Action Figures

Yesterday (my day off), I went and poked around at the Toys R Us. This is a thing that I do occasionally. See, I like action figures. I'm not a hardcore collector or anything but hey, I like small shiny toys that I can put on my desk and play imaginative games with. Action figures are pretty good for this. Wonder Woman, Darth Vader, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Pearl all occasionally have epic adventures on my desk. It fills the time while I wait for things to load on the computer. 8)

The problem is, though, that I always end up wanting action figures for things that toy companies would never in a million years make action figures for. They're almost always books - literary characters don't get made into action figures until they're first made into a movie. For instance - to my knowledge, there are no action figures for characters in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, even though that would rock. Surely that series is ripe for action figures. There's dragons and knights and assassins and shadow-witches and ice zombies and semi-vikings and semi-Mongol hordes, etc, etc. (And just think - the toy company would have fewer and fewer of them to produce as the series went on. By the time you get to book four, practically everyone you met in book one is dead.) It would be brilliant.

The last time I started thinking about this, I was reading Crime and Punishment. I still vaguely want an action figure of Raskolnikov. He would come with an axe for killing elderly pawn brokers, a couch for having a nervous breakdown on and possibly a dead horse. (Of course, you'd end up having to get Sonya and Razumikhin to go with him. And maybe Porfiry Petrovich.) I could pretend my desk was St Petersburg and have him walk around on it, talking to himself and gesticulating wildly. (Our Rodya canonically walks around talking to himself - the gesticulating is probably just me.)

I asked my sister what literary character she'd want an action figure of and I think her answer was cooler than mine: she wants Gregor Samsa from Kafka's Metamorphosis. This is awesome because her action figure would be a transformer. That is magnificently cool.

Anyway. The action figure thing is a good game. Want to play? What literary characters would you want as action figures, greater blogosphere? What kind of accessories would they come with? Would any of them have kung-fu grip?