Diamond Select Toys has announced a partnership with Art Asylum to produce all future Star Trek toys. Art Asylum will continue to design and sculpt the toys while Diamond Select Toys will handle marketing, sales and distribution. Direct market retailers will see the first fruits of this partnership with the fall release of Riker and Whorf action figures. Meanwhile Diamond Select will continue to release licensed items based on other key properties including Marvel Comics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Army of Darkness and the video game Death Jr.
Diamond Select's Marvel program features a number of resin busts including Werewolf By Night (August shipping $45 srp) and Man-Thing ($50 srp), plus the tenth and eleventh series of Marvel Minimates and an elaborate Thanos Action Figure, but the coolest DST Marvel release of 2005 could be the Fantastic Four Diorama, which includes five figures ($85 srp each), all of which come with a portion of the background. Collect all five and FF fans will have a truly impressive interlocking diorama.
Diamond Select is stepping up its G.I. Joe releases to the point where there should be at least one item per month listed in Previews for the rest of 2005. The G.I. Joe releases, which are clearly targeted at the Joe collectors, include Dogtags, bookends, and cool resin figures such as the Snake Eyes Wall Statue, which will be illustrated in the April Previews, but the most impressive G.I. Joe item of 2005 has to be the Destro Mask, which is a striking 12' metallic wonder.
DST also plans to produce a number of plush items for 2005 including three plush figures from the Sam Raimi-directed cult horror film, Army of Darkness--Ash, Evil Ash and a Deadite. Continuing on with the 'death' theme, Diamond Select is also prepping a line of plush figures based on Backbone Entertainment's Death Jr. video game, which is coming out this month for the Sony PSP (handheld PlayStation). Image Comics is publishing a Death Jr. comic book starting in April, Gentle Giant is making Death Jr. action figures, and Sony has a Death Jr. film in pre-production -- so this is a nascent property that certainly bears watching.
Like Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has to be considered a 'mature' property -- it's been around for a long time and has a shrinking, but devoted fan base -- the trick with mature licenses is to find the gaps in previous product lines and produce the kind of items that hardcore fans are going to want. Later this year DST plans to expand its Buffy the Vampire line with Angel and Fred action figures based on the Buffy spin-off series Angel.
