The Skeleton Warriors Rise Again

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The Skeleton Warriors have arrived! [00:00:30] Speaker 2: Skeleton Warriors is the third release under the Infinite Legion's umbrella. It's a project we're incredibly excited for because it brings a whole new element to the Infinite Legion's brand. [00:00:58] Speaker 3: This one hits close to home on a number of levels. For me, it was a very inspirational line that was hitting directly at the time when I got into the toy business. I went into the showroom and saw them, the first Toy Fair that I went to, this was before I was even hired full-time by McFarlane. I was blown away by what they achieved with those toys. They were ahead of their time. They were represented in the advancements that they made with those figures. The sculpting level, the paint, the accessorization, the bold design. [00:01:36] Speaker 2: For me, personally, I don't have a nostalgic childhood connection to the brand. I actually have a connection from when I first started collecting as an adult. When I remember going into a KB toy store and I remember seeing Skeleton Warriors and again, blew me away. [00:01:53] Speaker 4: When you would go to Toys R Us or KB Toys and you saw those on the shelves, you were drawn immediately to those figures. You're like, what the hell is this? This is cool. This is great. You know, those figures were bulky. The paint applications, everything. I think that combination of elements sometimes creates something beyond the original intent. [00:02:13] Speaker 1: Light, darkness, the two sides of existence locked in an eternal struggle for the hearts and minds of the others of the living. Each side claims its share. But what have those caught in between? Which way will they turn? [00:02:33] Speaker 5: Well, I was pretty young at the time because it was, what, '94 that it came out? I mean, I was definitely a Toys R Us kid, so I was setting up the toy aisle at any chance I got. Skeleton Warriors was another thing that just appeared on the shelves one day and, you know, even from a young age, I was really into, like, monstrous figures, you know, whether it was Kenner Aliens or Predators, McFarlane, and Skeleton Warriors was right up that alley. And even back then, I loved skeletons. I had Dagger, Oracula, Baron Dark, and Dr. Cyborn. Those are the four I had. So I was probably about five when they came out. [00:03:25] Speaker 6: Comic shops that sold action figures, they always had a bin of them in the back where they were in the package, five dollars, you know, so it was like I was buying them fresh and getting to open them. So it was something that I came to more as an adult collector and found them to be awesome. And at the time where I was looking at them, they were relatively inexpensive to get, where you can buy a whole set of things and go down a rabbit hole of getting them. [00:03:50] Speaker 3: And here we are, decades later, and, you know, the first figure that, of course, that I did sculpt for Skeleton Warriors this time around was Dr. Cyborn. [00:04:04] Speaker 1: Join me, Dr. Cyborn, and know the dark joy of the crystal. [00:04:08] Speaker 2: The darkness, Baron, the glorious darkness. [00:04:18] Speaker 3: He's the one that I think embodies Skeleton Warriors the most. And he shows off what they were able to do with that line in a really spectacular way. Even just the fact that he is a cyborg. So he mixes the organics of bone and the loincloth and those types of more organic elements with the machine elements, the tubes and bolts and antenna and little computer machines on the head. And there's that contrast there that's just so inherent in his design where there's a tension between the two that just immediately you realize that he's a dynamic character. He's a dynamic design. Really, I think he pushes that mixed media aspect further than a lot of the other figures. He's got a lot of chrome on him. He's got the rib cage where there's a chrome machine inside of it. There's bones. There's mechanical part. I can remember when I first had that toy, like I couldn't even understand how it was made, like how they could make all those layers overlap. Just because I didn't, you know, I didn't understand how toys were made completely at that point. But it was just that there was a fascination with it. It really piqued my curiosity. There's so much to like about each figure. And they really do each play up a different, you know, a different set of characteristics and features. [00:05:54] Speaker 1: "Aracula, answer my call to arms!" [00:06:05] Speaker 3: "Aracula is such a chaotic visual presentation. These arms all over the place, chrome flashing on all the armbands and in the head. Multiple weapons, so there's accessories in each hand. The way that the harness was constructed, there's a lot of overlapping of shapes and forms and things like that. And you just had the overall shelf presence and size was impressive. There's something to get into on each character. Certain characters had sidekicks. The accessories were oversized and really some wild accessories when you really stop and look at them, look at the details. And that's just series one. There was a big break in design for series two. You've got characters whose bones are green, blue, orange. I love the multi-colored skeletons. I mean, if you've seen Mythic Legions, you'll know that. Part of that comes from Skeleton Warriors. Part of it comes from Castlevania. And so I was really fascinated with the second batch of characters and really excited for them to