Palz Pals

[SignatureChoice]

G'day,

 

I just finished up my introductory post and on reflection, I've realised how much Palisades Palz were important, formative even, to me as a youth. I was also exploring the site, and found this here forum.

 

I realise many might not want to dredge up the past now Palisades has passed, but I also hope some of you folks could dig getting a bit nostalgic about the true cousin to the Minimate, the Palisades Pal. 

 

I also realise I should stay on topic, since I'm creating a topic, but if I may be so bold my topic at large is simply Palz themselves. But, in the interests of fostering conversation, I will include some observations and thoughts I've had over the years as 'prompts', if not just signposts for our walk down memory lane:

 

Why the flip was Comrade Artzen, Mr Alex Krycek himself, packed 1:64 to a case? Alongside the smoking man he's one of the series few truly recurring villains, and has a slightly more exciting (read:playable) M.O within the show. As opposed to smoking and stubbing out cigarettes menacingly. Also, Krycek had soooo many different looks, from FBI suit to undercut-leather jacket mercenary to his old man disguise. I can understand a variant being packed so as to become a rarity, but it's a great tragedy the only Krycek we saw was a 1:64 packed 'Comrade Artzen' variant. Is it still called a variant if it's the only figure we ever got? 

 

The issue of making unique characters chase figures recurs with the 1:64 Marita Covarrubias. I missed out on Deep Throat, that's on me. He wasn't blind packed anyway. I was lucky enough to get a 1:16 X figure, so I had someone to leak information to Mulder anyway. I'm grateful to have him, but I dread to think of those X-Files fans who got onboard X-Files Palz series 1 and were big fans of the informant characters. It's the same deal as Krycek, anyone wanting to complete a set of Mulder's first 3 whistleblowing friends would have had (and now most definitely) has their work cut out for them, and once again, it's not like the chase figure needed to be the only example. Marita had even more looks than Krycek throughout the show, some of them were even plot-pivotal. Unlike Highlander, there needn't have only been one.

 

Those two talking points became grievances quite quickly, and that's not what I intended, not at all. To be honest, I've never had anywhere to voice those long percolating thoughts. Onto a taste of the positives, without which I wouldn't be typing this labor of love. To name but two of my loves in this sadly defunct line:

 

- Accessories designed with block figures in mind

From the black oil spill pool with space for two Palz feet moulded into it to the Autopsy chest piece included as an accessory with aliens, Palisades really knew how to work with their medium in interesting, elegantly simple way. The whole 'two outfits per figure' angle on the Buffy line was an inspired early design choice, and as Palz licences became more diversified they never forgot the modular nature of their figures. They even released one of the earliest Build-A-Figures in Buffy Palz Wave 2...quite the logical move when your figures are already designed with disassembly in mind, and Palisades was certainly no stranger to smart moves

 

- Accessories at large

To an X-Files fan, the little white and red paper X-File included with each figure really showed the company cared, or at least cared enough to you know, read up on the episode the figure represented might belong to. That one slip of paper made each and every figure a little thrill in itself, and having one somewhat uniform accessory throughout the line really helped it have a cohesive feel. Little touches like these can be seen throughout the Palz releases; from the tiny wrapping tape to stick John McClane's pistol to his back to the trading cards included with the Buffy Palz to the early example of a Build A Figure in Buffy Wave 2's 'The Judge'. also including his own props across the wave, and speaking of characters played by actor Brian Thompson oh how I wish Palisades had made it far enough to make Alien Bounty Hunter Palz

 

Even if they packed them 1:64.

 

Anyway, I'm hoping Palz is acceptable as both the singular form and the plural, and that I can find other Palz Pals out there

[buttheadsmate]

You have hit the nail on the head with that post. Bravo.

I really got into X-Files Palz , I still hate their 'hands' but apart from that they sometimes get elevated to 'my most-loved' .  The most loved of my most-loved are a set of 4, Series 2 , Autopsy Scullys , each one is a different colour . They are sublime . 

[SignatureChoice]

On 11/24/2020 at 8:12 PM, buttheadsmate said:

You have hit the nail on the head with that post. Bravo.

