Designer Toys 101: What is a mash-up and what is a kit-bash?

If you are new to this column, it is truly meant to be read from the beginning to the most recent.
Please start with the first installment, "What are Designer Toys?"

Once in a while the term Mash-Up or Kit-Bash gets thrown around in regards to a custom and these have proven confusing concepts to some readers. While their Designer Toy counterpart is slightly different, the prevalence of the mash-up as a musical form gives us a great (and easy) way into explaining these.

A musical mash-up, in its most simplistic form, takes the instrumentals from one song and syncs the vocals from another to it. If you're not familiar, here's one of my favorite musical mash-ups: "Maiden Goes To Bollywood." It's a mixture of elements from an Iron Maiden song with a Bollywood track. So that's what a musical mash-up is.

And a Designer Toy Mash-Up is very similar. Basically, you have two similarly sized figures and decide that you want the head from one on the other:

In essence, the artist is creating one "new" platform out of two produced ones. The final result is typically then painted to instill a sense of consistency, but that's the general idea.

A Kit-Bash, on the other hand, is a term which comes from the scale modeling world. It's the term used to denote taking pieces from one or more scale models and using them as a basis to create something new out of. Sounds just like the Mash-Up, right? And, at it's heart, it is.

Within the Designer Toy community, Kit-Bashing refers to taking elements from things outside of the Designer Toy realm to create a platform (or using them in addition to a Designer Toy base to create something new). So when an artist sculpts the head from a Mego doll onto a Dunny, for instance, that would be Kit-Bashing.

Not as difficult as it sounded, right?

Next Week: ???
Unless John opts to write the column for the next month, then we'll be on a slight hiatus while other matters dominate my life. But we shall return. Have a burning Designer Toy question? Ask it in the comments and it might become a column!

The images used in this week's column were:
"Pocket Mummy Gator (GID)," designed by Brian Flynn and released by Super7 (2010)
"Rose Vampire Casket Cruiser (Pink Prowler)," designed by Josh Herbolsheimer and released by Super7 (2012)
"Gatormobile," custom by Josh Herbolsheimer (2012)