SDCC 2025: Nacelle Company’s Brian Volk-Weiss Talks ‘The Toys That Made Us,’ The Nacelleverse, And More
by Erik Amaya
Brian Volk-Weiss: This is how the whole thing happened: we had a meeting with Playmates about a year ago, and in the middle of it, they just casually mentioned that they were not doing any more Star Trek toys. A couple days later, I remembered that I said to the head of our consumer products department, I was like, “Hey, do you know anyone at Paramount?” And he was like,” I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t.” So we did a Zoom call [with the studio]. The Zoom led to another Zoom. It led to a meeting, and we got an email saying we got the rights! I have that email framed in my office, of course. But the reason I’m taking all this time to explain this to you, is because it’s all real. You can go to our booth and you can see the first two waves there, and it’s all real!
I can’t believe this is real. I mean, some people are like, “You’re a genius. You turned a documentary about toys into becoming a toy company.” No, I’m not a genius. I was lucky enough that I could sell a show about toys. That show led to incoming phone calls, that one thing that led to Robo Force, which led to Biker mice from Mars, which led to The Expanse. And because we had The Expanse, we were able to get Star Trek. So you asked me, “was there this great big plan and all?” No, no. It’s just I feel lucky. It’s like I’m living in a dream.
Switching to the Nacelleverse, what built up to taking these seven brands and merging them?
BV-W: So, it’s funny, I always say I didn’t go to business school. My version of business school or grad school was — and this is cheesy, but it’s true — was directing Toys That Made Us. I learned so much from just making the show! One of the things I learned that was the most important was, believe it or not, from the episode no one ever talks about, weirdly, the Lego episode.
No one talks about that one?
None of those characters interact with each other! So Hello Kitty can never ever talk to Gudetama or Koroppi. It’s so odd to me. So when I decided to do Robo Force and commit all the money and all the time , we had to build a system. So that’s why from the jump, in our Robo Force cartoon, one of the main characters, she’s Sectaurian. Number two: you saw the Biker Mice cameos, and the idea is, if you stay for after the credits, we set up the big bad guy from Power Lords. And so by the time next year, when Biker Mice from Mars, comes out, we’re basically going to be in a situation where, hopefully, if this all works, all the fans we made with Robo Force are going to come over to Biker Mice where we already have the Biker Mice fans. So that’s what I took from what I learned from making the Lego episode. You want to build a system. So that’s how and why we’re doing it.
Does the system make it easier to merge ideas from the 1980s and ’90s?
BV-W: The system does … but one of the things that we’re also doing is following what we call “the rules,” but we decide what the rules are. So for example, Robo Force — not the biggest hit back in 1983, so they only finished one episode. The comic books are literally unreadable, and they only made one wave [of figures]. It was the big wave, possibly the biggest first wave in the history of the toy business, which is how it bankrupted the company that made it. But anyway, because of all of that, we could do whatever we wanted. We changed what the characters looked like, we put them in a different city. We just changed everything and did whatever the hell we wanted to do, and we just hoped people would like it. Biker Mice from Mars, exact opposite.
We knew there were massive amounts of fans who were passionate. They hated the 2006 series. So that show has a lot of rules. One of the first things we did was hire two experts who make me — who watched Biker Mice when it first aired — look like I’ve never even heard the name Biker Mice from Mars. And we run everything past them. I would say 98, 99% of the time, we will follow their recommendations. And because we do take this so seriously, usually what we send them, they’re cool with almost instantly. And then C.O,W.-boys of Moo Mesa, which we just put into preproduction a couple weeks ago, it was a spinoff of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So again, we are going to follow the rules very, very, very closely and carefully.
Like Great Garloo: there’s no backstory. So we really operate within the edges of where things have been. We do push things forward. In Biker Mice for Mars, we created an original character named Scorch. She shows up in the fifth episode. And if we do our jobs and we get a little lucky, hopefully that’s going to be one of the characters that people fall in love with. But all day today and yesterday at our booth, people were asking me “where’s Scorch?” And I’m like, “a part of me is how do you know about Scorch?” So those are the lines we try and operate within.