I really got into X-Files Palz , I still hate their 'hands' but apart from that they sometimes get elevated to 'my most-loved' .  The most loved of my most-loved are a set of 4, Series 2 , Autopsy Scullys , each one is a different colour . They are sublime . 

Oh wow, wow indeed! Such an iconic look for both her and the show represented  are the figures moulded wholly in different colours or you've different outfits under her lab coat? Either way, that's incredible  

 

The hands are indeed one of the shortcomings of the Palz design (in fact, as I wasn't quite aware of Tooms when I first got him as a Pal, and as I was quite young, I mistook the stretched out hands on his stretched out arms for like, crustacean style claws or something he must have used on the show lol how wrong I was. what an accessory though & what an ep, Squeeze especially with Tooms as a suburb sequel/conclusion. Prime pick for those double feature VHS tapes x-files was first sold on but I digress) and it's a real shame, considering how much Palisades spoiled us in terms of accessories, that some can be difficult to get into anyone's hands. My professor Farnsworth I-Man (I-Men, now that's a ways back) has to wield the alien stiletto these days lol good news everyone

 

On the hands/claws note though, on the aliens, especially the S2 attack alien, they bring out the otherworldly in such an elegant lil way without going the full 'moulded hands' route. Once again though, it can be difficult if you want them holding anything lol I myself like to dangle the lil baby pod/alien fetus from the Erlenmeyer Flask from the aliens claws, like he's on dad duty.

 

EDIT: I'm sorry if this was terribly prying BHM, I was quite the newbie indeed when I wrote this mate

 

But, to return to your Dr. Dana Scully quartet, does that mean you have four gurneys also ? if you've any of the aliens from the line I do hope you've got one strapped up. A bit of a confession, but I recently ordered an S2 Buffy Cordelia from the US as lil gift for myself (hoping it gets here before Xmas) and I mainly bought her just to have one of those gurneys to call my own...and to strap my autopsied up S1 grey alien to of course lol hoping to hear more about your rainbow of Autopsy Scully's mate

 

 

Edited December 12, 2022 by SignatureChoice

[SignatureChoice]

On 11/24/2020 at 8:12 PM, buttheadsmate said:

You have hit the nail on the head with that post. Bravo.

I really got into X-Files Palz , I still hate their 'hands' but apart from that they sometimes get elevated to 'my most-loved' .  The most loved of my most-loved are a set of 4, Series 2 , Autopsy Scullys , each one is a different colour . They are sublime . 

this emboldened me so much to participate further on the forum, so just thought I'd slip in a little thank you this holiday season what with die hard Palz and such

 

or maybe just any excuse hehe you're an absolute legend my friend :')

[blogzilly]

On 11/23/2020 at 11:21 PM, SignatureChoice said:

Why the flip was Comrade Artzen, Mr Alex Krycek himself, packed 1:64 to a case? Alongside the smoking man he's one of the series few truly recurring villains, and has a slightly more exciting (read:playable) M.O within the show. As opposed to smoking and stubbing out cigarettes menacingly. Also, Krycek had soooo many different looks, from FBI suit to undercut-leather jacket mercenary to his old man disguise. I can understand a variant being packed so as to become a rarity, but it's a great tragedy the only Krycek we saw was a 1:64 packed 'Comrade Artzen' variant. Is it still called a variant if it's the only figure we ever got? 

The issue of making unique characters chase figures recurs with the 1:64 Marita Covarrubias. I missed out on Deep Throat, that's on me. He wasn't blind packed anyway. I was lucky enough to get a 1:16 X figure, so I had someone to leak information to Mulder anyway. I'm grateful to have him, but I dread to think of those X-Files fans who got onboard X-Files Palz series 1 and were big fans of the informant characters. It's the same deal as Krycek, anyone wanting to complete a set of Mulder's first 3 whistleblowing friends would have had (and now most definitely) has their work cut out for them, and once again, it's not like the chase figure needed to be the only example. Marita had even more looks than Krycek throughout the show, some of them were even plot-pivotal. Unlike Highlander, there needn't have only been one.

