I came across some interesting tidbits regarding Tytus’s production, and given the controversy he seems to have inspired among collectors, I thought I’d post them here.
First, there’s this post by ToyGuru on the Mattycollector forums:
Tytus also has a 100% sculpt. But at that size (13″) if we did him fully articulated he would have been very expensive. It is not the sculpting that is expensive, we pay the same amount to “sculpt” a figure as we do a 12″ figure. It is the production that costs more when a figure is larger because a larger figure uses more plastic etc…!
Gygor is not as large as Tytus so we can afford (plastic wise) to give him more articulation. At the end of the day, Tytus was just too large to produce with full articulation and keep him under $100.00. We wanted Tytus (as a giant) to be as big as possible, which is why we used Roto casting which is less expensive to keep him at the $40.00 price point.
We do have big plans for both the Gygor (gorilla buck) and Tytus (giant buck) in the future. So both were an “investment” for Mattel for future figures. We are making a deliberate attempt to spread out the big beasts and giants so that each year will have a good selection. That is why you don’t see all the big name big beasts like Panthor, Megator, etc… all in year one. I imagine in time we will get to them! Our goal is to keep the line going for quite a few years and to do that we need to save big guns for each year.
To add ball joints we would need to make Tytus completely the same way we do a figure and this would drive his price to over $100.00. We used roto casting to keep the price down but when you use Roto Casting it prevents ball joints from being used.
Would fans be willing to buy a new Tytus for over $100.00 that would include all the articulation you see in a MOTUC figure? Let us know.
Regarding the oft-discussed stylistic difference between the MOTUC 7″ figures and Tytus, the Four Horsemen posted this on their own forums:
Tytus is a newly sculpted figure. We tried to place his build somewhere between MotU Classics and DCUC for two reasons.
First, he just didn’t look correct at that height with the MotU Classics build. He just didn’t look “giant” enough. It kind of stumped his overall appearance.
Second, the hope was to have the opportunity to use the basic structure of the Tytus figure for many more projects besides just the MotU Classics Tytus. This could possibly mean that it could be used for DCUC or other characters or lines down the road. We really had to work hard to justify the cost of his tooling.
So there’s the answer–it’s very likely we’ll see Tytus re-used in DCUC.