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Collecting Professional Wrestling Action Figures

Posted: Nov 2nd 2007 By: CMBurnham

Professional wrestler Ted "The Million Dollar Man" DiBiase, who spent nearly 30 years grappling with everyone from Hulk Hogan to Ric Flair, still recalls the day when his first wrestling action figure hit store shelves.

"I was just thrilled," DiBiase told Toy Collector Magazine at a New York City wrestling fan convention. "All of a sudden, in the mid-1980s, wrestling's popularity had risen to a height that I had never seen before. We had a Saturday morning cartoon on TV, and action figures and video games and every kind of toy imaginable. The first time I walked into a Toys R Us or Wal-Mart, saw my likeness on a shelf, and said, 'Wow, that's me.' I have every one of the wrestling figures they made of me, I've got a couple of boxes of them in my house."

DiBiase's reaction has mirrored the positive and enthusiastic responses from wrestling fans -- and the wrestlers themselves -- regarding the growing market of professional wrestling action figures. Today, these figures have evolved from the cartoonish, rubbery statues of combatants in mid-grapple, to highly detailed and well-articulated representations of the top superstars of the squared circle.

"With the average action-figure property, you may see 36 different figures per year," said Jeremy Padawer, vice president of Entertainment Marketing for Jakks Pacific. The Malibu, Calif., toy-production company has manufactured World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) action figures since 1996. "With the WWE, our company produces almost 400 different wrestling action figures a year. Not only do we want to put out quality WWE product, we also want to put out the entire extent of their historic roster -- superstars, up-and-comers, peripheral characters, we want everyone in action figures."

Before the mid-1980s, professional wrestling collectibles were limited to newsstand magazines, event programs and the occasional 8 by 10 glossy photograph. That changed in 1984, when the World Wrestling Federation, in an effort to market their pro wrestling product to a younger audience, collaborated with toy maker LJN to create a series of 10-inch rubberized wrestling figures. Depicting the most popular wrestlers of the mid-1980s -- Hulk Hogan, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, the Junkyard Dog and "Macho Man" Randy Savage -- the toys allowed kids to recreate their favorite wrestling matches. Granted, LJN's wrestling characters were molded from a rubbery polymer, and the action figures stood in a single, non-articulated "mid-grapple" pose, but in 1984 kids were happy to have any version of "Macho Man" or the Junkyard Dog on their bedroom dressers or shelves.

The original LJN figurines, with their original packaging, are hard to find today. Most of those figures are found unboxed and heavily "played with" causing the paint on the figures' rubbery bodies to wear off. While popular and familiar characters like Hulk Hogan, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and Bruno Sammartino have retained their collectibility in the LJN line, many collectors search for figures from long-forgotten WWF wrestlers whose only existence in miniature was with the LJN line. ";The LJN figures are still very collectible," said Ben Glabe, a Liverpool, England wrestling figure collector. "Today, many people don't know that much about a wrestler named Ted Arcidi, but he wrestled in the 1980s and there's an LJN figure of him. It's the only figure of Arcidi ever made, which makes it harder to find and very collectible."

After the LJN line ended in 1986, several companies manufactured wrestling action figures, mostly working with individual wrestling federations. The toy company Remco manufactured a line of wrestlers from the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association (AWA), featuring such notables of the mat as Rick Martel, the Fabulous Freebirds and Larry Zbyszko. Another toy company, Galoob, produced a series of figures from the Atlanta-headquartered World Championship Wrestling (WCW) organization. From 1990 to 1994, Hasbro produced World Wrestling Federation action figures, which differed from the LJN line in size (4? inches tall) and quality (articulation was added by placing a thumb lever on the figure's back, allowing the figure to raise or lower his arms). Another independent company, calling itself Legends of Professional Wrestling, created several action figures in both traditional and blood-smeared packaging.

By 1996, Jakks Pacific, a new company that had acquired the World Wrestling Federation line, produced a fresh line of action wrestling figures. Jakks added new technologies to the diminutive action heroes. The 1999 Titan Tron Line incorporated a special voice chip in each of the wrestling figures, allowing them to engage in a dialogue with other wrestling toys). Jakks also added more points of articulation to each doll, and collectors could now pose their action figures in various wrestling moves, with appropriately bent wrists, elbows, knees, ankles and neck.

But in early 2000, Jakks added Real Scan technology to its action figures. A professional wrestler would sit in a special chair, and a scanning laser would encircle that wrestler's face and head, detailing the curve of his or her cheeks, nose, chin, eyes and mouth. That information would be digitally encoded into a computer, which could then reproduce a miniature prototype of the wrestler's face, right down to the tiniest scar or characteristic sneer.

"Prior to the Real Scan technology, we used a lot of reference photos of wrestlers, and sculpted their prototypes by hand," said Padawer. "The WWE would provide current photos of superstars, and we would take four to eight photographs of every angle of a wrestler's face, and work from there. There was an outside vendor who was doing 360-degree scans of characters for entertainment-based properties, and we applied that scanning process to our action figure line. We would go to events with the external vendor, they would take a 360-degree view of the wrestler, and we could now replicate that wrestler's face for our action figures, at a much lower cost."

