My Figures Story

How It All Began

A new discovery. YouTube, for some reason, pointed me to these little miracles from Hong Kong vendor, Hot Toys! While the only static figures I had collected up to Summer 2025 were LEGO minifigures (and previously Funko Pop MCU figures and Disney Infinity figures), I noticed there were many people collecting Hot Toys 12" figures (and also from other vendors like INART), because of their spectacular, realistic (like a little human head), posable 1/6-scale recreations of iconic characters in their iconic movie moments!

A small collection to cherish. And, not only have I so enjoyed seeing the spectacular releases from Hot Toys that brought new life to some of my favorite Sci-Fi/Fantasy characters, but I also purchased all of my absolute favorite figures!

How to integrate into Hobby Room. This is a smaller hobby than my robots, drones, and LEGO scenes, but I still wanted it displayed in my Hobby Room. I rearranged 3 shelves to make space. Unlike my robots and drones (open-air for easy access) and LEGO scenes (dust doesn’t hurt them much), these highly detailed figures - with tailored clothing and sometimes real hair - needed dust protection. Because the shelving unit can’t easily support elegant glass doors to block out dust, I chose to place custom clear acrylic display cases (with front doors) in the shelves. I skipped internal lighting since the Hobby Room’s overhead light already covers all displays well.

Collector Quality

Not all are so realistic. While Hot Toys has released hundreds of licensed characters from brands like Star Wars, Marvel, DC, and Disney under their Movie Masterpiece Series as well as Television Masterpiece Series lines, in my opinion, only about 50 or so rise to the level of ultra-realistic likenesses like those in my collection.

Journey to collecting top 16 favorites. My journey started by creating a curated list for my Cool Stuff page, after going through images of hundreds of products that were released from 2020 forward. Then, after seeing so many spectacular products, I quickly transitioned to wanting to own a few select favorites based on the most realistic likenesses. But I had to decide how many and which to collect based on the limited space I was willing to give up in my Hobby Room. I first assumed that I would give up 2 robot shelves, allowing me to accommodate 10 to 12 figures total on these. But as they started coming in shortly after I decided to start buying my top favorites from Sideshow (the official U.S. distributor for Hot Toys), I realized that unless I wanted them shoulder-to-shoulder, I could not reasonably fit but 5 figures per shelf; and re-evaluating the ones I really wanted, I made a third shelf available (all in a horizontal row with the best room lighting), and settled on a total of 16 figures (3 x 5 + 1 Endoskeleton centered behind T-800 and T-1000).

See how I built my final 16-figure collection

The favorites that did not make the cut. So, I started going through my curated list on my Cool Stuff page and others I later discovered, and evaluating which of these favorites make the cut to the final 16; resulting in many masterpieces falling off:

	Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars Attack of the Clones MMS809AE		Anakin Skywalker Star Wars Attack of the Clones MMS677
	Moon Knight MCU Moon Knight TMS140AE		John Wick (Artisan Edition) John Wick MMS833AE
	Black Adam DC Black Adam DX30		Thanos MCU Avengers: End Game MMS564
	Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice MMS767		Grand Admiral Thrawn Star Wars Ahsoka TMS116
	Doctor Strange MCU Multiverse of Madness MMS645		Black Widow MCU Iron Man 2 MMS757AEB
	Superman DC Superman MMS812		Captain America (Sam Wilson) MCU The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TMS040
	Robocop Robocop 2 MMS827D74B		Deadpool (Battling Version) MCU Deadpool & Wolverine MMS782
	Joel Miller The Last of Us TMS160

What I did to get all the ones I wanted. When I made the decision to buy my top favorites from Sideshow, I quickly found out that most were not available, so I could only buy a few outright (including some preorders), waitlist many, and regrettably the rest were no-gos on Sideshow. But I was not happy giving up on the no-gos, or even relying on the waitlist items, since there is less than a 20% chance of getting them as they depend on cancelled orders, new stock, and a long waitlisters queue. And since I did not want to risk not getting items on my definitive list of 16, I cancelled the waitlists, and looked for the cheapest most reasonable prices on eBay and Pop Collectibles for all those waitlisted and no-go items. In the end, I did quite well with my collection of 16 premier figures, only paying an average of 15% over retail despite coming into collecting late after Hot Toys' watershed year of 2024!

Considering the collector's needs. Hot Toys really knows what collectors need, and for some primarily in the Deluxe Versions and the Artisan Editions, giving them many options to showcase these figures in their collection:

Head/face sculpts that are so realistic, they appear like little human heads.
Remarkably realistic sculpted hair, while a few Artisan editions, come with even more realistic hand-applied synthetic hair.
Adjustable eyeball positions with SRE (Separate Rolling Eye) that allow you to change the direction of eye gaze with their tool.
Extra body parts (head, hands) with different sculpts to allow recreating different scenes and poses.
Specially wired capes and long coats to allow positioning the material in a dynamic action pose.
Incredibly detailed clothes and accessories, often including miniature functioning accessories.

Enjoying the Collection

My Collection. See pics and my reviews for the dozen or so in my collection! 🧸 Details