Reel to Real

Recently I drove out to Sideshow Collectibles in Westlake Village, CA, and toured their corporate headquarters which displayed – on just about every flat surface – licensed, limited edition toys, busts, prop reproductions, maquettes and miniatures from such film and television properties as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Hogan's Heroes, The Terminator, Angel, Jurassic Park – the list is endless. Most are high-end toys that the company produces for discriminating collectors and they range in price from a few bucks to several thousand dollars (ex: a "Gandalf the Grey" bronze figure from The Lord of the Rings).

"Movies toys aren't the kind of thing you hide anymore; instead, you display them proudly," Brant Bridges, Sideshow's Operation Manager told me as I viewed a Buffy figurine (stake in hand) from the company's popular line of Buffy the Vampire Slayer collectibles.

"Funny thing about that doll," Bridges said. "We had protracted talks with Sarah Michelle Gellar about the doll's nose. She wanted a different one – in effect, a nose job on the figure. But that wouldn't have been accurate to the TV character she played, so we didn't do it."

Bridges told me that quite a few stars and directors are fans of Sideshow including Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and Guillermo Del Toro (Mimic, Hellboy). "Guillermo is ecstatic about our toys," Bridges said. "He even took some of our Hellboy product home to role-play with them."

What most collectors don't know is that the current apogee of movie and television-related collectibles represented by companies like Sideshow began slowly and inauspiciously (and mainly in Germany) nearly 100 years ago. It was then that silent screen stars like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and later Laurel and Hardy, began to be hammered, pressed and lithographed into mechanical tin toys.

Who'd have thought that this toy company offshoot would, in time, become big business and rate a huge standalone niche? In the ultimate case of one-upmanship, some movies provide the marketing platform for the toy product … and not the other way around! (Think Lucasfilm and its plethora of Star Wars character collectibles).

Boys and their toys, indeed!