If there are two things I loved as a child, they were Garbage Pail Kids and professional wrestling. To be fair there were a lot of things I loved as a kid but these two fit the purpose for this article and they really were two of my favorite licenses from back then. I was always slightly more of an NWA mark at the time because Mid-Atlantic/Jim Crockett Promotions was the "home territory" of my area of the US and I always found their more athletic and hard-hitting style slightly more entertaining to watch. I still loved the WWF, though. Between Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, ice cream bars, action figures, and WWF Superstars to watch on Saturdays - it was a great time to be a young wrestling fan!
As far as Garbage Pail Kids go (GPK, if you're cool, apparently); I was also pretty obsessed with them. I loved going down to the corner store and buying a pack of cards or two in order to see which twisted, disturbing beings that I would collect. I still remember classic characters like Ali Gator and Half Nelson (if you're looking for a wrestling reference). I even loved the shitty GPK movie that was released way before it was "cool" to like it. I was a fan from the very beginning. For these reasons, while I was perusing the shelves at my friendly, neighborhood, department sore "supercenter" and ran across these newly released figures; I had to snatch them up!
For a bit of backstory - even though it's been many years since I've collected GPK cards, they're still released on a regular basis. In 2019, Topps released 13 sticker GPK cards that featured WWE wrestlers reimagined in the GPK's style. Earlier this year, The Loyal Subjects (who are no strangers to the action figure game) decided to turn four of these sticker cards into small (4-5 inch) figures. The two that I was able to pick up are characters based on Randy Savage and Andre the Giant.
Randy Savage is in my Top-5 list of favorite wrestlers and whenever I see a Macho Man anything; I have to pick it up. I have one of his Funko Pops, his "Masters Of The WWE Universe" crossover figure, one of his retro, Hasbro figures... I even bought my nephew a Macho Man t-shirt for school this year because I was able to teach him about the legendary madness that was Randy Savage.
This figure itself also doesn't disappoint. Frozen in an action pose (We're just ignoring the translucent pole up his ass that holds him in place, right?); we have Savage Randy (as he's known in the GPK universe) bursting out of a brick wall while holding a sign that says "Oh Yeah!". All "pole up his ass" jokes aside; it is a really cool pose. Even though yelling "Oh Yeah!" was a Macho Man thing; I wouldn't be too surprised to see the Kool-Aid Man calling gimmick infringement on bursting through a wall and yelling "Oh Yeah!". That was kind of his thing.
The figure itself is really nice and when you look closely; you can see a lot of little details that went into this that make it a quality, collectible figure. Each of these figures comes in a box that's sort of reminiscent of a smaller Funko Pop-style box but they also have their own "dynamic display" ("dynamic display" is how they describe it on the figure's box) which is why I display mine outside of their original box. Having a stand with a nameplate and an interchangeable background is pretty cool so, I want to show off that aspect as much as possible. As I previously mentioned; Savage Randy's background is a brick wall that he is currently in mid-pose of bursting through. Also, as I said, the backgrounds are interchangeable between the characters, and you can just pop them off and switch them around if you so choose. Each background is pretty specific to the character it comes with, though, so I don't know why you'd really want to change them around but you can do so if you'd like.
The next figure in this line that we're taking a look at is Gigantic Andre a/k/a Andre the Giant. Andre is another wrestler like Randy Savage meaning: if I see any sort of merchandise or figures that feature him; more than likely I'm gonna pick it up for my collection. I love that, according to this figure, Gigantic Andre is so gigantic he's crushing an entire WWE ring under one massive foot. "The 8th Wonder Of The World"'s interchangeable background is a bunch of skyscrapers for him to tower over, yet again demonstrating how huge he apparently is.
I really enjoy these figures a lot. They're missing the "gross-out factor" that most Garbage Pail Kids characters had but they're some of the favorites that I own and I can't wait to hopefully go back and pick up the other two in the series - "Seething Steve" ("Stone Cold" Steve Austin) and "Unravelled Warrior" (Ultimate Warrior). Let me also just say that Unraveled Warrior is an excellent name for the Ultimate Warrior character. If nothing else, he was always unraveled, that's for sure. I promise you that when and if I'm able to get my hands on these figures; we'll take a look at them here.