Indie toy store Kidrobot celebrates its grand reopening tonight at 118 Prince St.—not far from the old Kidrobot location, but in a roomier space. The festivities kick off at 6:00, and if you can’t make it, you can watch the store’s Flash video broadcast starting at either 5:30 or 5:45, depending on which section of the website you believe. Or, if you don’t care about the “limited-edition one-night-only giveaway!!!” claptrap, you can just visit the new store another time.

You might gather that I have mixed feelings about Kidrobot. In its varied role as designer/marketer/gallery/retailer, Kidrobot has played a large part in the rise of the art toy, a medium that gives voice to independent character artists who otherwise might not have found a ready niche. For this it should be hugely commended. But while I don’t begrudge an effort to scrape together some profit, I think Kidrobot’s marketing interests have contributed to a stagnation of the form.

The three toys depicted above, for instance, were all done by different artists, yet each hews closely to an aesthetic that has prevailed among indie vinyl toys for most of the decade: big curves, angry-but-cute, with a hearty but hollow dose of attitude. The Kidrobot marketing model encourages artists to stick to a familiar form that can be easily reissued in countless “limited editions,” each time with a different coat of paint and each time treated as something new. A similar technique is sometimes used to create new characters from a basic template in video games (especially RPGs), where it’s called “palette shifting” and is considered poor form.¹

At the center of the palette shifting is Dunny, a character created by Kidrobot to serve as a blank canvas for big-name toy designers. (The blank-canvas toy isn't unique to Kidrobot. There's also the Superdeux Stereotype and Bearbrick, among others, and they all have roots in urban art projects like Cow Parade.) A sibling of the brilliant, enduring do-it-yourself toy Munny, Dunny has been redesigned hundreds of times by the various artists who have enjoyed Kidrobot’s patronage. As a marketing tool, Dunny seems invincible, but as a piece of art, it hasn’t had anything to say for years. The fact that it remains such a focal point for Kidrobot disappoints me.

Hey, limited editions are fun, and I have no problem with them in principle. It’s when they become a raison d’etre that I think the medium suffers. When the vinyl-toy scene was exploding earlier this decade, artists contorted and combined traditional kiddie/cute forms in ways that spat in the face of a pre-packaged Toys ’R’ Us childhood, expanding the notion of what constituted a toy (and who constituted a toy buyer). Now, toy artists seem more content to turn out variations on a theme. The designs are new, but the ideas are old.

Kidrobot is still a fun time (and I like Toy Tokyo even better), so I don’t mean to be so solemn. I realize it’s pop art. I only wish it would pop like it used to.

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1. To be specific, the use of palette shifting to create “new” characters is considered poor form. Palette shifting is just a graphical technique, not necessarily bad and often artfully employed. ↑