hit the shelves. And of course, you know, as we all know, that never happened. I think as collectors, there's always those ones that got away that were shown at a toy fair, or shown on the back of a package, or something like that, that never make it to production. And so again, the ability to be able to bring something like that to people who have wanted those figures, dreamed about getting those figures for so long now, that is just an additional level of excitement that really makes this launch cool. [00:07:46] Speaker 2: I can remember as a toy collector, getting like toy collecting magazines, like Toe Marts or Toy Fair, and seeing coverage from like New York Toy Fair. And it would show all the stuff that was coming. And I remember seeing the second wave of Skeleton Warriors, which were radically different. And that wave was completely canceled. So there was always that could have been aspect to Skeleton Warriors. [00:08:11] Speaker 4: What I'm really, really, really excited about is getting the figures that fans got to sort of glimpse at back then through either the Toy Fair catalogs or the, I think, Action Figure Digest or Lee's Toy Review had photos from Toy Fair for that second wave and fans didn't get them. All of us as kids who, who dreamed of getting those figures in our hands back then, what is it, three decades later, we finally, we finally have them. It's a happy ending. [00:08:38] Speaker 3: So once we knew that we were doing Skeleton Warriors, one of the biggest challenges was actually deciding on who do we make first. Infinite Legions has now gone from a line that was supposed to be a character at a time to two characters, now four characters. But we're having just so much fun with it that it's a, we want to do as many as we can, b, it's just in a case like this, it's hard to choose. And so we really needed to look at this in a multi-wave strategy. [00:09:16] Speaker 2: So with Skeleton Warriors, the first wave that was released, there were five skeleton characters and three human characters. The unreleased figures, there were five base figures that were shown. Initially we had this conversation and I remember Eric saying, so which two are we going to do? And I sheepishly looked at him and said, I want to do four. I want to do two of the original wave and two of the unreleased ones, simply because if we were only going to do two, it was going to take many, many years to get through that roster. And we really had our hearts set on trying to get through all of the Skeleton Warriors. Then the next hard decision was, now that we knew that we were going [00:10:02] Speaker 3: to do two and two, how do we decide which characters to do? Because there's a lot to choose from here, all with really good arguments for why that character should be in wave one. Dr. Cyborn, because he is a favorite, if I'm being honest, and also just because he shows off of so much of what [00:10:24] Speaker 2: Skeleton Warriors is. And Dr. Cyborn is the cybernetic kind of robotic skeleton, mad doctor type character. Eric has a connection to that figure. He tells a wonderful story about driving up for his first job at McFarlane Toys with that figure on his dashboard. So right out of the gate, Dr. Cyborn [00:10:45] Speaker 5: was going to get done. Just the other day, I saw the Cyborn prototype and I was blown away. Like it's perfect. If you looked at it really quickly, you'd think it's the original Dr. Cyborn, but then when you look at it, you see how it's completely updated and more detailed. My favorite figure, the first [00:11:08] Speaker 2: Skeleton Warrior I remember seeing in a store I remember buying was Aracula, this multi-limbed [00:11:14] Speaker 3: monstrosity. So I pushed hard to have Aracula. Aracula is a fan favorite and just such a great presence and really symbol for Skeleton Warriors in general. He's the one that a lot of people remember the most from series one. So it felt right to bring those two out. Series two was even tougher in a way because there's just not as much familiarity with the characters themselves. People don't have a history with them as much. So Bones Eye really shows the type of heavy theming that was happening in series two. It's got a strong samurai theme to him, a great samurai style helmet with lots of detail in it. His weapons were two of the ones that were the most fleshed out in the original line. And so that set us up for success on that character. And again, he was he was one that really pushed that wild color palette of [00:12:22] Speaker 2: series two. The last one that we chose is a character called Claw. Claw was meant to be a werewolf style skeleton. While Claw did not make it into the first wave, Claw was featured in the Skeleton Warriors cartoon. [00:12:36] Speaker 3: It's very interesting going back and seeing that Claw was in a lot of the promo shots for series one early on. There's versions of him where he was painted more like series one in a traditional bone color. But once I got into those archives and started seeing the weapon designs for him, I was on board with him completely. There's just pages and pages and pages of weapon designs that in great detail showing what what they were, how they worked, how they were going to work as a toy back in the original line, but also how they just functioned as as a weapon. And then it became apparent that this guy is more of like he's a bounty hunter. He's a tracker. He's got these dual revolver blasters that he wears on his hips. I'm thrilled that we're able to actually take those designs and just immediately put