 

Hi. I was browsing around the web, looking for some info on PALz, and came upon this post. Hadn’t been here in a long while, though I used to swing by more regularly while I was much more heavily into collecting Minimates, Minifigures and Kubrick figures. I never felt very comfortable about joining into any of the ongoing conversations. It has been my experience that trying to explain myself or my actions after I left Palisades (I’m that Ken guy, the one who was responsible for all the horror) has never been very easy to those who have their minds made up.

I want to address, specifically, the blind box issue however. I can tell you that on the Product Development side of things, none of us wanted it. We all knew what many of you have stated within this forum…that it doesn’t fly well here in the states. Seems to get a pass with LEGO CMF, but that’s the only exception I know of. Of course the baggies…you can feel those out (the current boxes not so much, so that’s going to be an issue for them. Or is it? It will be interesting to see.) Bottom line is that the Sales Department pushed for it and got it.

Why? The company wasn’t doing very well. Smaller retailers, which were keeping the lights on, were rapidly going away. To incentivize them Sales thought that this was a viable solution. It didn’t address the long term problem. It was only a short term fix, which was selling the units to the retailers. It still didn’t sell enough units. It still didn’t sell enough overall product or get consumer exposure and interest. It didn’t do a lot of things. It wasn’t just PALz that suffered. Army of Darkness did also, that got flipped to blind packaging from Series 1 to Series 2.

That’s not the only problem with PALz, the blind box, but it’s realistically the biggest. The products in that category which released in blister packs did better than those that did not. X-Files was originally supposed to be 2-packs on cards. So was Die Hard. That was the format moving forward from Buffy. But things change and you try to respond to what you’re asked to do as best you can.

I do appreciate what you said about the attention to detail though. Kim (the assistant in PD) ran Buffy. I ran XF and DH. She was an enormous Buffy fan, I’m an enormous fan of XF and DH. You always hope that fan intensity bleeds out to the people buying the stuff, especially those who know the material as well.

EDIT: Typed this in Notes on my iPad. No idea why the text is huge. Sorry about that.

Edited August 22 by blogzilly

[cylonchaney]

@blogzilly Congrats on coming out of your shell. And welcome.

[buttheadsmate]

Your post made my day week !  PALz were the reason I originally became a mini-figure fan so you're the man I blame for being broke  

Amazing (to me) that you also share (my) your opinion on blind - boxing  

Thank you Ken for posting , I'm sure there are many PALz fans but sometimes it feels very lonely being one . Not for my ego , purely for context , you can count on one hand how many kubricks (that I am aware of) that I don't own , every Minimate that is shown on the MMDB & every PALz figure ........X -Files PALz are perhaps my favourite . 

On another note 'Oppenheimer' & 'Barbie'  are flavours of the day . Millions of people must have a Barbie doll but I'm betting few people are as proud as I am to own a "Smart bomb"  ? I haven't seen mine for several years ( my collection is a mess of cartons ) but I still remember loving it . 

 

 

 

[blogzilly]

8 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Your post made my day week !  PALz were the reason I originally became a mini-figure fan so you're the man I blame for being broke  

Amazing (to me) that you also share (my) your opinion on blind - boxing  

Thank you Ken for posting , I'm sure there are many PALz fans but sometimes it feels very lonely being one . Not for my ego , purely for context , you can count on one hand how many kubricks (that I am aware of) that I don't own , every Minimate that is shown on the MMDB & every PALz figure ........X -Files PALz are perhaps my favourite . 

On another note 'Oppenheimer' & 'Barbie'  are flavours of the day . Millions of people must have a Barbie doll but I'm betting few people are as proud as I am to own a "Smart bomb"  ? I haven't seen mine for several years ( my collection is a mess of cartons ) but I still remember loving it . 

 

 

 

That’s so interesting. Smart Bombs are one of those things that at the time seemed like an OK idea to pursue but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t. Or rather I wish I’d pursued something else first. It’s quite a long story, but the result of it was that making those sank any chance I had to grow my own thing. It’s likely for the best when I look at everything that followed in my life. 

