| Introducing: Amok Time |
| Written by James Tomlinson | |
| Monday, 21 July 2008 | |
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Amok Time has been on the scene now for some 16 plus years. Originally, the company focused on buying and selling vintage toys of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, which amounted to about 99 percent of the company's business. In the mid-'90s things started to change, and according to owner Paul James Lazo, Amok Time had to step in time to those changes. "There was so much new product coming out that had that vintage collectible edge to it," said Lazo "like the Hasbro Star Wars Power of the Force figures, everything Sideshow Collectibles was doing, especially with Universal Monsters, Hasbro's Transformers reissues, and all of that. The new vintage product, if you will, really started to eclipse the older stuff. Those developments were what changed our focus. It just got to the point where it was hard to keep a staff together and keep a shop open solely on vintage toy sales. On the other hand, we do keep our fingers in everything, and we still sell vintage toys. It's been a long road, and it's all really been building up to where we're at now." So, where's Amok Time at now? Well, we met with Paul Lazo at Toy Fair in February, and we and a lot of other Toy Fair attendees were surprised to see Amok Time had ventured into the manufacturing arena. We didn't see vintage toys being purveyed. What we saw was new product based on some very niche vintage themes, of the sort you're looking at on these next two pages. "Manufacturing has always been a goal of the company," said Lazo. "Toy Fair offered the first glimpse at what we've been doing along these lines. We kept everything quiet for about nine months," he said. "I think that's part of why we got such a great response from retailers at Toy Fair, because everyone was really surprised," said Lazo. "Responses ranged from, 'Wow, that's really cool,' to 'Wow, that's really cool but I don't know what the hell it is," he said. Lazo and team have a decidedly niche approach to the specialty marketplace -- really niche. "Ninety percent of the licenses we're doing are very niche," said Lazo, "and to be honest part of the reason for that is that trying to buy into the Star Wars license right out of the gate wasn't something we wanted to do. The fact of the matter was that just wasn't going to happen [laughs]." The other part of the rationale according to Lazo was, "I and some of the other guys here are fans of a lot of stuff that hasn't been made yet," he said. "Don't get me wrong," said Lazo, "we're all huge Star Wars fans, and that's what got us into this business, but I'm more interested in seeing something like a Rondo Hatan figure come out right now than Luke Skywalker in his fourteenth different outfit or something, even if I did buy all the Lukes that have come out to this point [laughs]. As far as I and Star Wars go, I always find myself wanting to say 'No' to the next thing, but it's like that quote from The Godfather -- 'Right when I thought I was out, they keep pulling me back in [laughs]." The new manufacturing tack for Amok Time started with Lazo and some of the other guys there going down a list of some obscure and not so obscure favorites of theirs, chief among them it seems were zombie movies. We don't know what it is with zombies, but zombies are in. It's almost a case of them being so in that you could call it zombie chic. "Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Living Dead were always huge things for us," said Lazo. "There are so many fans of those movies but no one's really touched it yet in terms of collectibles. We also love the Groovy Ghoulies, and Battlestar Galactica. As for Battlestar Galactica, we really liked what Majestic Studios did with the figures it did, but we wanted to do some of the ones Majestic didn't get to do for whatever reason. We decided that we were going to push that out and expand on it this year, and do some of the recurring characters from the series," said Lazo. Some other things that Lazo and the staff at Amok Time felt were worth doing were characters from cult classics like Killer Clowns from Outer Space, The Terror from Beyond Space, and Blacula. Those lines will have been announced officially on the company's web site about the same time you're reading this. "People who are into it are going to grab it," said Lazo, "but the simple fact is that some people are not going to get it," he said. "Some people are going to look at a property like Blacula and say, 'Why don't you just do something like Ernest Goes to Jail?,'" he said with a chuckle. Those of us here at the magazine think a Blacula figure, or figures, will rock, because there's plain old cool, and then there's Blacula cool. You've got to go miles and miles to reach Blacula cool, and it looks to us like Amok Time is there. For more information on the company and what else it has to offer, be sure to visit its web site at www.amoktime.com. Tell them you read about it in Lee's Toy Review. It distinguishes you. |
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