Despite being a busy guy, Andrew Sumner, Director of Titan Merchandise (which is one of five divisions that make up TITAN Entertainment), took some time from his busy schedule to answer some questions about TITANS, Doctor Who and anything vinyl figure related!
Within the past year/year and a half, Titan Merchandise has made a huge splash in the vinyl toy market. What was the leading decision behind entering this growing medium?
Titan Entertainment is an amazing place to work – we’re a global business based on the South Bank of the River Thames in London, almost directly opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s a beautiful, historic spot.
The other divisions are the UK’s Forbidden Planet megastores (including the must-visit flagship London store), Titan Books (who publish a fantastic array of award-winning books, from Star Trek: The Art of the Film, to Harry Potter: Page to Screen to Stephen King’s New York Times best-seller Joyland), Titan Comics (who publish Doctor Who comics and a whole host of awesome titles including Death Sentence and Tank Girl) and Titan Magazines (who publish Star Wars Insider, Star Trek magazine and The Walking Dead magazine, among many others).
Essentially, we are 250+ hardcore super-fans who live and breathe movies, TV, comic-books, genre of all kinds and cult entertainment any way you slice it. Our head office (which also serves as the run-down police precinct in Idris Elba’s cult BBC cop drama, Luther) is a hive of hardcore geek/nerd activity like you’ve never seen. So, bearing that in mind – we’re always looking for the next super-cool pop culture platform and our TITANS vinyl collectable program is an excellent example of that.
It’s the overriding, lifelong obsession of everyone who works here – we’re the truest of true believers (from our sinister CEOs Nick Landau and Dr Vivian Cheung, all the way through to the men and women on our facilities teams).
Nick’s a real multi-tasking visionary and always thinks bigger-than-big across every sector we operate in, while Vivian (who will always be Dr Cheung to me) has been a massively evangelical collector of vinyl toys since they first started coming out of Asia. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about the vinyl toy market (a well-worn Sumner saying at Titan HQ is “Doctor Cheung Knows” – she’s like The Shadow, wise and omnipresent).
I set up Titan Merchandise four years ago (aided and abetted by my tireless deputy Matt Buss, AKA The Dagenham Cowboy) and our first direct brief from Landau & Cheung was: “vinyl is super-cool, let’s set up our own global vinyl imprint.” Like I said, Nick and Dr Cheung think big.
And that’s how TITANS were born – out of deep love and the sheer will to be the absolute best (not the most prolific) in the market. We are all about quality, that’s our over-riding mantra.
Matt and I were both super-high-level fanboys but we knew very little about the inner workings of the toy/collectables biz (apart from just buying the stuff ourselves) when we started this journey – I had spent my career publishing music & movie magazines for Time Warner (I started out as a movie journalist) and Matt was my unstoppable management accountant.
But we worked with some great people – and, especially, our supremely-talented colleague Alex Carter-Jones, who showed us the way. I also got some great advice from my old pal Jesse “JMo” Morgan (now at GTS in Atlanta). And now Buss and I, like most neophytes-turned-evangelists, are the most evangelical of all. We literally live and breathe our TITANS business and our global apparel business 24/7.
As our hashtag states for all to see: #WeLoveTITANS
That’s a call-to-arms, a sincere affirmation and a sacred promise, all at the same time.
For the collections that you have created/announced so far, you have worked with Matt Jones (who is brilliant). How did you come across his work and have you considered branching out to other artists for different collaborations in the future or is Matt’s design style the main image you want when people hear “Titan Merchandise”?
Matt Jones isn’t just brilliant, he’s a fucking genius. And a great bloke. And a real pleasure to work with. I can’t say enough great things about the dude. Plus: he can sink a mean bottle of absinthe. Although I only remember watching him take the first sip. Buss might remember even less than that.
In the early days, we got lucky because he is very close to – and, in fact grew up with – our special consultant, Alex Carter-Jones. They’re brothers (and both disconcertingly tall)! Alex made the intro and the rest is history. Matt has worked with us on setting up our trademarked TITANS style and that approach will always sit at the core of what we do. As we grow the business, we might at some point experiment with our looks and feels – but our trademarked TITANS style will always sit at the heart of things.
With collections like Doctor Who, The Beatles, Buffy, Aliens, etc. it seems like you are getting inspiration from many facets of pop culture. What is the process to deciding what music/TV show/movie should be added next?
That’s the easy and fun part, really, Dave!
Like I said, Titan is an army of pop culture sponges (whether that’s myself, a guy who’s written about pop culture for his entire working life and owns 30,000 comic books – or any of my team, or anyone who works at Titan HQ). Our instincts for what’ s going to work and what’s going to make a cool TITAN is really acute and it’s literally all we ever talk about. You’ll be seeing a wide range of great stuff from us moving through 2015 and 2016.
Now that Titan Comics also publishes Doctor Who comics, are there plans to create figures that tie into the comic books or will the Doctor Who collections be solely tied into the TV series?
That’s a great question and definitely something we’ve talked about. For the time being, the universe of the TV show is so rich that we don’t need to reach into the fantastic universe our brilliant Comics team have created.
But we may well do this in the future!
There have been a couple pictures of actors seeing their likeness in Titan form (Alex Kingston, Arthur Darvill, David Tennant). I imagine it must be pretty awesome to have a 3″ version of yourself, so have other actors met their 3″ counterpart and what has been the overall reaction from these actors?
There have been a bunch of actors who’ve seen their 3″ TITAN piece on their own time (so we can’t promote it or show you the pics) but the reaction is ALWAYS the same. They love them!
We got a great message from Breaking Bad creator/showrunner Vince Gilligan recently – he loved the entire Breaking Bad TITANS wave. We are huge, huge fans of the show (we used to stage Breaking Bad marathons in the office – midnight till dawn on Friday nights) so that was a very special moment.
Shortly after the 3″ figures, Titan Merchandise released a 9″ The Beast figure for Doctor Who. Has there been any plans to “push the limit” and introduce something bigger than 9″ or do you feel that anything larger would be a bit ridiculous?
We talk about this all the time and all I can say right now is: 9″ is NOT the limit. In our eyes, there are NO limits!
I have one final question for you posed by Bob from last Friday’s article about your TITANS. Any news on the Cartoon Network TITANS that was mentioned a while ago?
Ha! Bob has a good memory! Some good news is coming but that’s all I can say right now! You will want to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for possible sneak peeks!
I want to thank Andrew Sumner for taking some time to answer my question and provide more information about Titan Entertainment, Titan Merchandise and vinyl figures! I know I am looking forward to announcements of new collections, as I am sure a lot of you are! If you had Andrew’s position (which sounds awesome!), what TV show or movie would you add to the TITANS series?
– Mine would be, The Boondock Saints and since NBC is rebooting the TV series, Heroes!
#WeLoveTITANS
Travis Denman