darkSpyro

Or do they make them prior to their release date?

I'd say most of the unreleased characters have already been made. I'm sure there aren't as many Ninjinas are there are Crushers, but they can't realistically make hundreds of thousands of characters in just a couple weeks.

I would say that some are already made. They may make more as needed if a certain figure sells out or whatever. I'm willing to bet that they can make a lot in a short amount of time however. With the machines and how everything is built to get the most out of everything, I say they can turn a lot of figures in a days time.

They probably already have a reserve of them sitting in a warehouse somewhere. (at least a whole large grouping of all the remaining characters anyways)

After that, they simply gather the figures and have people (or a machine) box them up and send them out. For things like variants though, I imagine those to be made more closer to the "boxing" date..

Gosh, it'd be really nice to see the factory that makes those Skylanders on "How It's Made" or something.

With how pristine these figures show up I would say they probably have them "Made" but I would assume they're not mass produced until closer to their release date.

I say this with a couple years working in different warehouses. No matter how nice, clean, and pristine you keep it things will always have dust in weird places, boxes will start to settle, and over all they just don't look as "New"

This is just my opinion but I'd say up until a few weeks before their releases they only have a handful made.

Apparently, they go through a LOT of junk figures before pulling it right.

Every production line has defective figures.
All figures also have to pass a Quality-Assurance Process...which apparently does not involve checking paint jobs

However with the sever lack of just bad chips in the figures I imagine they all get tested as a they come and they probably do a stock-sample from every "batch" if the stock-sample is bad the whole batch more than likely get run over some magnets and chunked.