those with a figure in series one. I think that fans are going to have a lot of fun with these because not only can they buy them and play with them, pose them as is, but you know, they can also inject them into their existing collections, especially customizers, you know, the pop and swap possibilities here. One of the core concepts with Infinite Legions is that we are bringing new collaborative IPs, characters, ideas into the Legion's build system. Any of the joints, the weapons, all of the areas where a figure could come apart or there's a separate piece, there's a commonality to the joints and the fittings and the sizes. We could take a knight figure that exists in Mythic Legions and add a skeleton warrior's arms. You could pop it out at the shoulder and put those skeletal arms on a knight figure. What would happen if we brought in new characters, new concepts, new ideas and started to integrate that into this build system? This is what the dream of Infinite Legions was and is and we're starting to see it manifest now. Now we're three collaborations in three very different types of characters. But again, there's that consistent through line of interchangeable joints. The weapons all fit [00:15:24] Speaker 6: the same on any of those figures. Part of the thing that happens in the cartoon, and you could see it in all the episodes, is when a skeleton gets shot with a laser beam, it falls into pieces on the ground and you know, the skeleton would get back up and get back into pieces. [00:15:48] Speaker 2: Baron, we have achieved immortality! [00:15:54] Speaker 6: One of the great things about the Legion's brand is that it does pull apart at all the same spot. It has that same buildability and same customization that you can do with a Glow's figure, but on a grander scale. One of the great parts about these skeleton warriors figures is that you can break it back down into that pile. It's that same, you'll get that same feeling of play if you wanted to, breaking your figure down into the pile on the table of bones and armor parts and things like that. [00:16:36] Speaker 4: So we started working with George to find a way to bring back the skeleton warriors. And this was now, I think, over a decade ago. And he came up with a really cool idea by combining skeleton warriors with the Goliath system, which had all these parts that you could mix and match and build new figures. Skeleton warriors fit perfectly into that. And George became a really great friend. So George found a way to bring them back to fans. But, you know, all good things come to an end and that came to an end very quickly. And then George [00:17:06] Speaker 6: was hired by the Four Horsemen. When I first got here, I brought it up immediately to Eric and we were not at a point where that was even a thing. Like we were like, we're not getting, it wasn't a license thing. We weren't getting licenses. Which we thought, you know, [00:17:20] Speaker 4: if there is, there's no better combination than this, having George who loves the IP, who's already done some work on it, with the Horsemen who are the guys that could really bring together the ultimate expression of the skeleton warriors and really fulfill the potential. I would call George every now and then, George, we got to do something again. They were like, can we, do you think we can, will [00:17:40] Speaker 6: the Horsemen make figures of this? And I was like, well, hold on. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know if that's something that they're interested, but like, let's keep it in our pocket and see if that's something [00:17:48] Speaker 7: that could ever happen. He's like, give me a little bit more time. I'm working it out. I'm figuring it out with the guys. I'm new over there, you know. And then when Infinite was born and we started this [00:18:00] Speaker 6: brand where it was like, hey, let's see if we can play with other people's toys in our world. And [00:18:06] Speaker 4: finally it happened. So I think that it was just meant to be, you know, sometimes you need the right combination of people and the magic to be realized. And I think that's what we have here. [00:18:15] Speaker 3: When I met them for the first time, I was instantly on board. I was energized after we had our first meeting together because by that point, we had been working together a little bit, but when they came to the studio and we met and sat down, I had done a fair amount of work on the line by that point. So we put together a little presentation where we showed them some color renders. And then while we're at the table, Joe brings in actual assembled prints. So we were looking at these printed pieces together and their enthusiasm and excitement was just infectious. The expectation coming in here was [00:18:56] Speaker 8: never like, oh, you know, like, what's this going to be? It was like, I, can you believe that the horsemen are making the skeleton, these skeleton warrior figures, but today just seeing what, how to take that and elevate that. And for the, you know, the collectible crowd for, with what horsemen really does well with our, with skeleton warriors, it's just incredible. Just, it's unbelievable. And you can see the, the care and effort and, and the detail that goes into that and blown away, just blown away. [00:19:28] Speaker 4: See, it was like this excitement that we're finally going to see, kind of get visual confirmation that the guys are doing this. Cause it's hard to believe still. It's like the four horsemen, they're actually going to make skeleton warriors figures. This