Articulation Daze – three modern action figure terms you NEED to know

by Cartoon Kingdom on June 01, 2024

It’s the year 2000 … 1990 … 1980 … maybe even further back. You’ve just received an awesome new toy for the holidays, and it’s one you just can’t put down. Was it a Kenner Luke Skywalker, Hasbro’s evergreen Optimus Prime, or something spookier, like Michael Myers from Halloween?

With hundreds of thousands of action figures released over the decades, from retro G.I. Joes to sixth-scale behemoths from Sideshow Collectibles, it can get confusing very quickly. Everyone loves action figures, but few take the time to learn the terms.

As with most other specialized hobbies, the figure collection community has their own terminology to better define the objects of their affection. Parents of collectors and collectors themselves can benefit from knowing these, but this article is mostly geared towards our newer hobbyists. There’s no shame if you’re already an expert, though – some things, you never outgrow!

Points of Articulation

Articulation in action figures is a point of movement … a joint on a pint-sized scale. However many joints an action figure has is a point of articulation – usually a minimum of 5. Hinges are what allows Bumblebee to transform, let alone the basic leg motion most figures have. Double-jointed legs and arms can have a human-like range of movement. A ball joint, on the other hand, is often used in the neck of an action figure to allow movement on a 360-degree axis. That means they can look up, down, left, right, and tilt their head.

Butterfly joints tend to appear on premium and larger figures, like our Hot Toys collectibles, allowing action figures to cross their arms and hold weapons without bending the plastic. Swivel joints spin 360 degrees but do not articulate in other ways (think older action figure heads moving left and right, but not up and down).  There are others, too – but as long as you grasp the basic movements of an action figure, you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for on store shelves when it comes to posing.

Kitbashing/Customizing

The action figure customization community is an offshoot of collecting where fans will mold, sculpt, and 3D-print different accessories and features for action figures. There are customizers of other types of toys, like Funko POP! figurines. Customizers tend to be revered for their amazing art, though the act of altering an existing action figure can be divisive for some collectors. Nevertheless, the customizing community is massive on social media and often attracts admirers in droves.

Kitbashing is combining parts of other action figures (and creating your own parts if necessary) to make something totally new. With the advent of the internet, action figures went from carving up pieces of plastic and gluing them together to ordering custom-made parts, though these still often go hand-in-hand. It’s literally Face/Off with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.

Scale

The fun part of an action figure collection to some (and something that hardly matters to others) is scale. Just like in the model kits we carry at our sister store, Cedar Creek Hobbies, the modern action figure tries to stick with a relative size to the ‘real thing’ so it is visually cohesive with the other action figures in its line. Famous scales include 1/18 and 1/12 scale. 1/6 scale is easily found in our collectibles cabinet, a premium size that allows for ample detail. Scale, however, does not always determine the level of detail on an action figure.

A good display, of course, doesn’t have to stick to a specific scale! If it’s the same character, you may want that character in different scales with different levels of detail. You and only you should define your action figure collection! We hope this guide helped you dive into the world of action figures, even as a casual observer.

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