Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.
Art Asylum has built their Minimates line primarily using comic book characters. However, they have dipped into many other licenses over the years, from movies to musicians to video games. Back in 2006, a Street Fighter 2 line was released, lasting only 1 wave due to poor sales. As a result, many core characters were never produced, but among the few that we were given: M. Bison, Ryu & Chun-Li
Behind the Image:
I’m a child of the late 80’s/early 90’s. I grew up playing Street Fighter 2 on Super Nintendo – that was my bread and butter when it came to this particular series. So to honor my own history with this game franchise, I pulled out the original SNES version of Street Fighter 2 and paused it on the M. Bison, Ryu & Chun-Li stages. I positioned the figures in front of the screen, and viola: each character in thier native habitats. No photoshop required 😉
On Ebay: Street Fighter
Great idea! Never got into M. Bison, though. Ken, Ryu, Blanka and E. Honda were my champs.
Comment by Doorman — August 28, 2010 @ 2:27 pm
Unfortunately, of the four characters you listed, Ryu was the only one made into a Minimate =/
Art Asylum’s mistake with this license is debated, but the two biggest theories are that a limited venue (Toys R Us carried it for a short time, but burried them in an obscure part of the store) and a weird selection of characters is what killed the line.
The odd decision with the character selection was that they mixed another game (Darkstalkers) into the mix. Then the second wave didn’t really introduce any new characters – they simply repainted the same characters and called them “player 2” versions (the only new figure we got in wave 2 was Akuma).
It was horrible because wave 3 was supposedly going to give us some very awesome looking releases of certain well known characters. But we never got them because nobody wanted to buy wave 2. What a tease >_<
Comment by Donny B — August 28, 2010 @ 4:54 pm