At San Diego Comic-Con 2024 (SDCC), we had the opportunity to chat with Mondo Senior Creative Directors Hector Arce and Peter Santa-Maria to delve into what makes their collectibles top of the line. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DHK: What are some of the design challenges working with existing IP?
Peter Santa-Maria (PSM): It depends on what work, what your goal is when you do something like that. Is your goal to make something that’s an accurate representation of what you see on screen or on a page, or is it a stylized something? So at our company, we really like to be able to do both. So when we are trying to stay accurate to, you know, something like with Rogue, we want to be accurate to the “X-Men” show, the animated show. The challenge is making sure you have people who can reproduce it and create it. And we have an amazing team. Alex Brewer, the genius is around here somewhere. He sculpted, and designed Rogue, you know, perfectly. So, someone like that makes that easy, right? And, then make sure we have a great paint team who can nail the paint. Having the right people in place is huge. Then stylizing is more challenging in the sense that you have to anticipate that the stylization that you’re choosing, whether it’s with an artist who has their own point of view, or if we’re coming up with something of our own that it’s going to land with the audience and resonate. Right? So that’s hard because you never know. We only can please ourselves.
Hector Acre [HA]: Yeah. I think I think the most challenging part is creating something that’s a reinterpretation of the characters.
DHK: what is the philosophy on the stylizing? Because obviously (Teenage Mutant Ninja) Turtles, for example, right? There are so many different iterations already. How do you make it your own?
HA: Yeah, for us it’s really, how do we bring a bit of freshness to the IP, but also honor what came before? With the Turtles, for example, with our soft vinyl, it’s very much a love letter to the original 80s toys, but it’s more like, “what would we have designed if we were in the 80s?” How do we capture the whimsy? How do we capture the fun that those toys had back then. Then when it comes to any other over stylization, that really is just about “let’s take it a step further.” Let’s maybe add more detail or add more, new accessories or new things that were never a part of the original character. But let’s make sure we still honor some of those moments that made that character special. So maybe it’s a particular portrait from a specific episode or a specific part of a movie or something like that. So we still try to honor those things and kind of scratch that nostalgic itch, but allow us to be creative and bring something new to the table.
PSM: You know, it’s part of Mondo’s history is to work with artists that are outside the company who, we see their work, and we go: “wow, that would be awesome on blank.” Then bring them in and allow them to flex, then say “that’s lightning in a bottle, capture it” and let’s, you know, put it together. We’ve been successful because we’ve been able to, to, I guess… I guess we have a good taste?
HA: We’re curating!
PSM: Yeah. We walk around the floor, we go, “who’s that?” Let’s meet that person. They would do an awesome blank right. We work with Jesse Hernandez who goes by Urban Aztec as an artist. His Godzilla was a really out of left field interpretation, and it crushed for us. So now we just revealed Ghidora at our booth, and people are like, “oh, can’t wait!” Now we’re more confident because we know the first one landed, versus the first time we were like, “I wonder, we love it… Anybody else?”
DHK: Right, has that Spidey-sense ever not paid off? At what point in the process do you guys go “you know what we’ve made a few prototypes but this is no go, we have to pull the plug?”
HA: There’s definitely been (times) in the toy part of Mondo. There’s been instances where we’ve just been like, you know what… we’ll go to concept. And we’re just like, this is not working. It’s just not connecting. It may be, it just may be with that particular artist or whatever. Then sometimes we’ll be like, you know what, let’s revisit this in a couple months. Fresh eyes, maybe a fresh take, and we’ll have those sort of instances, you know, every now and then. Maybe we’ll go even as far as sculpting, it’s like and it’s not translating from concept to sculpt the way we envision. So let’s maybe either one of us actually goes in and adjust the sculpt. I’ll go in and like, be like, I’m going to sculpt it this way because this is kind of how I envision it to match the concept better. Or we’ll bring in someone else to help or whatever. Every project is always in a state of change. Concept to sculpt, even to when we paint it, it’s like it transforms at every single time, right? We have to rethink it every time we’re going through those.
PSM: And it has to excite us every step of the way, or, it doesn’t go past.
DHK: So just like any piece of art. Right?
HA: Right! Especially when you’re developing toys, when you’re doing like there’s so many stages before you finally get to someone’s hands. Like he (Peter) said, we have to be excited at every stage.
PSM: Going from 2D to 3D is a whole different animal, right?
DHK: It’s almost as if it’s an extra dimension… [group laughter].
HA: Yeah haha, so we have to be, like, once we get even to paint master, right? We’re like,”this is awesome.” Or this: “Oh, it’s not working. Let’s repaint.” That’s the, you know, especially with the soft vinyl stuff where there’s a lot of room for interpretation. There’s a lot of eye of the beholder kind of thing. One person who has a creative, overarching creative vision to kind of just guide it.
PSM: We have a lot of pride. We’re not going to let anything come out that we don’t think we would be proud to stand next to because it’s the Mondo brand.
DHK: It’s the Mondo brand for a reason. I want to talk about sparkes (Scareglow) over here!
PSM: That’s his other name!
DHK: What was the biggest change from the first version, like, concept it out to this finalized one in front of us?
