I can’t yet. It’s hanging on the wall of my cubicle next to a Captain America (both directed by Joe Johnston, coincidentally) and above some LEGO and other things that remind me about how great it is to be a geek.
Now that I’ve written this, pretty sure on my lunch break I’m going to go pick up a Mal Reynolds. And Buffy Summers. And Marty McFly. Aaaaahhh dammit. Merry Christmas to myself, I guess.
I was just about to hit “publish” on this sucker, and decided to look up Funko’s lineup for 2015. Here’s what’s in the hopper (get ready to squee like the geek you are) …including a lot of movies/television shows that have never had action figures before.
Funko ReAction Figures 2015
- Jaws
- Star Trek
- Star Trek: The Next Generation
- The Dark Crystal
- Gremlins
- Breaking Bad
- Boondock Saints
Those “Dark Crystal” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” mofos are coming home with pappy.