I’ve visited a lot of popups at SDCC this year, but Super7 might have them all beat. The action figures/collectibles store does not have one but two events this year. It transformed its physical store into a Dungeons & Dragons-themed space to celebrate the roleplaying game’s 50th anniversary, and it’ll be throwing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed party tomorrow (complete with pizza.)
I spoke to founder Bryan Flynn about Super7’s humble origins.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
AIPT: How did Super7 get started?
Bryan Flynn: We started out as a magazine 23 years ago, about collecting Japanese toys. There were two other magazines covering action figures…we started covering the stuff everyone else wasn’t covering, which was Japanese monster toys.
AIPT: Did you have an interest in action figures beforehand?
BF: Yeah, I started collecting toys when I was a kid. The summer of 1991, after my sophomore year of college, I went home and was like, “I want all my old Star Wars figures again,” and started tracking them down. At that time, no one cared, so it was easy to get complete collections quickly.
AIPT: Super7 has two activations, based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dungeons & Dragons. What can you tell fans about that?
BF: We have a store here year-round in downtown San Diego, and every year we do a complete gut and remodel for a pop-up. So this year it’s 50 years of D&D, we have everything from the beginning to today. Everything you can want from D&D and more. Tomorrow night at 7 pm, we have Mikey’s Pizza…it’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizzeria, a completely functioning pizzeria, and we have a ton of exclusives coming out at that event as well.
AIPT: Have you ever done something of this scale for another con?
BF: We always have at least one event every con, apart from the main event. We’ve been doing popups at the store for nine years now…this will be the first con where we’ve done two outside activations.
AIPT: Is there any kind of theme you’d want to do for a future popup?
BF: I can’t talk about what we’re doing next year yet, but we’re already well in motion.
AIPT: Out of all the popups you’ve done, which one would you say is your favorite?
BF: The Turtle Pizzeria is going to be a top one, I think. The very first one we did was Skeletor’s Lair from Masters of the Universe, and that was cool because that was the very first one. We’ve done Peanuts, the Universal Monsters, She-Ra…we’ve done a ton at this point. It’s always the next one…the next one’s gonna be bigger.