The Secret Story of Toys - The Local Show

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hidden away in Kansas City's creative community is a small artistic subculture which makes its living creating toys for some of the biggest Hollywood and video game franchises in the world. From initial sculpture to the final prototype and casting, these local artists play a huge but unseen role in bringing toys to toy store shelves. These days you'd expect lots of computers and 3D printers to be involved, but not so much. The artists you're about to meet at the Livestock Exchange Building in the West Bottoms still do lots of their work by hand. Anthony Ladish of Mild Deep Films takes us inside this fun and fascinating corner of the toy making world. [00:00:49] Speaker 2: Making toys for a living is a very cool job. There's no sophisticated way to put it. It's just really neat to be making something that was a big part of everyone's childhood. [00:01:07] Speaker 3: "Before I ever got into this, I remember looking at toys and just kind of figuring, well, a computer must do that or something. I didn't even get that actually people just sat there and sculpted all of this stuff." [00:01:30] Speaker 2: "Honestly, I was pretty amazed that it was done so classically, just sculpting out of clay, and that it goes through Kansas City." [00:01:40] Speaker 4: "Whenever I tell somebody what I do, it doesn't matter who they are or what line of work they're in, they always perk right up and are fascinated." [00:01:58] Speaker 3: "To me, there's a bit of irony to the fact that I sculpted ever since I was a little boy. And my sister was always very talented at everything she did and she was an artist but she never sculpted. I decided to try to help her get some work with the toy companies and turns out she is like a miraculous sculptor without ever having done it before in her life." [00:02:33] Speaker 2: "Basically, your job is to observe something as obsessively as possible and then that's the invisible half of your job. And then the visible part is where you then deposit it into this clay." "I love and hate what I do and I think you'll hear that from a lot of artists because you can really torture yourself with the details. Most projects, especially if you've got something from a movie that's an iconic monster and you go, there's eight veins back here. I put seven veins back there and you can tell I didn't have the reference but now there are people on the fan site that found a picture of the sculptor behind the scenes and they used definitely eight and I put seven and you hate yourself for that. And then you look at it two months later and you're like, that's great. That looks fine." "We do prototype mold making and casting. [00:03:31] Speaker ?: What that means is usually we get original sculptures that are made out of fragile clay. [00:03:43] Speaker 3: Generally, when a piece comes in, it comes in many parts. You know, the action figures have all their movable joints and clothes and hair. A lot of times a piece may have 20, 30, upwards of 50 pieces for one figure. We take all those individual pieces and make molds of each individual piece and castings of each piece. And we turn those into durable plastic prototypes and then make sure they all assemble properly. And, you know, send them off. It's very much an art. [00:04:46] Speaker 4: I am very much a sci-fi fan. For instance, I'll go to a sci-fi movie just because it's sci-fi. Even though it's getting a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes or something. [00:05:26] Speaker 3: A lot of people who are in this industry are definitely passionate collectors and fans. [00:05:33] Speaker 2: I suppose at the end of all of it, what you're really doing is you're trying to put, you know, a professional suit on the whole thing. But you're basically being a kid. And it's all disguised with, you know, budgets and trying to make sure that everything works out and trying to figure out the anatomy. But what always ends up happening, especially with your personal favorite movies you've seen as a kid, is you end up getting this thing back. And you get happy, like Christmas, and you start playing around with it. And sometimes you get out the paints and paint it. Inevitably, you end up with a lot of toys strewn around your room. And you're back to the situation you were as a kid where you've just got a lot of toys. Only these toys are toys that you've made.