is insane. [00:19:41] Speaker 3: They've given us so much information to work with here that it's just been so easy to dig into all those materials and find inspiration. [00:19:50] Speaker 6: I've seen the spark in his eye when he talks about this wave now. And like, it's cool to see that. So for us to bring it back from the dead, no pun intended or pun intended, there were so many ties to this company already with it. And it fit our brand so perfectly that it was, it was almost like a, you know, a no brainer, as they say. [00:20:11] Speaker 4: And so from the beginning, we knew we needed a company or a group of people that from an artistic point of view could deliver, but also who loved this stuff as much as we do. And who would be willing to commit a great deal of resources into a property that has been dormant for some time, right? A property that is now considered sort of a, a fan favorite. Because at the end of the day, you know, if no one bought these things, I'm just happy to have them and put them up on my shelf and just kind of feel like I'm, you know, a kid again. [00:20:42] Speaker 3: Now that I've seen the archives and seen all that was in the pipeline and all that could have been, there's full characters there that are really cool designs that if we can take that and incorporate that into the line. Those are going to be very exciting additions to the lineup. [00:21:03] Speaker 2: One of the things that was an interesting choice in determining the roster for the first wave of skeleton warriors is the fact that we didn't include the main hero or the main villain. The main hero is Prince Lightstar or the main villain is Baron Dark. Typically those would be the characters you lead with in that first wave. We elected not to lead with them in part because we wanted to show everybody that we are committed to multiple waves of this. We're not going to start with the heaviest hitters. We wanted to start with some of the ancillary characters so fans could get some really cool designs knowing that there are still some big hits to come. This is just the first Infinite Legion's Skeleton Warriors release. It's certainly not the last. [00:21:55] Speaker 3: We're ready to go with this one. It's it's going to be a cool one and it brings you know brings something else to to Infinite that although it fits seamlessly with with the other releases it brings [00:22:07] Speaker 6: something brand new to the table. This is now our third Infinite Legion and it ties back to even the first one. It has my connection to Glyos. It has the original connection of Mythic Legions being born from Glyos. It has Eric's you know original tie to it from his original days of being brought into the toy industry. There was just so much about it that that worked so well and I think it's a complete departure from what we've already been doing in Infinite. It's a it's a complete new thing. So that's the fun thing about Infinite Legions for us is like we don't want you to know what's coming next. We want to we want to shock you with what's going to be the next thing on the list. We don't want you to figure it out. [00:22:51] Speaker 5: I definitely want us to to do all of them and then go beyond uh to be able to make up our own skeleton warriors would be awesome if we can bring new life to this franchise and help it grow [00:23:08] Speaker 3: and get give the love it deserves. We can realistically make it through all of series one all of series two little things in between and hopefully beyond into some of those archival characters but if people are into this even possibly further than that it's been a blast working on it we're just having so much fun with every aspect from the sculpting to the painting promotion marketing all of it it's one of our first opportunities to to play into nostalgia you know since we've been doing legions brands here it's about looking back at something that i was passionate about and enjoyed so much at another point in my life and reinterpreting that and really when you're working on something like this that trust me i looked at those figures a lot back in the 90s you know i looked at i that toy fair catalog that i brought home with me i just that that page was open daily looking at it and then of course when the figures came out just like you know studying them posing them just really inspecting every aspect of it but then when you're sculpting something like that you look at it in a different way because you are looking at every surface you're looking at it from every angle you're taking it apart you're building it piece by piece and so it's so enjoyable just to be able to go so in depth on a particular character or project where you get to re-experience it in a way that opening up a toy and looking at it playing with it and putting on the shelf only goes so far this is peeling back the layers in a very different way and what it ultimately comes down to is appreciating the figure the design the the world that was created in a deeper way so after so many years of working on our own projects in-house brands it's really refreshing to to come back to these collaborations with infinite legions and explore other worlds and other characters and really just kind of like kind of scratch a different creative itch they are the last hope [00:25:40] Speaker 1: for a world in chaos they seek to heal that which has been broken they fight to restore order to a world out of balance but can they [00:26:19] Speaker ?: out of balance but can they be broken they can be broken they can be broken they can be broken