THE TOYS THAT MADE US
Dave Okada The Toys That Made Us Courtesy of Netflix
Steve Sansweet de Us The Toys That Ma x Courtesy of Netfli
“this is impossible”—that’s what that felt like when it happened. Second of all, one of the things that’s great about Netflix is they’re very, very picky about the shows that they greenlight, but once they greenlight them, they really support the creators. So, I’d say for about eight or nine months, we’re shooting and editing—and I was able to choose the eight toys; it was really wonderful. They just trusted me to do all that. 78 | Issue No. 2 | THE POP INSIDER
And then, if that wasn’t good enough, when we sent in the first cut, which was the Star Wars episode that was about 2.5 hours long, the notes we got were fantastic. They were absolutely some of the best toys we ever got. The example that I always give is that 2.5-hour cut—and as much as everyone loves Star Wars, nobody needs a 2.5-hour documentary about Star Wars toys. But when you’re so close to something, you lose sight of it. And we had a five-minute section on this Star Wars character named Vlix. Every-
one is always talking about the rocket-firing Boba Fett—but Vlix is the hardest to find figure that actually went into production; one of them just sold [recently] for just under $60,000. So, we had a whole section about this guy and our executive at Netflix was like, “Listen, great episode, great cut. Don’t need five minutes on Vlix. Save that for the DVD.” That really allowed us to get a much tighter show that hopefully a lot of people will enjoy—more than just people like me. Believe it or not—I hope you’re sitting down—not everyone has the same 700-plus toy collection at 42 years old. PI: How do you choose the focus for each episode and define toys that “made” us? BVW: I use these unofficial theories. I created in my brain this idea of a Mount Rushmore of toys. What I mean by that is that I needed the toys to have at least one character, so that if it was on a Mount Rushmore of toys, people would see it and be like, “Oh! I don’t know anything about Transformers, but that’s Optimus Prime.” There had to be somebody that could stand up for the toy. I wanted every brand we covered to be iconic. The second thing is it had to be a good story. There were a couple of brands that