WARPLAND! How deep will McFarlane Toys take the fandom into this, and other fever dream episodes?

Wave 6 of the McFarlane Toys retro 6 inch Super Friends line has been officially announced. The Atom, The Joker and Apache Chief will be up for pre-order on September 4, 2026. Ideally, there should be three more figures, but only two possible Red Platinum figures have been mentioned, those being Batman and Superman as they appeared in the second episode of season 7 of the 1983 fabled “Lost Episodes” segment titled Warpland. 

Through a warp in space, Superman and Batman have become trapped in an alternate universe. Captured by the anthropomorphic defenders of the Planet Zoon, our heroes are briefly transformed into animals themselves. Superman into an eagle and Batman into an actual bat, until they can break away from their captors back through the space warp to their own universe in time to prevent a meteor from obliterating Metropolis and form back into their normal selves. 

Along with the segment Warpland, episode two of season seven also features the segments Two Gleeks are Deadlier Than One, and Bulgor the Behemoth rather coincidentally featuring Apache Chief. Rumors of this wave broke months ago.

Perhaps McFarlane could include a variant for the android version of Gleek. Probably just a re-issue with the glow-in-the-dark paint on his eyes. the segment Two Gleeks are Deadlier Than One, prominently features Giganta and Gorilla Grodd but I have no hopes that we will be seeing larger characters that require completely new tooling in this line from McFarlane Toys.

Having far too much free time on my hands, I decided to play with the Gemini slop machine in order to generate designs of what these versions of Batman and Superman might look like in the McFarlane Super Friends line.

It took, at least, an entire painstaking hour and a half of trying to convey to Gemini precisely how I wanted the original McFarlane Batman and Superman figures to be altered. If the renders I am presenting here is anything close to what is actually presented, one might conclude that McFarlane Toys may indeed be using AI to create designs just the same way I did. 

On a recent podcast, Todd McFarlane himself advocated for AI as an efficient tool in creating the art necessary for design.  If the McFarlane Toys official photography of Batman and Superman from the Warpland episode look anything like what I came up with in a painstaking hour and a half of articulating my thoughts through text to Gemini, does this indeed make me qualified to be a toy designer for McFarlane Toys? 

The “real” designs for the rest of wave six should be coming soon. Wish me luck on my potential new career as a professional AI toy designer at McFarlane Toys. Vegas here I come.