Barry’s Blueprints of Hits and Heartbreak

[Barry]

18 hours ago, NerdyTrev said:

These are very lamentable for me. Pirate Raiders is a line I would have loved to see continue. They look tremendous! I am eager to see what Uriel cooked up, if you can share them. 

I'll put them together eventually, but I think I need a bit of a break on gathering designs for online viewing.  I only just finished compiling the designs I considered mine or mostly mine, still leaving about 1500 more to go.  (Which is insane to think of, because that's about 2100 I just finished processing.)

 

2 hours ago, thereasonsy said:

just read the first issue of Nova and curious if an Infinity Watch set ever got discussed with Gamora in her original suit, Pip, and of course Moondragon.

I'm sure they probably came up in lists, but never anything more than an initial "we could do them..." and then moving on.  I think if anything, they might've had a slightly better chance now that 4 of them were movie stars, but I still think it would have been a very hard sell.  As for Moondragon, I don't think you ever would have seen her in that original outfit.  Despite the blocky nature, there's just too much flesh showing.

[Barry]

I'd completely forgotten about these until I was reading my list of figures worked on, and was confused as to what the listings were.  These were the original concept for Marvel Best Of, which was originally called the Starter Series.  This was to be an entry point into collecting the line if you wanted the A-list players.  Best Of served the same purpose, but I think the name was misleading. 

Starter Series had more of a modern slant to the costumes at first, but became more classic, until it became the Best Of versions.  Some of the art here was repurposed for Best Of, but overall colours were originally darker and less 60's styled.  There wouldn't have been two Thors, this was the first move from Modern to Classic.  I think the only difference on Thing was really the mouth, but hey, he was in the Starter folders, so I'll include him here too.

[NerdyTrev]

Love both of those Thors. I'm surprised that the FA Thor helmet piece wasn't used more than the one time. For my money, that's one of the best Thor's you made. So Kirby, it's brilliant!

[Barry]

(Hopefully this is alright to post here...)

I'm selling some sketch cards on Instagram right now until March 9th at 9:30 Eastern.  It's original art created for the cards, but based on previous digital art that I created.  (I have not created traditional art in over 15 years.)  Auction rules are in the individual posts.  I won't be running bids outside of Instagram just to keep everything in one place.

[buttheadsmate]

Some great stuff there Barry .

Regards the  Best of .. / Greatest hits ... waves  that were released .......were there any modifications made to the 'mates that were re-released ?  

[Barry]

16 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Some great stuff there Barry .

Regards the  Best of .. / Greatest hits ... waves  that were released .......were there any modifications made to the 'mates that were re-released ?  

None.  They were produced from the same production files and were simply meant as a rerun.  Any differences people may notice can be chalked up to human... I wouldn’t call them errors...  human element I suppose...?  They would just be minor variations that can happen when starting a new production run and trying to match something one-for-one that was manufactured some time ago.  In my personal archives, they are the same figures.

[thereasonsy]

15 hours ago, Barry said:

None.  They were produced from the same production files and were simply meant as a rerun.  Any differences people may notice can be chalked up to human... I wouldn’t call them errors...  human element I suppose...?  They would just be minor variations that can happen when starting a new production run and trying to match something one-for-one that was manufactured some time ago.  In my personal archives, they are the same figures.

Is this the reason for the variance in FF blues?

[Barry]

9 hours ago, thereasonsy said:

Is this the reason for the variance in FF blues?

He wasn't in Greatest Hits, are you referring to different rereleases* of the Best Of version, or between different waves?

*I should clarify too, incase it's not really known, that there were several different production runs of each of the Best Of waves.

Edited March 7 by Barry
Clarification

[thereasonsy]

9 hours ago, Barry said:

He wasn't in Greatest Hits, are you referring to different rereleases* of the Best Of version, or between different waves?

*I should clarify too, incase it's not really known, that there were several different production runs of each of the Best Of waves.

You’re right he’s Best of! https://www.minimatedatabase.com/figure.php?i=1673&n=Mr.+Fantastic always found it interst8ng we never got a Sue to match him. 

