1. There are some amazing and very expensive 1/18 action figure lines sold on-line at Entertainment Earth and others. Hiya, Joy Toy, Boss Fight Studio are examples of really well done, super articulated figures. Is this high cost, small run of 1/18 figures the future of Star Wars do you think? Do you think we could see Star Wars go the way of the GI Joe fan club with figures in excess of $30 or more (not counting inflation down the road)?
--David

Price increases are here, now - you should expect The Vintage Collection to be $14 or higher from here on out as things cost more to produce and to ship, plus inflation hasn't exactly got here yet. What we're seeing is in anticipation of it, so I would not be shocked to see the same product - which was $10 just a few years ago - for $15 in a couple of years.

I would assume part of the reason kids don't buy these figures is because they're too expensive - $14 for a 3 3/4-inch figure doesn't seem like a good deal when you can get a Corps figure for a couple of bucks, or a LEGO set for $10-$15 with a couple of figures. As it is, Hasbro's are probably too fancy to sell and they could probably do well to take a page from The Retro Collection and either a) make more of those, or b) make 5POA figures (with awesome paint jobs) on Vintage-style cardbacks. Carded collectors won't care. Open collectors... well... if we have no alternatives, we'll buy what we can get.

I don't believe Hasbro will do a $20-$25 plussed-up Vintage assortment and I certainly don't believe they'll let the license go for someone else to make stuff. (They did do two figures with extra gear for about $18 - the Sith Trooper, and the Mando + Child set.) If licensing out the format were an option, we'd have seen Super7, Funko, Bif Bang Pow!, NECA, or someone else making action figures for the American market. Other manufacturers wanting to make product in orbit of Hasbro's license must get creative to get approved. There are ways to get around it - Pop! Vinyl bobble heads aren't action figures, BanDai's model kits aren't action figures, and $60 Samurai figures aren't what Hasbro makes. There may be a creative workaround - like maybe someone could get a $80 3 3/4-inch action figure, because Hasbro won't do that - but I don't think that would be good for the business and honestly, is there anything enough people could agree on to make a $80 figure worthwhile?

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2. Any time there's an "Ask Hasbro" or "Fan First" online event, it seems the only questions they're willing to answer are about sculpts, card art, or other trivial matter. Why don't they answer the questions that really matter, like distribution problems, store availability, street dates, and lack of TVC figures?
--Chris

I've been writing about these toys on the Internet since 1995. And I've had times where I won't take questions about distribution and availability, because what do you even say? It's been like this forever. Hasbro produces what it thinks it can sell so it won't go on clearance. Clearance is death for adult collector lines - as soon as buyers at big box stores see a 44-year-old movie as last year's news, that's it. It's over. We're already there in some senses, I don't see any of the lightsabers for kids showing up in stores near me, or those Battle Bobblers from last year, or a number of other kid-driven items. The collector stuff I see come and go, though.

The era of "I can walk into a store and find the figure I want" is and maybe always was a myth. As a kid in the 1980s, we had to search for new Return of the Jedi figures and heaven help me if I wanted a Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back figure that may have been phased out. You were never guaranteed to find something on the pegs once the line got beyond the first few dozen figures. This was true in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and will be true until the universe crunches on itself. If you can go to a store and find literally every thing you want, you probably aren't into collecting popular stuff. I saw collectors in the 1990s coin the term "toy run" because if you collected toys, you had to go to multiple stores - usually several in a row - to see what's out there and hopefully to luck out and find your quarry.

I work at a store where we can't get enough product. (This is no secret - there's not a lot in stock at any given time, it sells out as soon as people see it's in stock, and this is why we encourage pre-orders.) I do not blame Hasbro for this because I can tell you demand has never been this high - supply has been good, but holy cow, the demand. You've probably heard about Target and trading cards. When people are bored, they get obsessive and frankly we do get kind of nutty. Back in the 1990s, we obsessed over every last detail with the 1995 (through, I'd say, 1999) action figures - 00 vs. .01. Long sabers, short sabers, long trays, short trays, stickers, green, orange, whatever - it got weird. And if we had any chance of actually seeing anything in a store right now, we'd be doing that again.

Thanks to The Mandalorian (and probably everything streaming with a fan toy line), we have more fans than ever before. We also have no solitary line to collect, and the demand for fans who just want a Mando figure isn't met. Or Vader, or Boba, or so on and so forth - this is a good problem to have, but there are also concerns that there may be a tipping point. Heck, I'm concerned. What happens when people can go to the movies, or share a meal, or consensually grope someone they barely just met? Will they still want all the toys, cards, games, and so on? I don't know. I assume yes, for now, but it's not like the 3 3/4-inch business in 2021 is anything like it was in 1995.

We're also in a quasi-post-home-media period. Record/vinyl fans, and retro game fans both still love physical media, but people not going to movies or shows allow them to stream or buy digital music and video. Or pirate it. Which leaves a lot more money to buy junk, plus prices for junk new and old on eBay has gone up a lot lately. I remember around 2011 or 2012, you could buy massive collections of 30th Anniversary or The Saga Collection figures at $3-$4 a whack. That ended. Deals are in short supply, and if you go to the toy aisles, they're empty. There are also very few toy stores left.

There are solutions that may work, but remember that production runs can be set months (sometimes close to a year) before you first see a figure preview. Subsequent runs in good times can take months before they can get produced and loaded on the boats from Vietnam and China - and then it's 6 more weeks to get here. Now we've got overwhelming production demand, shipping container shortages, overpacked ports, COVID outbreaks overseas, and too-busy customs agents. Will fans still want stuff when it gets made in 6 months? Will the weird, uneven economy where some people have gobs of cash to blow on toys while others are concerned about rent last forever? I have no idea. But what I see is a lowercase-c conservative industry hedging their bets and - as you can usually see - Hasbro is pretty good about making more of popular things (sometimes only online) to meet demand. It may not be "in stock" - you may have to pre-order it - but a lot of stuff keeps getting made due to demand.

