>>9113130Focus was primarily on paint and sculpt with articulation being secondary. A big point of contention was that articulated figures cut the sculpt up a lot and a lot of people compared hyper articulated figures as being "bionic looking" or ugly. But those of us who loved articulation were still prominent. That Toy Biz 18'' Spider-man was just about our messiah. Microman was another line that was a huge point of contention between both sides.
Come 98-2004 there was also a ton of companies springing up jumping on the adult collector's market. Most aped Mcfarlane's then contemporary strategy of statue type figures.
I'd say 2005-07 was when a big sea change came into effect. People had burned out on McFarlane statues and in Japan lines like Revoltech, Figma,and SHF were starting up,and while Toy Biz Marvel Legends was dying you had other companies begin to experiment more with expanding articulation Hasbro even ripped off Revoltech for a transformers subline. But a lot of companies also died around this time which set back the US industry in some ways; but in some ways was good because it ended the era of unarticulated statues at retail for the most part.
