The All Retro Figures General Discussion [Closing Soon!]

I would love the blue rocket attire! Assuming you mean from 93' where it was basically the Hitman gear in light blue.

To give you a quick idea of what should be possible, take a look at the Storm Hogan figures or the Legends of Wrestling games from the mid 00's. For example with Hogan, Storm made pretty much every iconic Hogan attire including Hollywood Hogan without issue. But they had to omit anything that would be a WWE owned trademark, such as the NWO logos on the boots or a NWO t-shirt. On the other hand, they did license the artwork for the tshirts for both Hollywood figures from the artist, which is something Mattel/WWE would never do.

If you look closely, you'll see the Legends of Wrestling games use a lot of iconic attires. But there are some minor tweaks made to get around copyright/trademark issues. For example the Piper image on the cover of the game is a shirt that says "Piper!" in the classic "Hot Rod!" font. WWE owns the design for that shirt though, so it was tweaked. One of Owen Hart's attires is actually his Slammys gear (which I'm not sure Jazwares could/would make), but if you look closely instead of saying "Slammy Winner" the text just says "Owen Hart."

Any intellectual property owned by WWE or another party is going to be off limits, including logos or names/phrases. So for example if they signed Bryan Adams, you could probably see a Kronik figure, but Adam Bomb would be unlikely. Same would go for things like the NWO logo, or an iconic tshirt design that WWE controls. But the vast majority of gimmicks and attires, particularly for folks who didn't work for WWE during the 90's "everybody has a profession" era are going to be possible.

Where it gets muddier is that trademarks expire and needed to be renewed. It's sort of a "use it or lose it" situation. WWE actually lost the rights to the War Games for a period of time, and had to buy the rights back from MLW. So tons of gimmick names from the 80's/90's expired. In some cases, the wrestler filed for ownership of the name and used it on the indies. In other cases, nobody had ownership, but the workers continued to wrestle under that name/gimmick on the indies and and trademark was basically considered abandoned. If you google you should be able to find new stories and court cases for Brutus Beefcake and Demolition, who both fell into this situation and continue to use the name/merch outside of WWE.

And of course there are going to be legal messes that Jazwares may decide to just sidestep. The Patriot gimmick is owned by Honky Tony Man, but that is disputed by Del Wilkes, who most notably wrestled under the mask. Del has PWT merch as Del "The Patroit" Wilkes. It might be possible for Jazwares to make a Del Wilkes figure in Patriot gear, but may not be worth the possible legal trouble. Or a Raven figure wouldn't be able to include any of his iconic tshirts (bands, Sandman, etc) unless they licensed the rights from whoever owns those rights.

Anyone under contract to WWE is going to be off limits, at least for the duration of that contract. I expect people like DDP and Jake will end up signing with moving over the AEW merch whenever their WWE deals expire. My gut feeling is those dates are fairly soon, and part of why we're suddenly seeing new WWE figures is partially to undercut demand for future Jazwares figures. But WWE's legends roster is about as small as it has ever been, and there are literally hundreds of possibilities.

So to some of the examples you noted, The Natural Dustin is almost a given, I think. Sting should have very few restrictions besides not using any NWO/Wolfpac logos, and possibly his TNA Joker facepaint. We have seen WWE need to tweak/adjust some attires as well because there's IP that is owned by another company - changing the font on Seth's Bears attire, or leaving the X off of his X-Men gear. But there will be the same ways Jazwares can/will work around limitations if they desire. But on the whole there should be more than enough meat on the bones to make put some figures collectors have been asking for for years.

Boots are different but it looks the same torso and legs to me.