Green Day Pop! Vinyl Figures Have Been Announced & I Am Not Impressed

Green Day fans-turned-Pop! Vinyl fanatics have been waiting more than a decade for Funko, the company behind those weird little bobblehead figures you see everywhere, to release figures of band members Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool.

They’ve finally been confirmed and every time you look at the announcement images and glam shots, the figures just keep getting worse.

But before we dive into some specifics around that, a little history on the company’s relationship to music merch and how they continue to stick it to pop punk fans.

It was back in 2010 that Funko, which was established in 1988, released their first-ever Pops (a small run of DC superhero figures) and it wasn’t long until the company started snatching up licences to mass-produce musicians under the banner Pop! Rocks, the first in the series being a Purple Haze edition of Jimi Hendrix, accompanied by a metallic variant known as a 'Chase' (one in 36 figures was a chase).

An eBay bidding war back in May resulted in a Chase version of the Purple Haze Jimi Hendrix figure selling for over $4k.

Pic by hobbyDB

Around the same time the company dropped Elvis, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, The Beatles and more, all of which are now worth hundreds of dollars each, if not more.

Even Seth Sentry got caught up collecting in the early days, not realising until recently his collection, which had spent years in storage, was worth a small fortune.

“I think my interest dropped off a little bit because there’s just so many now,” Sentry told The Music. 

“I had the idea of wanting to collect them all. I’m a real completionist and that’s impossible now.”

And he’s not wrong, in recent years Pop! Vinyl interest has skyrocketed and the Pop! Rocks line continues to expand like there’s no tomorrow with Amy Winehouse, Guns N Roses, Justin Bieber, Metallica, Elton John, Kurt Cobain, Babymetal, Alice Cooper, Weird Al Yankovic, Ed Sheeran, Britney Spears, Queen, The Police, Mariah Carey, Debbie Harry and so many more being turned into figures.

There are now hundreds of music-related Pop! Vinyl figures

(ALL) THE SMALL THING

Back in 2018, Funko dropped blink-182 Pop! Vinyl and they were great, except it was a set of only two figures, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker, with no Tom DeLonge. Granted DeLonge split from the band (twice), it’s still annoying the set is missing the best band member (I know, those are fighting words). They did give DeLonge’s fictional character Poet Anderson a Pop! back in 2016 under the Pop! Animation line, so that’ll have to do.

Something's missing here...

I'M NOT OKAY (I PROMISE)

Funko recently had My Chemical Romance fans pulling their hair out. They released four different Gerard Way figures back in 2015 and in the years that followed ‘vaulted’ them, meaning they were in theory no longer going to produce them anymore.

As such prices went through the roof and diehard fans late to the game ended up dropping hundreds on eBay and other platforms to collect them all.

Then, last year, the company began ‘unvaulting’ figures one-by-one and releasing them via retailers again, and their value plummeted. The last of the four figures to be re-released is the Black Parade Gerard Way set to hit stores around late August. Before it was unvaulted, fans were paying upwards of $150 for it.

Also recently, in the US, they took the previously released Skeleton Gerard Way figure, dipped it in silver paint (calling it ‘platinum’), whacked a ‘Limited Edition - 5,000PCS’ sticker on it and had fans scrambling to nab one in order to complete their collection. Adding to the confusion, in Australia they're 'common', meaning they're not limited to 5,000 and you can order them pretty much anywhere with no issue.

That's one way to make some extra $$

(BOULEVARD OF) BROKEN DREAMS

And then the Green Day Pop! Vinyl announcement happened during the Pop!apalooza reveal event. Something both Pop! Vinyl and music fans alike had been waiting with bated breath for and at a first glance, they looked awesome. Until they didn’t.

The first issue is perhaps that Mike Dirnt doesn’t really look like Mike Dirnt. Secondly, and this likely to do with licencing, but Billie Joe Armstrong isn’t holding one of his more notable guitars – it’s a real shame he isn’t specifically playing ‘Blue’.

Those are forgivable missteps, but what’s absolutely absurd is the fact that NONE OF THE FIGURES HAVE TATTOOS.

Yep, those are definitely tattoos. Pic by Jaz Meadows

Even these customs by fan Dennis Gugin look better than the official release:

These custom Green Day figures are better than the official ones...

Funko also thought it was would be appropriate to put American Idiot-era figures into Dookie-themed boxes. It looks sort of silly and is also a missed opportunity to have Dookie-era figures AND American Idiot-era figures released separately.

A glam shot of the upcoming Billie Joe Armstrong Pop! Vinyl

Are there more important things to worry about in the world? Absolutely. Will that stop me whinging about little plastic toys? Obviously not. Will I still buy them when they’re released around the end of July? Yeah, probably.

Thankfully, Funko announced a slew of other Pop! Rocks during Pop!apalooza that actually rock, including this insane Pearl Jam five-pack.

Check out the full list of recent reveals here.