I recently discovered Pantasy Building Blocks. The company has acquired rights to characters such as Astro Boy, Saint Seiya, My Own swordsman and more.
The China-based company was formed in August 2020 and began partnering with exclusive pop culture IPs. What began with a team of brick fanatics, brick designers and hobbyist community, Pantasy was created.
One popular IP that Pantasy is representing is “Popeye” (Popeye the Sailor Man) and their “Pantasy Popeye & Olive Buildable Characters Building Kit” caught my attention. I believe this is the first time anything “Popeye” related is receiving a brick-based set.
For those who are not familiar with “Popeye the Sailor Man”, the first appearance of the character was in January 1929 in a comic strip. By 1933, the character would appear in short animations courtesy of Max Fleischer for Paramount Pictures.
Currently owned by Turner Entertainment (a sister company of Warner Bros.), he is an iconic American animated character who is in a relationship with Olive Oyl, while his nemesis is Brutus. And each time Popeye eats a can of spinach, he would gain superhuman power.
Of course, the eating a can of spinach was to make children think that eating their vegetables would make them stronger (and a study done in 2010 showed that children increased their vegetable consumption after watching Popeye cartoons).
So iconic that people did the Popeye dance in the ’50s and even the popular “Donkey Kong” game from Nintendo, was once supposed to be Popeye trying to save Olive Oyl from Brutus. Oh, if only the company allowed for Nintendo to have the rights. And of course, the popular character had a live action film made. And Popeye’s restaurants used to feature the character in commercials.
While the character is iconic, I have to admit that I was surprised to see a brickset and I’m quite amazed of how good it looks and how big the box was. And as a longtime brickbuilder (of the popular Denmark company), I am open to trying other companies and one that really has gotten me excited is Pantasy.
And their first major set that I had to try is the “Pantasy Popeye & Olive Buildable Characters Building Kit”.
While 1,209 pieces, a lot of parts are big, so the difficulty is quite low and I feel beginners can easily build this set (in fact, the age range is 6 and up) and should take about six hours to put together. Instructions are good and for the most part, not many small bricks to worry about.
But this was a lot of fun to put together. I love the fact that you can change the expressions from eyes closed to eyes open. But I was quite surprised that the height of this after you put it together is over a foot long and almost a foot wide. So, you’re definitely wanting to make room for this set.
Now some may balk at the $140 pricepoint. But if you really look at it as price per brick, if the other well-known brand is about .18 cents per piece (average in 2022), with this set being 1209 pieces, it’s about .11 (.12 if you round it off). So, in actuality, it’s a lot less expensive than the other popular brand.
Of course, the bricks are much different compared to the other popular company but I believe that Pantasy is going to be huge, once they keep on doing what they have been doing and snatching up these popular IPs. Especially now that they are getting into the anime and traditional Japanese art side of things. There is a lot of potential there.
I’m expecting big things to come from Pantasy and this is a set that I enjoyed and now, I’m looking forward to taking on more fun, Pantasy brickmaking projects.