[Barry]

Any slight differences would be down to human involvement in the mixing of the Pantones.  As it was, between different versions of him (like, W48, TRU 6) that was my choice to make them either reference a certain era, or just to make them look different than the last version.

As for Sue (and Johnny at that), I don't know why they didn't make it to the Best Ofs, other than we didn't go beyond Wave 3.  I'm sure we would have got to them eventually.

[buttheadsmate]

2 hours ago, Barry said:

Any slight differences would be down to human involvement in the mixing of the Pantones. 

I printed pharmaceutical packaging for several years , for emphasis I was the man controlling the printing machine, I matched/ mixed the inks to the Pantone spec .  Most pharmaceutical packaging is (or was) printed in specific Pantone colours ,rarely CMYK  .  Get the colour wrong & I was out of a job.  Bored yet ? 

Minimate tampo-printing :

Over the years I became sympathetic towards the ....er....irregularity ...of the colour-matching of the toys that I was collecting .  Inevitably ,despite my sympathetic stance, it often became ....er...irritating . Did it matter ?  Not really, but TBQH if you are matching a Pantone....you match it . 

My knowledge of packaging also led me to scream whenever I received blister-packaged Minimates with the 'blister' hanging off .  I knew why it was happening & that just made it worse .  

 

 

[thereasonsy]

6 hours ago, Barry said:

Any slight differences would be down to human involvement in the mixing of the Pantones.  As it was, between different versions of him (like, W48, TRU 6) that was my choice to make them either reference a certain era, or just to make them look different than the last version.

As for Sue (and Johnny at that), I don't know why they didn't make it to the Best Ofs, other than we didn't go beyond Wave 3.  I'm sure we would have got to them eventually.

Yeah, I just bought an extra Reed for Johnny but color matching that Sue has been the bane of my decal existence. 

[buttheadsmate]

Barry , my little 'packaging' rant got me to thinking about the 'Bluntman & Chronic' SDCC pack .   What was the 'story' about this pack & its almost universal disappearance ,re-appearance en-mass on ebay & the fact that almost every pack that I have ....& that is many .....have poor packaging? Do I recall rumblings about the leaf-motif on Bluntman & its unsuitability ??

[Barry]

14 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Over the years I became sympathetic towards the ....er....irregularity ...of the colour-matching of the toys that I was collecting .  Inevitably ,despite my sympathetic stance, it often became ....er...irritating . Did it matter ?  Not really, but TBQH if you are matching a Pantone....you match it . 

My knowledge of packaging also led me to scream whenever I received blister-packaged Minimates with the 'blister' hanging off .  I knew why it was happening & that just made it worse .  

Sorry, I've been suffering from a severe lack of sleep -- maybe my saying 'mixing' was the wrong term.  The application was really what I was getting at.  I was referring mainly to what I said some time ago about matching across different applications and materials.  Hand painted vs spray masked vs injected vs tampo... how many times you have to hit the same tampo...  that sort of thing.  The Pantone would be correct but the human element comes for how it's applied in different situations, and then how much money and time we really want to spend to match all elements when the toy has such a low cost.  It happens on pretty much every toy line.  I've seen it on everything from Mattel and Hasbro to Figmas.

Blisters coming off just might be a run of bad glue or having the item exposed to the wrong temperature conditions before it's fully set.  Again, it happens across many companies.  It used to be a more widespread problem back in the day, I remember seeing dozens of figures falling from their bubbles in Wal-Marts and TRUs.  Now, not so much, but I think many companies have switched to some kind of heat-sealing instead.

 

11 hours ago, thereasonsy said:

Yeah, I just bought an extra Reed for Johnny but color matching that Sue has been the bane of my decal existence. 

TRU 8's probably your closest match, but it's not the same number.  I guess you could chalk up no Best Of Invisible Woman to being another incompleted team, unfortunately.  

 

53 minutes ago, buttheadsmate said:

Barry , my little 'packaging' rant got me to thinking about the 'Bluntman & Chronic' SDCC pack .   What was the 'story' about this pack & its almost universal disappearance ,re-appearance en-mass on ebay & the fact that almost every pack that I have ....& that is many .....have poor packaging? Do I recall rumblings about the leaf-motif on Bluntman & its unsuitability ??

