Action figures descend from ancient articulated dolls
An action figure is a poseable character model, usually plastic, drawn from films, comics, games, sport or the military. Hasbro coined the term in 1964 so boys would buy G.I. Joe without calling it a doll. Yet jointed clay and wooden figures already existed in Greece and Rome by 200 BCE.
Two lines of ancestry meet in the modern figure. One is the jointed doll: artists' mannequins, Japanese ichimatsu dolls, and the ball-jointed dolls Western Europe developed in the late 19th century. The other is the toy soldier. Military figurines turn up in ancient Egyptian tombs, German makers cast tin soldiers between slate moulds by the 1730s, hollow casting arrived in the 1890s and polyethylene by the 1950s. Albert Schoenhut's Humpty Dumpty Circus of 1904, with jointed wooden performers, looks like an early relative.
G.I. Joe began as an 11.5-inch soldier pitched by toy idea man Stan Weston. When Sears sold a rival called Johnny Hero in 1965 it still had to be labelled a boy's doll. Hasbro licensed Joe abroad, and in Japan Takara reused its torso for the see-through Henshin Cyborg; when the 1970s oil crisis made big plastic figures costly, Takara shrank the idea into Microman. Mego made Marvel and DC heroes from 1971 but lost Star Wars to Kenner in 1976, and Kenner's 3.75-inch figures made the smaller scale standard.
Cartoon tie-ins drove the 1980s, from Masters of the Universe and Thundercats to The Real Ghostbusters. By decade's end collectors were hoarding boxed figures, flooding the market so badly that most Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures never became worth more than a few dollars. Companies answered with endless costume variants; Batman alone came as Arctic, Piranha Blade and Neon Armor versions. A 1999 study found figures had bulked up beyond real bodybuilders, possibly feeding body-image problems.
Adult lines from McFarlane Toys, Palisades and NECA now treat figures as display statues, sold through chain exclusives, convention releases and deliberately scarce short-packed pieces. A sculptor starts with sketches, bends aluminium wire into an armature, builds it up in clay or wax, and the final toy is moulded in hard ABS plastic and painted with acrylics.
Source: Action figure
