Author: Ron

There are some really cool insights from the Four Horsemen how cost can impact product feature decisions for action figures. There’s some very interesting reading here.

Way back when the voting was going on for Scarabus, you guys – the FANtastic FANatics chose how much and what kind of articulation Scarabus should have. Well, at that time, Scarabus’ evil prevailed and the pricing structure for the figure with all of the articulation and other features added in turned out to be much more expensive to produce than we’d planned, so Scarabus was pulled back temporarily so we could figure out a more cost effective way to produce him.

Scarabus went through a few costing phases with multiple factories before we finally came upon a factory that could not only offer us a decent competitive price for everything we wanted to include, but they would also provide us with the production quality that we expected.

A couple of alterations still would have to be made to keep the production costs at a point where we could pass the figure on to you at a decent price, but they’re alterations that we can all live with.

First, although we feared that a lot of the articulation would have to be removed from Scarabus, the only thing that really had to be removed was the “ab crunch”. With the detailed sculpting on top of that area requiring separate parts made out of a different material, the extra costs were just unnecessary.

Second was the cape. Although we would like to have had a cloth cape on this figure instead of the soft plastic cape that we’re going with, the unit cost would have doubled for each figure. WAY to much expense to eat or pass on to our fans!

So, here is a diagram of the articulation you can expect with the gruesome guardian of Gothitropolis. Take a look, and then hit the Gothitropolis section of the FANtastic Exclusive message boards to let us know what you think!

-FH-