I like the Food Warriors and the Rock Warriors (I’m probably getting the names wrong even though I just looked at them… maybe not the greatest branding, but still).
I think the only hurdle to these types of toys now is that most action figure type toys kids actually want are tie-ins to major movie and tv franchises, not just saturday morning cartoons made just to sell toys (not that some of the modern franchises don’t seem made just to sell toys).
I think that’s unfortunate but hey, a lot of those not-tied-in toy lines obviously sucked anyway. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, “toys” meant for adults (collector’s items, not sex toys) - I mean artists’ original characters etc. and not those comic book shop collector’s action figures - have become very popular and pretty big business. People who would have tried to get jobs at toy companies designing standalone characters for toy lines in the past are now doing their own stuff independently.
Maybe for action figure type toys (I have no idea?) - but speaking as the father of a 4 year old who is just starting to discover the joys of marketing (“Daddy, we should go on a family cruise, like on the Disney channel!”), I can tell you that there are TONS of Saturday Morning (well, really, any-day-of-the-week now that we have dedicated cartoon channels) cartoons that appear to be aimed directly at selling toys of some sort.
