To my eternal shame, I was away at New York Toy Fair 2019 last week and haven’t quite caught up yet and watched last week’s Q&A. But the show must go on, and I’m back this week as F4F launches a figure (and variants) fans have been waiting to buy since his debut at GamesCom last summer! It must be fate, because the same week collectors around the world are receiving and being blown away by the resin Solid Snake statue, the F4F Metal Gear Solid Snake SD PVC figure and variants will go up for order today! All this and more in the F4F Q&A #108 Recap!

Announcements and The Week in Review:

• Alex and Chock are sporting brand new T-Shirts this week: “Long Live King Chockles!”; there are frowny and smiley versions of Chocks available!
• Pre-orders are still open for the Exclusive versions of Meta-Ridley, Psycho Mantis, Spyro & Sparx PVC, Alphonse, Shovel Knight Player 2, Warp Star Kirby and more on the F4F website
• Will be issuing for Tekken Marshall Law statue, as the sales are not sufficient to enter production on Law; were looking forward to him as well and gave him as much love and attention as possible, but it wasn’t to be even with King and Jin in the marketplace already; F4F never wants to cancel projects and it’s not a good thing to do so, but the support for Tekken Law just was not there
• Warm wishes to the retiring Reggie, who is stepping down at Nintendo of America; sharp-eyed fans noticed the First4Figures Darunia and Mario in his office
• Alex has been frustrated this month because of videos not being ready, and would prefer to have videos done faster so that there can be buffers ready; have brought someone new onto the team (as of the beginning of March) so that videos can be completed faster
• “Don’t be late for your interview, and don’t be too early for your interview! About 15 minutes is right–not 30 or 45 minutes. There’s an art to interviews!” — Interviewing Advice from King Chockles
• “If you want to get involved with the marketing department at F4F, you need to hit Chockles up. Spam him with your CVs!” — Alex Davis
• Finally got approval on Mario on Yoshi; Question for the viewers: “For those who bought Bowser, will you buy Mario on Yoshi?” “For those who didn’t buy Bowser, would you buy Mario on Yoshi?” “For those who won’t buy Mario on Yoshi, will you not buy it because you only want Mario or Yoshi on their own?”
• Alex thinks that Mario on Yoshi outshines Bowser like it’s going out of fashion; “one of our best pieces”
• 4 years since the last statue of Mario himself–Cat Mario/Lucky Cat Mario!
• Alex doesn’t know if Aku Aku Masks will be ready to ship by the end of March–factories are just starting to reopen following Chinese New Year and haven’t summoned Alex in yet to check the progress
• Rider Link is coming to the stage where it can soon be wrapped up; estimated four months away now
• If everything goes smoothly, All Might will be debuted at Emerald City Comic Con 2019 in Seattle in just a few weeks’ time
• Preparations for ECCC are coming along slowly; difficult organizing events overseas
• The long-demanded Inu Yasha character poll is finally posted! If you want Inuyasha statues, then make sure to vote for the individual characters you’d want to buy statues of in the poll! Alex wants to see 3 characters at 800+ votes!
• Snake busts are in the works
• Alex is going to look super closely into Super Shadow and Modern Metal Sonic; will look closely at modern Tails and Knuckles; those are the characters Alex is looking at more closely at this stage
• A ton of scalable new systems need to be put into place for F4F’s expansion; inefficiency was rampant in 2018 and Alex really wants to iron that out this year
• Rider Link and Sheikah Slate Life-Size replica are both deep in development

Tempation Thursdays and King of the Ring III:

• Monster Hunter TT: 72 ‘Yes’, 177 ‘No’
• Apex Legends TT: 319 ‘No’, 39 ‘Yes’
• Noragami TT Next Week!
• This week’s hashtag for a chance to win Rewards Points next week is #F4FMGSSD
• King of the Ring III: Phazon Suit Samus is well ahead of Crash PVC; looking at likely 31%-62% fatalities this week that will eliminate a large portion of the remaining entrants

The Q&A!:

• The most challenging statue F4F has worked on is Guts; the easiest was Pac-Man
• Haven’t really thought about what’s next for the Mario line after Mario on Yoshi. Donkey Kong? Luigi?
• Retail generally prefers True Form PVCs over SD PVCs; although most companies don’t retain the high level of detail on super-deformed pieces that F4F does
• PVC Amaterasu will not have Issun
• Guts’ final pre-production samples are being made now and he will be shown as soon as they’re ready
• Alex’s thoughts on the Inuyasha Character poll results: *blows raspberries*
• Will always let collectors know beforehand that a PVC will have a resin version or vice versa at the time that the first version goes up for sale
• When possible, will not do PVCs of preexisting resins; there may be exceptions when there is a reason a new sculpt isn’t possible
• Alex wasn’t really impressed with the response to the Modern Amy Rose sneak peek; needs more likes and reactions; doesn’t seem like natural excitement; feels like a risk to keep on going with Amy and thinks she should be paused for now; doesn’t feel like Amy will get 600 orders; thinks it’s more likely that Super Shadow can hit 600+ orders than Amy; F4F isn’t playing the same game as they were when the team was tiny–statues need to actually sell to keep the lights on and pay everyone; there’s real risk involved in having too many niche characters that bomb–Alex doesn’t want people not being able to get paid
• Law cancellation is painful–no if’s or but’s; need to expand the company to do more launches per year so that there’s more of a buffer for when individual pieces don’t sell well
• Warp Star Kirby poll results vs. actual sales proved to Alex that poll results aren’t very reliable in predicting in how a statue will actually perform in the marketplace; Alex doesn’t want to ask the team to work on something that he doesn’t think will sell enough pieces
• Nothing to say about My Hero Academia availability in Europe–for now
• Guts changes
• Can do a character poll for Resident Evil
• Haven’t sent Artorias bust for approval yet
• Grayfox coming along slowly but surely; more information when they have that information
• Alex would love to make F4F’s own game; something he’s always wanted to do
• Probably would not make any Tomb Raider PVCs because wouldn’t want to step on Gaming Heads’ toes
• 100% will have Warp Star Kirby shipped by the end of the year
• Warp Star Kirby with revised twinkling lights shown on the stream
• No idea when Nito will be up for order
• UK will only have one batch of Varia Suit Samus
• Nothing to report on Yu Yu Hakusho
• Amaterasu LSB factory is finishing Silver end of edition
• Mario on Yoshi pre-order will be sooner than later
• Love for Revolver Ocelot noted
• Kingdom Hearts? “Rally on Funday after March 1st.”
• Psycho Mantis is next at the Alucard factory for production
• Plans for Metal Gear Solid after Gray Fox? “Absolutely.”
• Working on LSB Snake with Codex variant behind the scenes
• Sonic TF in an action pose? “Maybe. Maybe not.”
• Okami Amaterasu PVC EX will be $99.99
• Factories start reopening next week and ramp production back up–True Form Midna production will begin once that gets going
• Let’s get Gruntilda and Mumbo-Jumbo to 800+ votes each
• High likelihood of Wait Lists for Life Size Aku Aku Mask Exclusives converting
• Decided to do Snake PVCs to bring representation of the character to fans who don’t have the space or funds for the large resin versions
• Neo-Cortex is deep in development now
• Resins need to sell a bare minimum of 600 pieces and 800 pieces to be considered successful; PVC EXs needs to sell 1500 pieces and 3000 to be considered successful
• Haven’t looked at Phoenix Wright; no updates
• Thinking of Gray Fox SD next in Metal Gear Solid SD line instead of Psycho Mantis
• Could possibly be something small extra for Snake SD Triple Packs
• Alex loves what he does and is grateful every day that fans’ support allows him to have this company; can only see himself retiring if he’s forced to because the company has been bought or something like that
• Warp Star Kirby’s face is both painted and sculpted
• First Disney character Alex would want to do a statue of? “Elsa.”
• “Who do you guys want to see next in the Metal Gear SD line? I want to see Gray Fox.”
• Alex has never met Reggie; his favorite memory of him is Jimmy Fallon
• New painter starting next week
• Super Shadow poll looks alright; Inuyasha poll: “*raspberries*”
• We’ll see the counter sample of revised Guts in the next 3-4 weeks
• Not sure when the next Zelda pre-orders will be
• Get on the Shiranui EX Wait List ASAP–will ship toward the end of the year
• Alex’s favorite Brush God: Yumigami (the rabbit)
• Chocks can’t frown like on his T-Shirt
• Nothing to report on Tekken as a whole
• Edition size of Spike is set at 1000; making the whole edition size Alex thinks
• Have already crossed the line with Skull Knight and made him at physical stage, so he’s a go even though he doesn’t have as many likes and reactions as Amy Rose
• Not seeing enough buzz and hype whenever Alex posts about Amy and Blaze; no hard number of support that Alex wants to see
• Alphonse should be going into production soon-ish
• Darksiders Fury could have a DE if Darksiders license is ever acquired
• Spike production should be complete really, really soon–Spike could be getting packed up in about 3 weeks
• Fingers crossed for All Might PVC to debut at ECCC

Solid Snake SD Exclusive Order Info:

• Solid Snake SD Exclusive & Variant Orders go up for order at the end of the show! Stay tuned!
• The details present on the resin Snake needed to be translated to the SD Snake as well, as there was a benchmark to hit since the larger Snake was done beforehand
• The face is more cartoony and caricature-like since this is an SD piece, but the body has exactly the same details as resin Solid Snake; tons and tons of details such as leathery textures that can be seen and felt and cross-stitching on pouches; wanted to bring all of the details from the resin to the PVC as well
• Already knee the correct coloring and shaping of the gun from working on the large Snake statue previously
• Exclusive version of Snake has always-on and flickering lights options for the flames on the base; has included rechargeable/removable battery (unless you’re in Australia) with micro-USB post on the back of the statue
• The Stealth and Neon Green versions of Snake will feature swappable eyes like the normal version allowing Snake’s eyes to “look around”; if you look really closely you can see a slight darkening area inside the transparent versions where the magnet is integrated, but you can’t really see the magnet
• The Exclusive packaging isn’t ready to be shown yet for the pre-order, but the Snake SD EX and Variants will all come with a deluxe, exclusive art box similar to those of the Dark Souls SD and Crash Bandicoot PVCs
• All-new low numbers will be up for grabs for this line, as it’s a new series and not a continuation of the resin Metal Gear Solid line
• EX, Stealth Camouflage and Neon Green Stealth Variants are all $99.99 each; $184.99 for Combo Packs containing two of the versions ($15 off!); $269.99 for the Essential Edition including all three versions of SD Snake
• 20% deposit due when pre-orders open up and six month payment plans are available; Validation occurs 3/1/2019 for low numbers
• $25 USD shipping cost in the US/EU per figure; $35 to Canada; $45 to AUS; $65 to other regions like Egypt, Cyprus, etc.
• Snake scheduled for Q3 2019–Alex thinks it will be in-hand in 4-5 months

…And that’s a wrap! Now that you’ve seen all of the details and the final PVC prototypes, will you be ordering one (or three!) of the Solid Snake SD PVC figures? And aside from all of the details regarding the cutest Solid Snake ever, did any other news or information in this week’s show catch your attention?