Exclusive Q and A Session with Toy Pizza’s Mr. Jesse DeStasio

• I’d like to consider myself with my finger firmly off the pulse now…hahah. I’m sort of purposefully in exile from the world of licensing and management so I can give my all to the Knights of the Slice and our fans. There is no question my time in the professional world, working for different IP holders and movie studios helped give me a strong sensibility of what works and what doesn’t…but at the end of the day it was toiling to advance someone else’s vision. 

• I know people automatically think it’s based on Power Rangers, but I was just slightly too old to embrace them when the show first came out. The inspiration is more directly a love letter to a line of 3 3/4″ figures Banpresto released covering all sorts of different Japanese characters from Kamen Rider, Lupin III, Kinnikuman, and beyond. I was thinking about doing a retro line of figures with minimal articulation even before Toy Pizza was launched…then Super7 came out with Alien ReAction and did my idea better than I ever could.

• Yes, always been obsessed with designing and customizing figures into my own characters. The childhood drawings are from a series I call ” Old Heroes” where I dig up terrible drawings and make them into new, contemporary figures. My feeling is I have never had better ideas than I did before I was the age of 10. It’s very fulfilling to continue to introduce more and more Old Heroes. 

• Originally the KOTS was not going to have Glyos joints. I was just going to do standard twist joints and possible ball jointed shoulders, like another line that featured Kinnikuman, Chojin Power Series. Matt Doughty and I had been friends for several years and he convinced me to do the project with him and his factory. It ended up being the right choice and continues to be a strength of the line…even if it was largely rejected by Glyos fans in it’s debut. 

• The world of Knights of the Slice is based on a simple premise- Food is Religion. So if we assume that’s true, what sort of people and tribes occupy that world? The order of the KOTS are a sort of benevolent (?) police force who have corporate overlords, but generally try to safe guard food for the population to eat it. Anyone trying to hoard or disrupt food are villains and dispatched by the KOTS with extreme prejudice. 

• Yes, the AFOTM club has been the biggest single catalyst for our tiny little toy line. The lineup was in no way intentional, it was complete anarchy. I basically spent every penny I made from KOTS on sculpting new figures, so I had this backlog of amazing characters that were designed on a whim but were such oddball ideas, they didn’t fit anywhere. So I took all these disparate ideas and just decided…”well, let’s let the public decide how many of these get made”. So the line up is filled with a random mishmash of characters that will hopefully tie together in some sort of cohesive narrative. That idea itself, of a self-fulfilling narrative, is a big part of the KOTS mythos. A lot of the bios and names are decided a few days before a figure goes on sale. I sort of let the final product tell me it’s own story and how it fits into the world. 

• I’ll let you in on a little secret, I actually pitched Hasbro to become a joe licensee. I was interested in taking over the Collectors Club when the current deal ended and I spent a lot of time crafting a pitch deck that I thought spoke to what was missing from the experience and how I could fix it. It was politely declined and I heard later from a mutual friend that I had ruffled feathers by starting the presentation with the proclamation that “Gi Joe is dead”. I believe the quote was “At least it wasn’t forgettable”. That experience galvanized me to prove I could do it better than it’s been done, even without the license. I think I have a proof of concept with the AFOTM. 

Regarding homages- it’s something I try my best to avoid doing to only doing lightly. I always say homages are like cilantro, a pinch too much ruins a dish. Homages are the easy, low hanging fruit and you see a lot of indie toy lines sort of collapse once they exhaust the cycle of “Star Wars colorway / HeMan colorway / Transformers colorway. It collapses because they are selling someone else’s idea and repeating motifs we’ve all already seen.

• That’s a tough question but I think I’d go with designing toys, because creating content takes so much more work! I’m lucky Nicky handles everyone once the camera is turned off, because it’s way harder than picking out some pantones and sending an order to the factory. 

• I strongly want to do enrollment for a new Kickstarter for AFOTM club in Nov.

I want 2020 to be even bigger and better. I think once people start getting Jan. in the mail and sharing pics, I think a larger audience will become interested and we could double our campaign this year. 

For the immediate future, I’m looking forward to getting our first new figure, The Desert Rat, in people’s hands.

• He also looks great when matched with the Old Knight’s parts. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed diving in to the awesome history of Toy Pizza as much as I have! I’m really looking forward to all that Jesse and Nicky have in store for us in the future.