Reis O’Brien, Funko’s art director, spoke to StarWars.com about the latest sculpts to hit the beloved Pop! line and why we just want to clean the crumbs right off Grogu’s collar.
StarWars.com: The Mandalorian Season 2 wrapped up in December. How quickly can you and the team turn around a design for a character once you see them on screen? Or did you get a sneak peek at some of these newcomers ahead of their episodes?
Reis O’Brien: Most characters we get to see several months ahead of schedule, like the Gamorrean pit fighters [from an earlier line], so we have plenty of time to work on them, which is of course the ideal situation. But there’s always a character or two that are kept ultra-super top secret until the episode airs. That’s the point when we’ve got to get all hands on deck to get the character designed, sculpted, approved and into production as fast as we possibly can. Usually, I’m biting my fingernails on the Friday morning of the last episode waiting to see which surprise character is going to have us running around that afternoon like ‘This is not a drill, people!’
StarWars.com: I know I always ask you this difficult question, but can you pick a favorite from these 10?
Reis O’Brien: Oh jeez! Why do you do this to me? It would be nearly impossible to choose a favorite single one from this series. I think we have an extremely strong grasp on the subtle expressions of Grogu’s little baby face, so he’s always fun to work on. The Ahsoka Pop! also turned out to be utterly sublime. Her pose, with the slight twist of her torso and the way her robes flow around her body is just to die for.
I may be biased, but I felt like our designers and sculptors on the Funko Star Wars team really dug deep and upped their already impressive game for this series. The show itself really inspired everyone to just kill it on these Pop!s. And I think it shows.
StarWars.com: I’d love to just go through each new Pop! with you and talk through the design and details. The Dark Trooper is brilliantly terrifying even in adorable Pop! form, and Ahsoka with her hood up is *chef’s kiss*. But you also let the cute ones get REAL cute — like, can I just wipe those cookie crumbs off Grogu’s chin?
Reis O’Brien: Right?! I just want to brush the crumbs off his little robe and go, ‘Who’s a messy little Jedi?’
The best part of the Funko Star Wars team is that, over time, everyone has sort of found their specialty. We have one sculptor, Phil Branesky, who is our go-to guy for droids and other mechanical objects. He did an excellent job of capturing that innate cold menace of the Dark Troopers.
Our lead sculptor on the team, Amanda Brock, has Mandalorian armor and helmets dialed in, so she really got to sink her teeth into a lot of Pops in this series with the addition of other Mandalorians [like Bo-Katan] and Boba Fett in the show. With those characters, you really have to try and capture something as elusive as ‘coolness’ in something as traditionally cute as a Pop! It’s a tricky thing to do.
And Bo-Katan was a fun challenge because we had already made a version of her in our Star Wars: The Clone Wars series. So we had to be very careful that each version maintained the proper feel since one is the animated version and the other was live action. Most of that was achieved in sculpt, aiming for a more organic, realistic look over the previous version that was more angular and sleek. Another tactic we used was to stick to a slightly more muted, realistic color palette for the paints and pad prints. Animation is innately more vibrant by its very nature, so calming down the colors on the live-action version helped seal the idea that this is a character that was seen on film. So it was a lot of fun to see the two versions side by side, and although they are both clearly the same character, you can immediately tell the source material for each. Also, we got to make an unhelmeted version of her, which is a fun bonus.
Read more here. Preorder these new Pop! vinyl figures from Entertainment Earth, Forbidden Planet and Zavvi — happy hunting!