"You would sit in a chair, and a laser would go in a big circle around your head," said professional wrestler Mick Foley, a professional wrestling legend whose characters of Cactus Jack, Mankind and Dude Love were recreated in Jakks Pacific action figures. "The challenge during the scan was to not move your eyes as this thing was going around you. Instead of having an artist rendering what you kind of look like, that's your face there on that doll -- and for a collector, I think it's great. I've had people come up to me with several of my action figures under my different characters, and they ask me, "Can I get them autographed?" And I'm glad to sign; then they find out that Mankind's and Cactus Jack's signatures are very similar to mine."

Currently the Jakks Pacific line with the most interest is the WWE Classic Superstars series. Begun in 2003, the Classic Superstars line eschews previous gimmicky images of the action figures as "toys," and instead presents the characters as their fans most remember them: dynamic action heroes ready to battle their malevolent opponent, or cunning action characters ready to steal a victory from the goody-goody babyface.

"I joined Jakks Pacific in 2003, after working with Mattel," said Padawer. "My co-worker, Peter Skourtis (lead project manager for WWE product at Jakks Pacific) also started there in 2003. Both of us had been big WWE fans throughout our lives, and I thought wouldn't it be great if we had a line that celebrated the careers of some of the greatest superstars of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Jakks had tried to create a historic wrestling line once before, but it failed. We determined that it failed because the characters Jakks produced were cartoonish versions of classic wrestlers. That's not what the consumer wanted, or what our WWE fanbase wants today."

With that, Padawer and Skourtis created an online poll listing more than 200 wrestlers of the past and offering fans the opportunity to vote on the most popular characters if such figures were made today. "We were able to collect, in ordinal rankings, the highest intent-to-purchase totals," said Padawer. "From there, we mixed the highest intent-to-purchase characters with some of the middle talent, so we could celebrate the entire WWE history and have this series last for quite a long time."

The first series of WWE Classic Superstars is still popular today, as a Shawn Michaels action figure from that series can easily command $150-$200, mint/boxed. "We were lucky enough that we misorganized our stock room," said Jack Feuerbach, the owner of the online wrestling figure store Highspots. "One time someone found that Series 1, a year or to several months after it was released.Demand was very high for that, and it sold pretty quickly. There are always collectible figures from each series. In Series 4, for example, fans are looking for the Roddy Piper, Junkyard Dog and Tito Santana figures from that set."

In addition to wrestlers on the WWE's past and present roster, the Classic Superstars line also features detailed recreations of professional wrestlers who never previously worked for the WWE, including the maniacal Abdullah the Butcher and mixed martial arts champion Tank Abbott. It also includes stars who previously left the WWE on bad terms, such as Bret "Hitman" Hart and "The Living Legend" Bruno Sammartino, whose likenesses are now incorporated into the series.

"We were surprised and pleased that Bruno Sammartino is part of the Classic Superstars series," said Padawer. "I think the long and short of the answer is, we've found very few superstars "Even those with really long, heated relations --who weren't willing to participate in the Classic Superstars series. I was talking to Bret Hart a month ago, he was blown away with the figures that we did of him, and he wanted to see if we could get him one of everything that we've done to date."

"I'm going to be part of the Classic Superstars line in Series 16," said Tammy "Sunny" Sytch, a popular wrestling manager who worked in the WWE from 1993 to 1998, when she left the company to seek help for addictions. "Jakks Pacific sent me a contract, I signed it, and bingo we've got a doll coming out. It's as easy as that. My doll will be a limited-edition figure. It'll be one action figure in every two cases. Myself and Mae Young (an octogenarian female wrestler who still occasionally competes in WWE matches) will be in different cases. I haven't seen the doll yet, I don't even know what it looks like. Hopefully it'll be a good surprise, not a bad surprise."

Sytch's note that her figure will appear in only one in every two sales cases of figurines is not so much a calculated effort by Jakks Pacific to create rare short-printed collectibles, as it is a marketing decision regarding any action figures of female wrestlers, valets or "divas" that are sold commercially. "Sometimes we release characters that may not appeal to the 4 to 7-year-old boy," said Padawer.

For the most part, the divas appeal to the post-pubescent set. Little boys don't like to play with girl dolls, so we'll shortpack them in shipping cases. There's a secondary benefit to short-packing: it creates more collectibility. But that's not our objective. We know that when we put the divas figurines out there with the normal amount, it'll back up at retail. Most companies wouldn't even dream of making action figures of female wrestlers like Mae Young or the Fabulous Moolah, not in a million years. But we do it because we've got a big brand on our hands, we don't mind spending tooling dollars and even losing money, if it means we can provide the consumers a complete look and understanding -- where they can create their own WWE experience."

Although the Classic Superstars line is Jakks Pacific's most popular series, it is by no means the company's only series. The Unmatched Fury line, featuring highly detailed wrestling superstars in poses or moves associated with the namesake wrestler, is also one of the company's most popular series. "Unmatched Fury features a 9-inch statue style, borrowing from Todd McFarlane's hyper-detailed statue lines," said Padawer. "In the future, we will be adding a deluxe line called Build 'em Brawlers, where the figures come with an accessory piece. If you take all the accessory pieces together, you can build a wrestling ring or a steel cage. We're also going to have a 12-inch ultra-articulated deluxe style version called Maximum Aggression. That will be coming out in the fall of 2008."

With an overwhelmingly positive response from wrestlers themselves, scaled-down versions of ring royalty appear to have a bright future. "I still enjoy collecting the action figures," said Ted DiBiase. "As long as they continue to make the toys, I'll keep signing the packages."