Fuel Your Fandom artwork

Episode #136: Junko Pop

Fuel Your Fandom

English - March 10, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour - 57.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 4 ratings
Hobbies Leisure retro video games comic book movie entertainment television fandom geek Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed


Seems like every few years, a weird phenomenon happens in the popular culture: a nerdery purveyor will make a boo-boo in production, and then undertake drastic measures to literally bury their mistakes. It's not exactly a PATTERN, per se — but it's happened just often enough to be curious. To wit: the folks behind the ubiquitous Funko Pops — those impossibly proportioned chibi-style figurines depicting everything from rock stars to video game characters to your uncle's best friend — apparently overestimated how many toys they should make for the year. And rather than liquidate, donate, accumulate or procrastinate, the company opted for a much weirder solution: evacuate. Meaning they're just dumping the beady-eyed little bastards into a landfill. Yeah, really. And they're not the first geekufacturer to have done so. Want to know more? Give this episode a listen, and we'll dig into it together. PLUS: more Twitter takeaways, Marvel movements, and DC drama (both comics, and Washington).