Interview with PopBox Collectibles' John WongRyan Yzquierdo from Seibertron.com interviews John Wong from PopBox Collectibles about what they're doing with the Transformers license. Ryan Yzquierdo from Seibertron.com interviews John Wong from PopBox Collectibles about what they're doing with the Transformers license. Seibertron: John, can you tell us what products you guys are developing for the TF movie license? John Wong: We have developed a range of unique & collectible products for the TF movie license such as embroidered patches, metal coins, 3D magnet heads and accessory danglers. We are also currently working on exciting 9" high-end 'Head bust' displays on the more popular characters from the movie. These might be as close as you can get to movie props, or perhaps even better. To compliment the Transformers video game on popular consoles such as NDS & PSP, and in keeping with the 'Transformers' theme, we are offering our reversible, 'transformable' carrying cases. Also in the pipeline are carrying cases of a similar nature for the iPod Video & Nano mp3 players. Seibertron: That sounds like a lot of stuff. How did you decide to pick these product lines? John Wong: Our decision to come up with these product lines are driven by two primary factors: First and foremost, it has already been decided for us that we could not do figures, period! Secondly, we are innovating from the styling of the movie version and assessing what type of cool products we could put out on the market . Seibertron: Can you give us some examples of the collectability, improvements and expertise that you talked about? John Wong: Sure, for the 7 cm style embroidered patches, we went well beyond run-of-the-mill, standard materials to create them. For the Ratchet and Barricade patches, we have printed vinyl in the more detailed graphic areas. This makes the graphics look sharper, with a glossy sheen and eye catching. We think the final effect looks awesome! For the Optimus background, we used a reflective PU material which gives it a slight sparkly, metallic feel. And for all the mechanical parts of the character heads, we used metallic thread. You can compare them with your regular patches to see the difference of the various materials we use. Seibertron: That all sounds fantastic! I am sure that TF fans appreciate the time and effort that you guys are putting into creating them. In regards to what you guys are producing now, I imagine that you might have run into some interesting production situations. If so, can you share some of the more outstanding ones? John Wong: Mainly I w ould say the magnet heads and the high end carrying cases. For the magnet heads, there were no mechanical turns of the characters. All we had to work with was computer rendered art from the style guides. We patched these together plus various others out on the Internet in those early months, which I would like to note are all slightly different, to come up with our 3D versions. Megatron was the hardest as the different views of the sides, back and what we imagine to be the top view did not match up. Anyway, these took a very long time but we are very happy with them based on the resources we had at that time. Seibertron: That sounds great, John. You mentioned when we last spoke that you will have other products available. Can you tell us know about those? John Wong: We have mobile phone danglers with 2cm size character heads and metal 3cm size character head danglers to accessorize your clothing, backpack, key chain, etc. These should be really nice as the 3cm size one will be nickel-plated and sand-blasted to give them a rich texture. Actually, you can probably even use them as necklace pendants. That is the plan although we haven’t got our pre-production samples yet. Seibertron: Exciting stuff. I think our readers will be in for a real treat when all these come out. I guess a very important last question, as you guys are based in Hong Kong, where can we (Americans) get your products? John Wong: Our items are licensed for most of Asia and there are 2 licensed distributors in Europe who are also selling them. So you should be able to find them in various specialty, toy and game/electronic stores in those 2 continents. For people in the US, I suggest trying online shops in Asia and Europe. |