JEREMY'S TOY BOX PRESENTS: THE SIMPSONS

Five long years, 16 series, 39 playsets, and numerous exclusives have gone by... and now it’s over. Yes, the last of Playmates\' successful Simpsons line is now hitting the shelves. Time to reflect on the virtues and missteps of a line that drove me to collect every single figure. Let’s look back.
It had literally been ten years since I saw a Simpsons\' action figure in a store, and when the first of this series hit the shelves, I was pleased to see them again. It was the playsets, however, that really hooked me. The fact that any figure would say different phrases on different playsets was a marvelous idea. After all, the voice acting was a huge part of the show\'s entertainment value.
That first series was also a milestone for me, personally: these were the first action figures I ever opened. You’d have to know me personally to grasp the magnitude of that last statement. I had been collecting figures for eight years up to this point, and I never opened anything. The talking feature was just too much to resist.
Once the second series was released, the figures really took off, becoming the hottest item of the year. Then the scalpers came in, and Wizard World started selling their exclusives. (I’m not going to get on this rant again. Check out my past reviews for more.)
Needless to say, it became increasingly hard to collect the entire series after this point. The regular figures were hard enough to find, but the exclusives were damn near impossible to get at a decent price! Then a flood of other Simpsons products hit the market, including different things created by Playmates themselves that never quite took off. All of this alone probably added to the series\' inevitable demise.
The one severe flaw of these toys, however, was that all of the show\'s key characters were released in the first few figure lines. After that, Playmates had no choice but to crank out variations and make more obscure characters. But they didn’t just make any old variant. They should be commended for creating variants derived directly from the show to appease the fans. There was never an \"Air Attack Bart\" or \"Battle-Damaged Homer\", which is pretty incredible for a toy line originally created as a kids\' line.
And now that the smoke has cleared, there are over 90 different characters created over a five year period. That is completely unheard of! Hell, we have characters that don’t even have real names, like Comic Book Guy, Sarcastic Man, and The Pimply-Faced Teen. They have even created characters played by famous people like Phil Hartman, Danny DeVito, Patrick Stewart, and John Lovitz, to name a few. Of course, the casual fan isn’t going to know who the hell Legs and Louie are, hence the slow sales and eventual demise.
The last series did take them out with a bang, however. We get the three nerds that roomed with Homer when he went to college (Benjamin, Gary, and Doug), Principal Skinner\'s mom, Agnes (Finally!), and another John Lovitz character named Artie Ziff. There’s even a little more controversy with a couple of strange Bart and Homer variants. The final playset should also be heading down the pike, soon. It\'s Town Square, with a Jebediah Springfield figure. I really don’t understand why it comes with him, but I like it all the same.
I am incredibly pleased with these action figures and am happy to have the complete set. It was sad opening my very last Simpsons\' action figure, but I am sure I can find something else to waste my money on. Who knows, maybe ten years from now someone else will make more. Until then, I wish these damn playsets would stop going off by themselves in the middle of the night and scaring the shit out of me.