Todd McFarlane Planning Retro Toy Packaging on Spawn Line

Not long ago, McFarlane Toys launched a replica/reimagining of their first-ever Spawn toy on Kickstarter, allowing superfans to buy in at a variety of levels, including some that included retro packaging that looked like the blister packs used on the first Spawn toys back in the early ’90s. Now, McFarlane says he’s working on a whole line of figures that lean into the nostalgia of early ’90s Spawn, capitalizing on the fact that he knows the Spawn audience will appreciate it…but also that there’s nobody out there complaining because it’s more of a niche property than, say, McFarlane’s DC figures.

That means he can (and does) sell a lot of those figures online through the McFarlane (spawn.com) website, rather than through retailers who have more precise expectations about the shape, size, and format of the packaging on their shelves. Speaking with ComicBook.com about his “Buy the Booth” promotion on Whatnot, McFarlane teased that it had been the topic of a conversation just the day before.

“If you remember, we used to have a lot of our packaging,” McFarlane told ComicBook.com. “We had the figure, and then we had this flange. We had this flange next to it that was this cool big piece of art. A lot of the time it was just all figure and all plastic, but for the most part we were doing like, ‘Here’s the toy and here’s a little bit of art.’ But the reality of it is that that art is just empty space and the retailers go, ‘If you cut that off, Todd, I can move my pegs. Instead of only having two figures this far apart, because you’ve got a flange, you’ve got artwork in between. You’re doing figure, art, figure. Why don’t you cut all the art off and then do figure, figure, and just put figures next to each other?’ So the unfortunately or fortunately, I guess depending on who side of the fence you’re talking about, it’s a dollars per square inch. They just go, ‘We’re not here selling air. We’re here selling items. Cut that off, get your boxes tighter. And oh, by the way, we’re going to dictate box sizes. So if you want them to even be in our store…’”

“So you’re a little bit of a slave to their rules, and that’s it,” McFarlane admitted. “But now that we have the internet, we can go outside. The answer is like, yeah, we’re not beholden to those rules. So why don’t we do more of that? And that was actually the topic of  conversation.”

The large packaging may have been inconvenient for retailers, but in the early days of McFarlane’s toymaking career, it played into the then-new idea of collectible action figures, suggesting more protection for the toy itself. While packaging has become more standardized and smaller, the fact that so many toy lines have more “protective” packaging now than they did in the 1980s and ’90s is likely in part due to McFarlane’s influence on the market.