Kickstarter – The Hero Project- Action Figures of World Cultural Heroes

Manufacturing an action figure is expensive, as the creators of The Hero Project- Action Figures of World Cultural Heroes* project on Kickstarter know and have shared with all of us. In an attempt to launch their own line of action figures the team behind a series of toys from Hasbro — I saw G.I. Joe: Sigma Six mentioned, but cannot now find a link — are asking for $125,000 from action figure fans to bring to life a line of toys based on the cultures of the world. Click through; you can get a figure for $35 . . . and lots of other stuff at higher supporter levels.

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Making an action figure is more complex than most people might imagine. Right up until launch the biggest question we got from anyone we showed was, “Why is your funding goal ($125,000) so high?”

The answer is threefold- scale, complexity and quality. The steel molds used to reproduce a figure are expensive and that expense grows exponentially with scale, complexity and quality. A small and simple Pokemon item may cost $5000 to make a mold, $15,000 for Batman or Ninja Turtles figure, and upwards of $30K for most larger scale figures. Ordering a sizable batch of large, multi-part figures is costly and like most people we know, neither of us has an extra large bundle of C-notes sitting around to front the capital.

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