A few retro gaming characters have already made it to the shelves as POPs, but Funko have now gone all-in on the concept with a Mystery Minis line. There are 16 iconic characters from
yesteryear in the series, but only 12 “arcade cabinets” in a case. Apparently
each character is packed 1/12, so there’s nothing outrageously rare – but the
two boxes I saw at my local hobby store seemed to suggest that each case has a
random mix of characters, as opposed to the preset layouts that some of the
other Mystery Minis series use.
THE BOX
Funko has
some great designers working for them, but the Mystery Minis boxes are not
typically very exciting – some control art, a title and not much else. But
they’ve really stepped things up for this series; each character is housed in a
box shaped to look like an arcade cabinet based on the game they’re from. It’s
a great touch, one indicative of the care that Funko has put into the line*.
Sadly the box is just a little too
big for another Mystery Mini to use as an arcade machine. Nonetheless, they
look so cool that it’s very tempting to keep it and incorporate it into a wider
display. It would be great to Funko do more like this on future/other Mystery
Mini series.
In the
original game there are multiple Froggers (Froggi?), but this one is specifically
based on the image on the logo strip atop the
cabinet. He’s depicted with a tie and a briefcase,
presumably on his way home from work to see his wife and frogspawn. It’s
stylised HD Frogger, rather than a literal attempt to render pixels in plastic.
He’s pretty cute, though he does look a little dead-eyed – I suspect this is
because they’ve given him a croaking, half-open mouth rather than the
closed-but-smiling expression on the cabinet. But those of us working desk jobs
can easily relate to feeling dead inside, so it’s oddly appropriate if you
decide to use him as a desk ornament.
Of course,
some of the coolness is undone by the sloppiness of the paint. This is
disappointing, as the Mystery Minis have typically had better paintwork than
their larger Funko POP companions. But for a $9.95AUD collectible, it’s adequate.
OVERALL
I was born
in 1985, so Frogger had kind of
already come and gone before I even arrived on planet Earth. But I am a staunch
video game history buff, and you can’t look too far into the history of the
medium before you run across Frogger.
It’s easy to see why it was a hit – cutesy design, combined with easy-to-play
but difficult-to-master controls are a winning combo in any era, but perhaps
never more so in an era when gaming was filled with thinly veiled Pong and Pac-Man clones competing for kid’s coins. And in the years since
its release, Frogger’s pop culture
influence has outstripped plenty of its contemporaries. It was even a central
plot point on an episode of Seinfeld** which
brings with it a level of fame that few games can ever hope to reach.
I don’t
intend to go too deep with this line, but Frogger’s cutesy design and iconic
status made him a must-purchase for me. And there’s still plenty of iconic
retro characters to be made, so here’s hoping we see at least a series 2 in the
near future.
*Of course, I had to go and spill water on mine, didn't I?
**And here’s a thought for you – that episode of
Seinfeld is now older than Frogger was when they first filmed it. Double
retro!
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