Tina Fey & Amy Poehler

By Past Nastification

My brain couldn’t process what my eyes were seeing. On a merchandise shelf display thing at a used book store- there they were. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, in 1:18 scale!! Was this real? Surely I would’ve heard about these?

Why didn’t I know these existed?!

But they were real, even though I had never heard about them. Produced by Bif Bang Pow! in 2015, the two figures were released as themselves (instead of character names) as Saturday Night Live merchandise.

Tina Fey (the person, not the toy) is brilliant. The flawless deadpan deliveries, the grin, and the typewriter-fast wit. And let’s be honest, Joe fans, she kinda looks like The Baroness. So that’s cool, too. If you loved 30 Rock and currently love Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, then you know what a creative engine the woman is. Clearly a woman worthy of plastic immortality.

Amy Poehler (the person, not the toy) also exists.

The figures aren’t bad. They’re technically action figures, but they’re essentially poseable display pieces. Seven points of articulation, like old MASK figures, which works fine for two figures designed to sit behind a cardboard Weekend Update desk. Next to a standard ARAH figure, they look like they’re scaled to be about 5’4”. They’re well proportioned, too. The feet and hands are a bit tiny, but not too bad. The designers were even smart enough to include holes for Star Wars-size foot pegs.

Each figure has a unique head and a shared body.

The Amy Poehler one is easily the better likeness of the two. You might say it almost looks like her. Given that these don’t appear to be done with some kind of facial-scanning technology or anything fancy like that, it’s a decent approximation.

Tina Fey head looks more like a schoolmarm than the myopic nerdess vixen it should. As the only woman who has dazzled both Cyclops and Ant-Man, (James Marsden in 30 Rock; Paul Rudd in Admission), the Tina Fey head should look better than it does. Between trying to sculpt the glasses and the smirk, something got lost in translation. The gap between the head and the body doesn’t look as bad in person, but it’s still distracting.

The figures have the shared pantsuit body. Tina Fey has a navy one; Amy Poehler has a grey one. Painting/molding one pantsuit in a solid color and the other as a two-tone pantsuit would have worked better when using a shared body in a set. I’m overthinking it, and defaulting to seeing these as action figure action figures, when I shouldn’t give the pantsuit colors any thought at all. These are just quirky display pieces that happen to have some points of articulation.

A search for more realistic 1:18 scale SNL figures didn’t find any. But that doesn’t mean that more won’t be made (118archive.com shows a Seth Meyers prototype to be in development).

As a kitsch collectable or as background diorama pieces, these figures are simply fun. Hopefully we’ll see more down the road.