And how is it being a booth exhibitor in San Diego for the first time?
BV-W: This is the [convention] I’ve been reading about since I was 15. I’ve been coming here since 1999. It’s so surreal. I had a million meetings and stuff yesterday while the whole thing was getting built. And then, at some point, I went to walk the floor and I’m literally just walking the way I normally would since 1999, see the booth and think, “Oh, my God, I cannot believe we have a booth here!” It’s like I’m in a dream. And again, I know I’m using all these cliches, but it’s like I’m literally living in a dream.
Going back to Sectaurs for a moment, did it feel like there was an opportunity to expand there?
BV-W: I would say it has a more complex backstory than Game of Thrones! I mean, it is bonkers how much time they put into everything. So we are using that. We’ve had a miniseries come out [from Oni Press] and it took what had come before us and included it in the first three pages. Basically, it explained all the stuff that happened back in the day, so when we get to page four, then we start pushing the story forward, and then the next two issues just cover that. All of these comics basically act as the prequel to the series.
So the plan is everything — toys, comics, shows — in a shared universe. Where it is the Nacelle system, it also seems to take the three prong approach Hasbro took back in the day with Transformers and G.I. Joe.
BV-W:I feel like we’re taking the best of what Hasbro did and the best of what we have now seen Marvel do. And the best of the stuff I learned from Sanrio and Lego. Also, I can’t talk about any of this without mentioning Star Wars! They’ve had a front row seat to what George Lucas built. So we’re trying to cherry pick all these best practices and merge them into this shared universe.
Based on what we’ve seen with Robo Force and the comic book sales and everything, people do seem to want an independent shared universe. And what I always say is, even if I wanted to be Nike, we couldn’t be Nike. That takes lots of time and we want to be Airwalk. We want to be the cool alternative that people come to because we have our own style, we have a lot of heart, and we have a lot of comedy. Like my background’s in comedy, I’ve been doing comedy 27 years. I’m not a comedian, but we put so much comedy into the comic books, pretty much even our packaging, We try to put a lot of humor in it.
Speaking of that — are there going to be more standup action figures? I got the Bill Hicks as soon as he was announced.
BV-W: So funny. We’re selling them here; we have less than, definitely less than 50, maybe less than 20 units left of every single one of them. It has a soft spot in my heart, because even though it was technically our second toy that got greenlit after Robo Force, because it was so much easier to make, it actually got here first. So our first toy ever was Legends of Laughter. So that’s the good news.
The bad news is it was profitable, but barely. So I wouldn’t say we made a mistake, but if we do a wave two, the big difference will be all the comedians in wave two will be alive. It’s very hard for an artist to promote a product when they’re underground! So yeah, I know who I want to do and I’m friends with the people I actually want to do it with. But we’re so focused on the Nacelleverse. When we started off, we didn’t know what would work or not work. We didn’t know if Robo Force would work. So we tried doing lots of different things, and as the Nacelleverse started working, it just seemed to make sense to focus more and more on that and less and less on peripheral things. But that said, I would like to make more Legends of Laughter.
And if you wouldn’t mind one Toys That Made Us question, what would it take to get the Robotech story told?
BV-W: I would love to do an episode on Robotech. If you’re asking me that question, I assume a lot about Robotech. But even as a guy who, conservatively, has over a hundred Robotech pieces in my collection, there’s a problem with it.
So the episodes that we make, they cost a lot of money and they take a lot of time. So its always goes back to the rules. One of the policies: is there a good story? Robotech might have one of the greatest stories in all of Toys That Made Us, so that’s good news. But one of the other rules we follow is, “is there a character [who] would be on a toy Mount Rushmore that people would recognize? Now, you could argue a Veritech is recognizable … to you and me. My wife, who’s the least nerdy geek you’ll ever meet, has no clue what a Veritech is. She knows who Optimus Prime is. She knows who Captain Kirk is — but she doesn’t really watch any of it! So that’s the problem with Robotech; I don’t know if it has the fan base it needs for us to do what we do.
I totally understand that. Thanks so much for your time today, Brian.
Nacelleverse and Star Trek toys are available for order and preorder at their online store.
