Jpatrik

Thanks for watching and for the many kind words!

Sadly, many of the mysteries that I wanted answers to (including the Beverly in the Generations uniform mix up) remain unanswered.  Researching the Playmates line is almost like archaeology – stalking people (Overly never got back to me) and trawling through archived pages on the wayback machine and scouring old magazine articles.

I guess in some way these videos have been my attempt to document some of this stuff before it all gets lost to time.

The Chase Masterson fan club was pretty helpful, and I exchanged some nice words with Ron McPherson (the artist who did all the package art) who remembers his time working on Trek with great fondness.

As for the uniform screw ups – I did find an old quote from Mara Hart from Playmates where she basically stated that the incorrect uniforms were missed at every stage of the approvals process!  Pretty crazy, huh?  Just another Playmates oddity I suppose.

I’ve always been a huge fan of 8472 – its such an extraordinary figure that holds up even today – well painted and engineered too.  Plus a lovely representation of a character from one of the later DS9/Voyager seasons.

Incidentally the Eddington custom was made by a buddy of mine – quite a talented artist who is really producing some extraordinary figures to have signed by some of the lesser known 90s Trek actors.

Part 3 of our Playmates documentary series (for anyone who likes this format).  As always, sharing this video (liking and adding comments - no matter how small) really help us out :-)

This was a  labour of love by people obsessed with the Star Trek Playmates line.  We hope you like it!

About the figure numbers - youre right, it is in fact a sizeable black hole.  I tried really hard to track down some sources, found old magazine articles and most sources focused on Red Data, Tom Riker or Esoqq as rare or shortpacked figures.  Sources varied (but not by much) in terms of quantities for those figures.  But for the TNG wave 1 & 2 figures?  No idea.  I resorted to asking various facebook communities for the highest numbered figures they had and it topped out at about 300,000 for some figures (which explains why so many mint in packet samples are still on the market decades later)

As for later on, I was able to find magazine interviews with Chris Overley where he stated that the warp factor figures would be produced about 10,000 per figure.  Anecdotally, this sort of tracks with what I see on ebay every day.  The later waves do seem to be under-represented (but of course, as your posts often point out this can be driven by "market forces" like new shows, the return of older characters like Picard, etc)

Thanks for the kind words!  Yes, this was the result of many hoarded playmates ads scanned (as well as many other fans have generously shared with me).  Plus I have loose samples of every figure, so any time you see a figure against a white background - that's mine! (1701 figures included).

Yeah "evil" Picard has been annoying me every since it was issued - had the same reaction.  We were years behind on DS9 here I grew up so I genuinely thought it was an upcoming episode where a "mirror" Picard would show up and do and say evil stuff!

Crazy to hear about the Trifolds at the Huntsville convention.  Funny how the collective "memory" of the internet doesnt seem to reach that far back in time to include the 90s and much of the history of the Playmates line.  Thanks for watching :-)

For anyone who still frequents these parts, here's part 2 (part 3 is being edited now) of our documentary.  All the loose figures (with the white background) are mine!

As always, comments and likes really help the algorithm! :-)