No idea, honestly.  My best guess would be they sold at SDCC, but there was remaining stock, so Diamond offered it up to retailers after the show.  Someone must have grabbed a bunch and then resold them.  The poor packaging would be unrelated to this release pattern, which is to say that it wasn't something to do with a factory issue.  As for leaf-motifs, there was no issue.  It's in the source material, and the licence would have gone in fully knowing what types of imagery they were licencing out.  The only things we could never use on figures were logos from other licences, or brand logos.  That's why the MTV logo on the Predator Blain figure was changed to a Minimates M instead.  For Big Bang Theory, we could use DC hero logos because it was all owned by WB.

[nandoninny]

damn -- once again, Barry -- i'm loving this insight.  i'm a CPA who couldn't cut it in art/design school so all of this is gold to me.  thank you

Edited March 9 by nandoninny

[buttheadsmate]

Thank you for taking the time to answer Barry.  

Regards the blister problem , who knows, there are perhaps many scenarios but I was convinced that it was incompatibility between the glue & the varnish coating the printed card .   It was a problem that was surmountable ....hence my screams.

Forgive me dwelling on this but if you like your toys & you like to choose whether to open the package or not .....loose blisters kinda took the choice away .  

 

[Barry]

23 hours ago, nandoninny said:

damn -- once again, Barry -- i'm loving this insight.  i'm a CPA who couldn't cut it in art/design school so all of this is gold to me.  thank you

 

23 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Thank you for taking the time to answer Barry.  

Any time, I really enjoy talking about it, so I'm happy to share!

 

23 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Regards the blister problem , who knows, there are perhaps many scenarios but I was convinced that it was incompatibility between the glue & the varnish coating the printed card .   It was a problem that was surmountable ....hence my screams.

Forgive me dwelling on this but if you like your toys & you like to choose whether to open the package or not .....loose blisters kinda took the choice away .  

 

That might be possible if they changed the glue, or maybe had a bad batch.  It does ruin the collectability, for sure.  I remember Hasbro having a hard time with some Star Wars figures in the 2000s which drove people mad trying to collect MOC.  I was always a loose collector, so I didn't mind.  The only figure I ever kept on the card was the Return Of The Jedi Special Edition Luke that I got at the theater back in 97, but alas -- his glue finally gave up and the bubble fell off.

[Barry]

I’ve updated my website with major additions to most MM galleries.  (As far as I can tell) there are now just over 2,500 images.  This brings the site up to date on every design I was the lead on, or consider to be mainly mine.  I can still post unreleased figures here if people are interested though, and if people have questions about anything they see there, I can definitely answer here as well.

[thereasonsy]

2 minutes ago, Barry said:

I’ve updated my website with major additions to most MM galleries.  (As far as I can tell) there are now just over 2,500 images.  This brings the site up to date on every design I was the lead on, or consider to be mainly mine.  I can still post unreleased figures here if people are interested though, and if people have questions about anything they see there, I can definitely answer here as well.

Oh we are still interested and sitting patiently. The website looks beautiful. And so many great memories. I love how you originally had the Jean Grey first appearance version come with her second mask. It looks beautiful.

[Navaan]

On 3/14/2026 at 6:44 PM, Barry said:

I’ve updated my website with major additions to most MM galleries.  (As far as I can tell) there are now just over 2,500 images.  This brings the site up to date on every design I was the lead on, or consider to be mainly mine.  I can still post unreleased figures here if people are interested though, and if people have questions about anything they see there, I can definitely answer here as well.

As the head mod for r/Nightwing, I appreciate that you put Nightwing as the DC cover character.

[SCW]

Don't know if you have the answer to this, and I feel like I heard an answer to this years ago, but maybe you can give some insight...

Why weren't MMs given two face prints for heads? With most characters having hair that covered the back of the heads, and this being a somewhat common practice for Lego, why wasn't this utilized in MMs more? Sometimes we were given multiple heads for a character but still only one print per head.

Obviously not every character needed multiple faces but would have been cool for many characters.

[NerdyTrev]

16 hours ago, SCW said:

Why weren't MMs given two face prints for heads?

