Over the years, the overwhelming majority of the “in-house” figures we have developed have made it into production and eventually into the hands of collectors. There are, however, a few projects that never quite made it over the finish line for one reason or another. One of those figures is the focus of this “Blast From the Past” feature – the Vampire Queen.
Created as part of our Gothitropolis property, the Vampire Queen ultimately became a victim of a changing toy industry struggling with the rising costs of production. Those rising costs simply made it impossible for a small studio like ours to self-fund the production of even a small run of action figures like we had done with our earlier Seventh Kingdom and Gothitropolis figures.
The Vampire Queen made it to the point of being a “2-up protptype”, which is what we used for the sample photography you see below. For those who may not be familiar with this term, a “2-up” is a figure that is literally twice the size of what the final production figure is meant to be. Back when all our figures were sculpted using traditional, non-digital methods, this upsized scale allowed us to be able to create the level of detail we needed for a figure, and the factory would later shrink the parts down to the final production size. So in the case of this Vampire Queen, she stands around 12-inches tall, twice the size of the 6-inch scale figure we intended to release.
So where does this figure exist today? She sits inside of a display case at Four Horsemen Studios along with the planned variant figures based off of this design (look for a future article on those variants!). This character may never see production, but we do have these photos to share as a cool example of some of one of our past designs and a look at what might've been!
Published on 11.22.19