Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The 2012 Roundup

I don't think I've done this the same way twice, and I'm so damn tired right now my creativity is at a 3, so let's just go with stats...

In Blogspot's internal stats, you can't ask it for yearly numbers, but happily, if you click All Time, more than 5 of 2012's articles made the cut. It was a year of unexpected scoops...some expected hits and some that may surprise you.

#5: Toy Fair 2012: Mattel Monster High - I'd taken the horrors of Monster High over to Dread Central, and Idle Hands, when we first discovered the YouTube animated clips. Since then, you could say the concept has exploded, but our look at Monster High items for 2012 came at the height of a scalper feeding frenzy. With every light shipment of the mega popular dolls came 3 to 4 portly middle aged opportunists who would clear the shelves, assuring a high public demand and with it, COLLECTOR RAGE!! These days, the stores are fully stocked, the fans happily hunt for their favorite high school horrors, and Mattel hopes to get, at the very least, another year of creepy dolly love.


#4: Toy Fair 2012: Spinmaster La Dee Da Dolls - Seeing a trend here? While Action-Figure.com was very much the view of a male geekling looking out upon a world of explosions, men in tights and buxom heroins in peril, Idle Hands sort of mocks that dynamic with a "water cooler geek" aesthetic and a promise that all bets are off. We write for our friends...and that includes men, women, women who love batman and men who love barbie. With our friends in mind, we knock on the doors of all the booths at Toy Fair and in doing so, discovered the La Dee Da doll line! The room was bright, sunny and multi-colored enough to trigger sugar shock not unlike the sharp, debilitating pain you feel from inhaling a Slurpee too quickly. High fashion, young girls and limitless possibility seemed to me like a recipe for success..and your hits on this article confirmed my suspicions.

#3: Star Wars Angry Birds Revealed - This one is a no brainer. There are several topics I have little hope of ever getting a scoop on. Lego is one. Transformers is another. Star Wars was another..until this year. These are topics with rabid fans scouring the earth every day for the tiniest piece of info to share with legions of other rabid fans. When a site like ours gets advance images of something like Star Wars Angry Birds...all I can do is thank God and chalk it up to awesome luck. Reactions were mixed when the news hit. Some thought it was a logical extension and a clever jumping off point from Angry Birds Space. Others rolled their eyes and wondered where the Star Wars merchandising would end. Those folks must be wondering even more now that Disney has control of that wheel. We thought it was silly, yet handled very cleverly, and welcomed the waves of websites across the globe who picked up the story...and allowed us to slide into New York Comic Con with giant smiles on our faces.

#2: Toy Fair 2012: DC Direct Rises - Never before did a female butt on a statue cause so much conversation. That butt belonged to Anne Hathaway, and while I believe, at the time, people had seen the costumes, trailer and such for The Dark Knight Rises, I suppose no one had seen the full outfits from the 3 main characters from top to bottom. An advance look from Diamond changed all that. Often, when we get these images, there is little info to go along with it...and that is where the fun starts. There's nothing a geek likes more than speculation, and when you are forced to pour over images to give your best guess on what the item will be when it finally hits shelves, it makes for a fun week or two! This particular story made its way across the globe, so it was doubly fun to see who had picked it up and what input they would lend to the conversation. Days like this, you gotta love living in the future.

#1: Toy Fair 2012: JAKKS Monsuno - This one has been the head-scratcher of the year. The product was inventive and the game play fun, so we made sure to make Monsno one of the first "official" Toy Fair articles of the show. Looking at the numbers on the images in that set...they are great..but not mindblowing...and certainly not mirroring the 50k views this article has gotten!! If I were a more techy guy with vast knowledge of the inner workings of the interwebs, maybe I could begin to understand how this article got so much traffic...but I am not, so for now I'll just thank JAKKS for the access and tip my hat to all those folks who were probably sitting at home in mortal fear that Monsuno would be the next gargantuan fad to drain their wallets as their children wail for product. You know what they say...know your enemy. I can only imagine all those reads on this article were parents doing just that!

Flickr Stats: 54,661 pictures posted // 4,884,058 views
If I could get Flickr to spit out more specific stats, I'd be able to tell you which images ruled the year, but just from my observations, I'd say most views of all time go
#3 Sophie Dee
#2 Nick Manning and Madelyn Marie
#1 HALO UNSC Firebase from Mega bloks
Which just goes to show you...big boobs will never conquer the lust for video game merchandise.
Shout out to IGN whose links to us brought us the most traffic this year and Bleeding Cool coming in a close second.

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