I've wondered this myself, and my best guess is that it has to do with the mark from the injection mold on the bottom of each head cylinder. There's no guarantee that the printing will avoid hitting that mark in the same way that they can expect it with only a single printing going on the piece. Just a thought, anyways.

[Barry]

I actually wrote this up before, so if you'll permit me to quote myself, then read on!  

I'll also add that Lego's systems of tampo application are far more advanced than ours were.  They are completely automated, whereas ours were more hand-operated due to the small production numbers in comparison to Lego.  The automation creates more precise application for less chance of errors, but the initial set-up cost for a machine that only prints on one specific part would be huge.  Their numbers pay that off though.  Some of our production runs would be equivalent to what Lego would be selling of one specific set to all of one store chain's locations in a single city.

You can actually see a video on YouTube that Lego uploaded themselves of minifigures in production.  There's no narration, but it does show the process.

 

On 8/21/2025 at 2:44 PM, Barry said:

I’d forgotten that the original Jubilee was one of the double-sided heads.

As usual, it all came down to cost as tampo printing is expensive and prone to errors.  Each color is applied separately and with every added color the risk of misalignment increases.  When that happens, the piece has to be scrapped and started over.

For Jubilee’s two faces, they were two hits of black, two of white, two of red, and one of pink for a total of seven tampo hits on a single head.  Split across two separate heads, that becomes three hits on one and four on the other.  Aligning three or four colors is far easier than seven and if there’s a mistake on the first hit of the second head, the first head is still salvageable.  With a double-sided head, the second face isn’t treated as a new start.  It still counts as the fourth or fifth hit (depending on which side you print first) because you have to align the start of the second face directly opposite the first face.  All of this is made more difficult because it's on a cylindrical surface.

You might think you could solve this by rolling the tampo around the head so each color is only applied once but rolled tampo is much harder than straight-down stamping.  For example, if you print white first and then black, the alignment will probably be fine on the first face but by the time the stamp rolls around to the back, the black won’t line up with the white. You can see this issue on plenty of Spider-Men with just one hit of black tampo, where the webbing on his head doesn’t line up in the back.

In the end, it’s easier and more cost-effective to split the faces onto separate heads.  Plus, I believe it looks nicer in the packaging to present the second face as an accessory especially for figures that wouldn’t otherwise come with extra parts.

A smaller reason was what happened the first time we tried it with Gul Dukat.  No one realized the head had two faces, and when the factory accidentally packaged it with the Damar side forward, fans assumed it was a downgraded, poorer likeness compared to the promo shots.  We ended up writing a blog post on the Art Asylum site explaining it, letting people know to swap one of the faces on their Dukat duplicates in the two Sisko sets to make an extra character.  That confusion was something we wanted to avoid happening again but really it came down to cost.

[elhonez]

I'm curious to learn more about the D&D MiniMates -- these were some of my all-time favorites, and the packaging was just perfect. I was very sad to miss out on the last wave -- it looked amazing.

Zach mentioned at one point that there had been discussion about developing D&D themed "blanks" or generic singles for role players to use in their character creation and campaign building. I feel like this could have been pretty cool, given that gamers are already in the practice of painting miniatures to represent their characters, and this would have been a much more dynamic solution for them.

Were any designs ever worked up, or did this idea never move past the spitballing phase?

[Barry]

Generic singles isn't anything that I'm aware of, but then I was left out of a lot of meetings.  I'm sure Robert and I could've discussed the idea of doing something like that at one point, akin to the Pathfinder characters, but it was never a concrete direction that we were headed in.  The Minimates line was based solely on characters in the style of their appearances in the 80s cartoon.  The general licence was held for other products though, and I can't see why it would have been exclusive to the show for MMs, so I suppose we could have done something with generic characters, but it was never seriously discussed.

Thanks about the boxes, I was pretty proud of those!  I used to sell D&D modules when I worked in a hobby / comic shop, so that was the first thing I thought of when coming up with ideas.  I wanted them to be a bit more fancy looking in terms of a bound book with gilded pages though.  

I actually had set 3's box done, since the layout was already complete.  It just needed the mascot and key art, so I did it on a free day.