3. 2 Part Question:

1. Do you think Star Wars will always have a presence at retail (Walmart/Target) or could you see it shift to an "online-only" product in the future, based on feedback from consumers as how difficult it is to locate products?

2. The recent prices of VOTC (#1-115) and even the newer waves, in some cases, are astronomical. Ashoka going for $500+ seems insane to me. Are we seeing these price increases because of a new group of people entering the market of "Vintage style" collecting or were the runs on these figures so low back then, yet we are only figuring it out now?
--Jeremiah

A lot of people returned to the hobby in the last year. What hobby? All of them. Video games, records, toys, if there's something that made people safe and happy as children, they're going back to it now. There's not much you can do about the fact that older figures from 2010-2012 are now worth a bunch of money - that's kind of typical. If all goes well, Hasbro made enough to satisfy contemporary demand and enough to not rot on pegs. Believe it or not, the Ahsoka/Lumat/Obi-Wan/Nien Nunb/etc. wave was sold on Amazon below cost while Hasbro still had stock, for goodness knows what reason.

Some people really like Ahsoka. Ahsoka was always in short supply, and there's a lot of very expensive figures these days. People are paying $50 for a run-of-the-mill Obi-Wan Kenobi from season 1 of The Clone Wars - which you couldn't give away for $5 a few year ago. I blame the pandemic for making the problem and the secondary market swell quickly, a bunch of people want stuff, all at once, and supply hasn't increased. We're probably 10-15 years ahead of where we should be on a lot of secondary market prices, and it's only worse when you consider kids that watched The Clone Wars in 2008 are now 13 years older. Typically stuff really starts to shoot up around 15 years later, thanks to that generation of kids, tweens, and teens finishing college and now having the money to buy the things they wanted as kids. And bid against one another. (Invest in Miraculous dolls, people.)

Hasbro is aware of the high prices, hence the reissues with revised face deco. They know you want it. They know some of you have it, but want to make it different so your originals aren't totally worthless. (Also how crazy is it we're getting figures from 2010 in 2021? You would never have imagined figures from 1978 returning to shelves in 1989.)

There is no reason to assume Target and Walmart will completely get rid of Star Wars, but it's possible. (And all toy lines generally do have dead periods.) Target has dumped toy lines over the years because manufacturers couldn't fill demand - Playmates' The Simpsons had some issues in the (I think) second and/or third years when stores just took down the pegs because they were always empty, and Target doesn't make money from permanently empty pegs. Walmart phased out most of Star Wars in late 2003, skipping a lot of pretty good stuff. But now they order a lot more exclusive product, with mainline product tending to be hard to find. I'm surprised we don't see remix waves or repaint waves.

A lot of big box merchandising plans are set by planogram and computer too, so it's also possible some stores might even be happy with how things are going. If Walmart and Target sold through their entire year's supply of 3 3/4-inch figures by June, that's a good thing for them. Assuming Hasbro restocks the shelves with something or other. And if they can't, surely Lanard or Mattel or someone else can give them something to put on the pegs... or they can consolidate the toy aisle some more and put up some Rubbermaid totes to fill space. The worst possible thing is unsold, stale product sitting for months, or no product at all. Everything selling out immediately is what manufacturers and retailers want.

This is the new world - pre-order, or miss out. It sucks. It won't attract kids or casuals, especially when you can't go buy Mando at a store any day of the week. But it's good business, and as long as there's no debris rotting on pegs the hobby and indeed the line is potentially doing just fine.

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FIN

Be sure you send in your questions for next time. The mailbag is out of on-topic questions, so if you got some, send some in.

Droids is still expected - eventually - on Disney+, while The Bad Batch continues to be a pretty good first season of Star Wars animation. I assume and hope there are plans for a few years, mostly because seasons one and two of The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Resistance were mostly about finding their legs. I've enjoyed The Bad Batch, which has been a pretty decent time of playing the hits with cameos from across the galaxy and TV history. (Rhea Perlman! Who'd have guessed?) Sadly there's no kid line on-shelf with the show, but that's more or less in line with the entertainment industry lately. The Rise of Skywalker had a pretty meager launch, and that's typically how most movies go - a handful of toys at launch, or none, with more later if fans and business demand it. I'd love to see a 3 3/4-inch line - particularly 2008-style animated figures - but I'm not hopeful that such a thing is in the cards, even if the business would be amazing.

If ever there would be a great time for Mini-Rigs, it would be now - The Bad Batch is an action figure concept dream (just like The Mandalorian) with cool armored heroes and lots of opportunities for play vehicles. A 3 3/4-inch line with tiny vehicles would probably do particularly well, given each character has special powers that would probably translate well to toys. Throwing rocks, activating equipment, shoveling well, what kid wouldn't love to have some sort of neat rocket-launching blasters? Well, here's hoping it can happen next year, now that these guys are no longer a secret.

Is something coming up this week? Yes. In theory another fairly thin issue of ASWN, because retro is always in fashion. You can also assume there may be some Star Wars things to talk about being announced and we'll be collecting that information, whatever it is. And Cappy Space has new figures up, you should check those out.

--Adam Pawlus

Got questions? Email me with Q&A in the subject line now! I'll answer your questions as soon as time (or facts) permit.

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