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Urban Vinyl 101
Posted by adrian on Saturday, August 23, 2003

Do you get lost on what the appeal of Urban Vinyl really is? We take a deep and detailed look as I try and explain it all to you (I've even brought charts!)...

So you find yourself reading the site and come across an article on some new Urban Vinyl toy or designer block figure, and find yourself wondering just what all the fuss was about. The aim of this article is to give you a little background into Urban Vinyl, it's appeal, and why this part of the market is having big influences on the toy market as a whole. Whilst we're not trying to turn you into a convert, we hope this article will provide you with an understanding of it's appeal.

Seriously, Urban Vinyl is hard to understand for the casual action figure collector... it took me a long time to grasp it, but since I have, I enjoy the majority of pieces I see.

This article is probably the most complex I've ever written because it's a pretty complex subject as it's all about where art and business collide. We're also going to be talking a lot about art. The concept of figures as art is difficult to some, so I'm going to try and explain that as well.

What I hope you will end up with is an extremely good understanding of Urban Vinyl (probably better than the vast majority of the toy industry)... it might not change your opinion of pieces, and indeed this article is not about trying to change your opinion rather than increase your understanding.

To understand, you have to look at the differences between a kid and a collector when it comes to toys. At it's extreme a kid will pick up a figure to play with... the character is all important, action features are neat, and if the figure doesn't look too much like the source, and is painted in Neon... that's cool. OK, I would agree that a lot of older kids are more sophisticated, but I'm talking in the 4 to 5 year old range.

Now let's look at a Collector. Ignoring price, we are really worried about 2 things: how much like the source character the figure looks like, and how much articulation there is. Again it's stereotyping, and Collectors could be cut down the middle over articulation Vs Sculpt. Some would say that the sculpt should not be ruined by articulation, others would say the sculpt should not compromise the articulation. Whether you love or hate lots of articulation, it's still a factor.

Now there is no real place where a kid stops and a collector starts and a lot of companies are trying to cater for both markets with a combination of laser scanning (for authenticity) and action features (for play value). Both markets tend to bump into each other, but you will hear us often say that something is a kids line or a collectors line.

So start from kids, move into Collectors and keep on going for some way... you end up at Urban Vinyl. There is a big gap between collector toys and the Urban Vinyl toys, but we'll cover that later.

Urban Vinyl is all about Style. Now you may say this is exactly the same as sculpting... in truth it's not. Sculpting is about how well something has been translated from design to 3D Model (i.e. how much does that Tomb Raider figure look like Angelina Jolie, Do those upcoming Spawn figures look like the comic covers they are based on). Style is what happens before that. If Sculpting is about the transposition from source material to figure (the process of creating something from the design), then style is about the creation of that source material or the creation of the design.

Now with a collector figure, the style is usually done outside the creation of the figure. The style work for Hellraiser was done during the creation of the Movies... the style for Spider-Man was done in comics. With the vast majority of collector figures, the style was created outside the toy industry to suit some other medium. Are there exceptions? Well you could argue that Masters of the Universe is an example where there was no prior designs in other mediums. To a degree I'd say yes, but the style was really created when the original figures were created in the 80s (when toy design was more about engineering than art)... what the Four Horsemen did (taking nothing away from their fantastic skills) was do a very good job of enhancing that style for the current toy market.

You see, Urban Vinyl is the closest thing to Art in the action figure world, and like all art it's subjective. However, whereas collector figures started life as designs for other mediums, with Urban Vinyl, the figure is the canvas. These are designs that were created solely for making stylish action figures, they don't exist in any prior art form.

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Re: Urban Vinyl 101

by kadamontaga on Jan 06, 2004 - 11:05 PM
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I've just read this article in Jan 2004 and it really was fascinating. Very accessible yet quite mature and challenging. I've never really understood Urban Vinyl before but now that I've read your article I feel that you've given me the framework of understanding on which I can now appreciate these pieces.

Thanks a lot Adrain, that was really interesting reading :)

One final note though - could you mean tectonic plates rather than platonic plates?