I used to collect all kinds of block figures too, BHM…Kubrick, Be@rbrick, MM, Dragon, anything I could find. Gorton's puts out a promotional block figure of their fisherman mascot? I’m tracking it down. Somewhere amidst all that, maybe 2025-ish, I zeroed in on LEGO and focused on it almost entirely. That’s still my primary thing that I’ll pick up, if I have any extra money. I’m seriously considering now dumping all collectibles that aren’t block figures and building the ultimate Blockopolis.

I thought there was a checklist-style database somewhere around here, though I might be mis-remembering a lot of it. It’s been quite a few years. Gotta admit…sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped on Minimates. Now I realize how there’s just no way I could ever jump back in. There’s so many. That’s a good thing for them though.

[blogzilly]

15 hours ago, cylonchaney said:

@blogzilly Congrats on coming out of your shell. And welcome.

Thanks!

[NerdyTrev]

1 hour ago, blogzilly said:

I thought there was a checklist-style database somewhere around here, though I might be mis-remembering a lot of it. It’s been quite a few years. Gotta admit…sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped on Minimates. Now I realize how there’s just no way I could ever jump back in. There’s so many. That’s a good thing for them though.

Hail Ivan!

[blogzilly]

29 minutes ago, NerdyTrev said:

Hail Ivan!

That’s the one. Wow…it’s so huge.

[thereasonsy]

On 8/23/2023 at 12:29 PM, blogzilly said:

sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped on Minimates. Now I realize how there’s just no way I could ever jump back in. There’s so many. That’s a good thing for them though.

Um. It’s never too late and there are a ton of  cheap options to jump back into the arena! Luke’s loose Fridays are a great way to test the waters. Also, collect them al is a suggestion not a command. Join us!

[Trekker 42]

Agreed. I assure you, one of each of your favorite characters is adequate for a Minimate collection. 
I just hope for your sake your favorite characters aren’t Juggernaut and Kang. 

[blogzilly]

On 8/27/2023 at 9:10 AM, Trekker 42 said:

Agreed. I assure you, one of each of your favorite characters is adequate for a Minimate collection. 
I just hope for your sake your favorite characters aren’t Juggernaut and Kang. 

I’m guessing there’s some super scarcity to those two I haven’t yet begun to comprehend?

[Trekker 42]

Kang, yes. Very much so. 
There are some more options for Juggernaut but the only genuinely good looking Juggernaut is one of the rarest non-promo releases of Marvel. 

[buttheadsmate]

Also "Kang" or the lack of Kang became a long-running in-joke here , he eventually appeared in a fairly obscure box set . There is a second  Walgreen version which is widely available & IMHO a very worthy cheap alternative .

Juggernaut ?  I guess the Excalibur version is rare & the best. The Excalibur box set is rare & a bit of an enigma , it contains one of the cutest Minimates ever made ,Meggan & undoubtedly one of the worst, Capt.Britain  , a shockingly bad minimate that should never have seen the light of day .  The Excalibur Nightcrawler is also the best version we have had. 

[blogzilly]

3 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Also "Kang" or the lack of Kang became a long-running in-joke here , he eventually appeared in a fairly obscure box set . There is a second  Walgreen version which is widely available & IMHO a very worthy cheap alternative .

Juggernaut ?  I guess the Excalibur version is rare & the best. The Excalibur box set is rare & a bit of an enigma , it contains one of the cutest Minimates ever made ,Meggan & undoubtedly one of the worst, Capt.Britain  , a shockingly bad minimate that should never have seen the light of day .  The Excalibur Nightcrawler is also the best version we have had. 

Oh yeah…I’m starting to have totall recall on how hard it was to keep track of all the different releases now. Lol. Especially the Walgreen’s and TRU packs and such in Marvel. Turns out I did buy that Excalibur set when it came out, just forgot I did, but the figures are here. No Kang anywhere so I must have missed those packs. Past several days I’ve been doing some assessing and sorting. There were some TWD, Aliens, Tomb Raider packs, all unopened that I completely forgot I bought. Makes sense according to some of the dates on the packs, almost all pre 2015 when things in life started taking significant lefts so I wasn’t collecting as vociferously.

