I can't believe the Funkopacalypse is finally happening!
I remember a couple of years ago, when they were literally dumping unsold Funko Pops into landfill by the hundred.
I suspect there's going to be a few very interesting books/documentaries/eight hour YouTube 'Pop slop' video essays coming out about this, and exactly the reasons this happened - I have my own theories as to why they're going out of business, but I'd be interested in having them confirmed and I'd like to know the sort of bad corporate decisions that lead to this.
What really interests about this is how it's going to affect bricks and mortar retailers. Every 'geeky' shop I have ever been to has had walls full of these things. It's weird to see them going the way of the Beanie Baby.
I'm also very intrigued as to what level meme culture played in Funko's demise. They've become, in the popular imagination, a kind of cultural shorthand for the sort of person we all think of when we hear the words 'Funko pop' - the soy-filled Redditor who gets cucked and cries at Star Wars trailers. Funko stopped being cool and quirky, and became an embarrassment.
They should bury the Funko Pops in the Atari graveyard and let people dig them up half a century later.
Funko Inc should start selling them at a discount and tell people to "buy the dip!" Tell them that the Pops will be even more valuable than in the past after the Labubus go away. Heck, partner with a hummus company and sell literal Funko branded dip.
what happens to all the stores at the mall that are just 90% funko pops?
Mall? What's a mall? Is that the sonic torture dungeon that's manned by obese dementors on Segways, eternally guarding empty stores full of mildew?
I'll tell you what happened when the pog fad died.
The pog store near me was in a strip mall, the cheapest one in town probably. I think it was also home to like, the place where you get braces put on your teeth, your melanoma cut off, or your tax forms filled out. The types of place where location doesn't matter.
The pog store had various pogs at different price points. For example, cool ones like holographic yin yang or pure poison ones with skulls on them might have been 5 to a dollar. Boring ones like educational ones that tell what what each of the 50 states are known for would have been 15 for a dollar. Same for religious ones, which might simply have "John 3:16" written on them.
Advertising pogs, that marketed movies like Jurassic Park or Casper, might have been 10 for a dollar. That's about the price generic ones would cost - these were totally random art - weird looking faces, early CGI spaceships, and so on.
The most expensive pogs might have been like 3 for a dollar, these had photos from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition or maybe the Victoria Secret catalog.
Slammers were a few dollars each, made of milled aluminum, steel, or brass. A row of these precious artifacts was kept behind glass. A few had a sawblade shape. A common one had OJ Simpson behind bars, with "OJ's in the slammer" written around the border. Protective plastic tubes were also sold, suspended from the ceiling.
I think it was 1994 that the pog fad was ending. It wasn't going to last until the beginning of the school year in August, and some schools were banning pogs as a form of gambling. The owner saw the writing on the wall. So he got a bunch of ziplock bags, I think gallon sized, and filled them up with assortments of random pogs, and sold them for $10 a bag. He said there were a thousand per bag, but I don't know if it was more or less. They might have even had a slammer thrown in.
I ended up getting two of these bags. They had all sorts of pogs in them and I autistically sorted them. I still have them packed away somewhere. They are like a snapshot into the culture of that year. They're pretty interesting to look at because you see what movies were in theaters, what art directed at kids was like, and what was in pop culture.
