Toy Vault

Toy Vault, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is a designer and manufacturer of plush toys, plush apparel, board games and other novelty items.
Perhaps best known for their Monty Python toys, Toy Vault also holds licenses for such properties as Godzilla, "The Princess Bride", Jim Henson's "Labyrinth", KISS, "Trigun" and others.
In January 2013, Toy Vault announced that they had acquired the table-top game, plush, and novelty item license to the cult favorite television show "Firefly", and later announced the title of the first game under this license, "Firefly: Out to the Black".
"Lord of the Rings".
Three months after its inception in 1998, Toy Vault acquired a license from Tolkien Enterprises to produce plastic figures based on the "Lord of the Rings". This was the first series of action figures ever produced based purely on a literary property.1
Notes.
1 Rob Rooney "The Road Less Traveled" 1999 available at http://actionfigures.about.com/library/weekly/aa011899.htm.