HA: This was very much a singular idea from the start. When we brought it out, it was always, you know, I want a Scareglow that has bones inside. Then from there, we did, in the spirit of soft vinyl, which is lots of colorways. Sometimes the fun of soft vinyl was the chase. So exclusives all this kind of stuff.
PSM: It becomes like a platform for design choices. So Scareglow is a strange instance because, when we were collecting He-Man figures, most of us, not everybody, like aged out right before Scareglow came out.
HA: Oh, yeah, that’s a good point!
PSM: I never had Scareglow.
HA: Scareglow was one the harder figures to ge at the time.
PSM: Yeah. I had all the He-Man figures, and I never had Scareglow.
DHK: But you didn’t have all of them because you didn’t have Scareglow!
PSM: Yeah! I just got a little I’m like: “okay, I’m doing He-Man for now.” I moved on… and then Scarecrow comes out. Because of that, most people have put them on this pedestal. He lives in reverence and chase.
HA: He has some mystique around him.
PSM: Yeah, some mystique. So we’ve done Scareglow in different iterations and it’s just an awesome skulled character with a cape.
DHK: You can’t go wrong.
PSM: You don’t need to know who he is, you can like it. So because of that, he translates to this platform of soft vinyl, which is known for its iteration. you would buy in soft vinyl if you’re collecting, like, Japanese Sofubi, you know, those old retro Godzilla figures. There’s people who collect one sculpt in every different color, and they like that. That’s just a thing in soft vinyl collecting. So bringing Scareglow into that is that we have confidence in this design that people will want to have more than one in different colors and, and display it like an art piece.
HA: So this is the third color at this point. We’ve already released two other ones throughout the year. So this one’s got gold glitter inside. We’ve got like this kind of overspray pink on the skull and the weapon. Something we’ve been traditionally doing every Comic-Con is releasing a form of a cherry blossom version of our soft vinyls. So we’ve been doing it with Godzilla every year since we have been doing Godzilla soft vinyl. We thought it’d be fun to also do with Scaremare. In this particular case.
DHK: I mean, yeah, you got to keep the tradition alive!
HA: It’s just kind of been…, it was nothing intentional, but we just now just do it now.
DHK: Now it is!
PSM: It works. Keep going.
HA: Every Comic-Con we drop a cherry blossom glow in the dark.
DHK: Are there any body parts, accessories, figurines that you’re like, I know this is integral to it, but it’s just going to be a production nightmare. What gives you what keeps you up at night?
HA: [Laughing] I don’t know if you’ve seen some of our stuff, but we jam pack our work.
DHK: I own a lot of your stuff. My wallet is very light because of you guys
HA: Especially our 1/6th scale… we will find the most obscure things from, especially we’re doing like a direct interpretation, for example: “Batman: The Animated Series” or “X-Men,” we will comb through episodes. Our sculptors will come through episodes. Our concept (artists will comb), and we will find the most obscure little thing that we can include just to say, “I’m adding it in.” Sometimes it does become a production.
PSM: In other words, he’s saying he gets paid to watch TV. You heard that? [Room laughs]
HA: I need one more easter egg!! We gotta find the most exclusive release.
PSM: But it’s true, because if you don’t find it, somebody else will. The audience will be like: “you didn’t include blank blank blank” And it still happens!
HA: There are days where I’m like, okay, we have everything we could possibly include here. And then somebody will chime in with “oh, you forgot this.” Damn.
PSM: Then we’re like, feel challenged and embarrassed.
HA: I mean sometimes logistically it gets a little out of hand. There are times when we have to pull back and be like okay, like what can we realistically include here?
PSM: But it’s a fun part.
HA: It’s the best part.
PSM: For me my favorite part of our 1/6th line is that you don’t get just a figure. You get to walk down the memory lane. You love the character. There’s different beats.
DHK: So as things like 3D printing become more accessible to layman consumers, how does that force you guys to up your game and keep distinguishing? Or does it have any impact on (your process)?
PSM: I mean it’s definitely brought more, like you can walk around a convention floor now and see a lot more booths that just have sculpts at them because of the technology. But I think what’s going to happen with the onset of any new technology is you’re going to see a difference between the people who have access to technology and artists. Just because you have a tool doesn’t mean you’re an artist. You know, there’s a lot more that goes into it, and a lot of that is being a student of the game. Why is soft vinyl tantalizing to toy collectors? Why are we confident to introduce it to a new fandom? You know, what is a stylization that’s going to work? Why did we decide that Jesse Hernandez (Urban Aztec) would work for Godzilla and someone else didn’t, right? So there’s…
HA: Tastemakers!
PSM: Yes. There’s curation, there’s experience. There’s all that, that goes into it. I think what’s good about the technology is it removes hurdles for people who will be excellent.
DHK: It’s your next possible generation of designers possibly.
PSM: And competition is awesome. Its steel sharpens steel. It makes us want to make sure that we’re on our toes. But we already have that, because you walk the floor, there’s so many great companies creating great things with similar IP that we anticipate. We’re like, if we do this and we don’t go all the way here, so-and-so is going to get right here, and then we’re going to not be ready to deal with it. So we have a friendly sense of competitive spirit with everybody.
DHK: Thank you both so much for your time!
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