Earlier this year I spoke with The Nacelle Company’s Brian Volk-Weiss on Zoom about the launch of RoboForce: The Animated Series on Tubi. This week at New York Comic Con 2025, Volk-Weiss led a panel for his popular Netflix documentary program The Toys That Made Us, previewing the upcoming fourth and fifth seasons that will spotlight Pokemon, Polly Pocket, NERF, Ghostbusters and more. He also teased work on the Biker Mice animated series. After the presentation, I asked Volk-Weiss what has surprised him about RoboForce‘s success and audience reaction — and how his experience with the show and its accompanying toyline have been:

“It’s funny. The thing that surprised me the most shouldn’t have surprised me based on my day job, and also my former job. I used to be a manager, and I represented only comedians. I’ve had enough training that this shouldn’t surprise me. But basically what happened… There’s three options when you make a show and it premieres. Option 1: Hit right out of the gate. Boom! That’s probably 15-20% at best. The [second] option is failure… disaster… loss. That’s probably 75%. The weird 10% of the time… and I call this ‘Shawshank Redemption’: It just takes time.

RoboForce came out. We did a lot of press. We did a lot of marketing. We did all this stuff. I would say in the first month, maybe the first two weeks, it was a walk to first. It did good. It was great. We got to first base. I was like, ‘Okay, we have a foundation. We can keep going.’ None of this is guaranteed. If it had bombed, we wouldn’t make more. (And I’m not saying we’re making more.) But that said, it took 10 weeks…

This woman who had two kids posted a picture of her two kids with their backs to the camera watching RoboForce. What she wrote was basically… ‘My two kids were driving me f—ing crazy. They wore me down. I turned on the TV. There was some dumbass show about robots. I watched the damn robots. I’m sitting there making dinner… and I found myself tearing up about these stupid robots.’ The only reason I even know about this is because she tagged Tubi [on Instagram]. Somehow someone at Tubi’s social media forwarded it to the exec who bought the show, and he sent it to me.

It took off after that. And we saw it with the sales. The show came out, and if we were selling 10 figures a day, we went to 10.5 or 11 figures a day. (These are not real numbers.) About 10 weeks later… we were doing 30 or 40 a day. And it’s stayed there, and it keeps going up a little bit. And we know from Tubi, who obviously see the numbers… They plan out how a show is probably gonna do using comps. We’ve exceeded the comps. That’s like at the carnival when you hit the thing and the bell goes off. For a streamer to tell you that you’ve exceeded the comps, that’s like winning the World Series. Very rare and very cool.”

Stay Tuned for more New York Comic Con 2025 coverage on Animation Scoop!