Popular characters as action figures make plenty of sense. Obscure action figures are often works of art, have meaning to someone, or are awesome in their very obscurity. Then there are mass-produced action figures that serve only to expand a series and sell to collectors who are obsessed with a complete set, depicting characters that no one cares about or are impossible to play with. For example, the action figure of Dennis Nedry. Who?
Nedry is the shlubby guy who agrees to steal some embryos from Jurassic Park and sell them to Biosyn, only to wind up getting killed by a seemingly harmless Dilophosaurus. He's played by Wayne Knight, aka Newman from Seinfeld. Of all the characters from the first Jurassic Park movie, he seems like the worst candidate for an action figure — and apparently, the makers of these figures agreed with that, because they chose to make the toys look nothing like Wayne Knight or Dennis Nedry. The Nedry figures are well-built, square jawed and rugged-looking, with a nice shoulder holster and (in one case) cool sunglasses. It's like they're advertising the fact that they had no reason to make an action figure of this guy.
Read about nine more of these at io9. Link