The last time I bought a Marvel pack in the store was in 2016. It was a 2-pack of Dr. Strange and The Ancient One.

I like Trekker42’s idea of having a collection of one each of a favorite character. I think I’ll start whittling some of these down from what I got here and approach it that way.

[NerdyTrev]

4 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

The Excalibur Nightcrawler is also the best version we have had. 

I'm partial to the Dave Cockrum version we got in Giant Size Wave 68. He has a cutlass!

[buttheadsmate]

4 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:widely available & IMHO a very worthy cheap alternative .

 The Excalibur Nightcrawler is also the best version we have had without a cutlass.

Sorted.

[minifigvig]

i was kind of taking a break from collecting but when i saw the excalibur box i knew i would need that juggernaut

and finally last year i was able to find an ebay listing with both of the disney store four packs NIB, so now i’ve got kang grim reaper and hawkeye

now the problem is finding vindicator and box so i can have a full alpha flight team

[Shanester]

Welcome aboard Ken.  I have a couple of Palz I got with some Minimate test shots.  Any idea what the story on them is?  BTW, Scully has been sitting here by my monitor since I bought her back in the day.

[blogzilly]

8 hours ago, Shanester said:

Welcome aboard Ken.  I have a couple of Palz I got with some Minimate test shots.  Any idea what the story on them is?  BTW, Scully has been sitting here by my monitor since I bought her back in the day.

Hey,

I do know what those are, I think. In 2006 I got the go ahead from the company that acquired Palisades to use the body design from PALz for a block figure line. At the time I thought I’d be able to get the tools, turns out I couldn’t get full access, so I paid for a new tool. That was a dumb decision. I should have designed a different product but I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time. It was a very difficult couple of years. To test the tool I’d run off a couple of sets of brightly colored factory shots. They ultimately worked.

‘Not long after a former co-worker saw me messing with them and asked me about using them in a game he was trying to do, an indie game called Get Bit!. A card game that had been using cards but he wanted to have a play element with figures that lost appendages. I needed the income because things weren’t going well so I said “Yeah, sure.” and convinced the factory to run a very short run (couple of hundred, really not many) of these brightly colored PALz-like figures. He paid me and I got packaging credit.

So he puts them in the game and it really improves the overall experience and gameplay and later sold a larger company revives it via Kickstarter, though they added a shark that they ripped off from LEGO after changing a couple of bits. They later created more versions of the game and kinda cut me out of the entire equation, even though some of the original Robot Martini versions of the game (with my name on the box) were in their campaign as rewards.

I spoke to the owner, was promised things I never received (like comps and packaging credit) despite him telling me they were tooling the fig on their own (yet the rumor in China (I knew people) was that somehow they got access to the tool I paid for. He was just covering bases and making sure they had my blessing (likely seeing if I was going to have a problem, legally speaking, with the actions they were about to take). Hey…shit happens, people get f—d over all the time in the industry. This particular time wasn’t even the worst thing that ever happened to me, not by a long shot. I really wasn’t going to survive long enough as a small toy company to get anything going on my own, I’d failed hard getting things started. I was smart enough to realize that.

Anyway, more versions of Get Bit! did end up getting made, some were laughingly shitty, IMHO. I’ve never seen a physical copy up close but photos are so awful. Artwork is really unprofessional on their Collectors Edition. Looks like a bunch of grade school art.

High likelihood that those figs you have are from some version of the Get Bit! game. Attaching pics of the first version (which I also didn’t get, and I was supposed to get comps from the cool kids…funny that!) 

[blogzilly]

Here’s a shot of the final factory shots I had done back when I was still considering doing an 80s toys satire line that would have needed a new title. The working one was…oh it was just so dumb. But it was these colorized figs that led to their inclusion in Get Bit! the card game.

[Shanester]

Thanks so much Ken!  I never would have guessed that I would even get a chance to ask you, much less get an answer.  Mystery solved. Thanks much!!