1. Was it presumptuous of them to think a mere 3000 units would suffice [for the D23 Star Tours Starspeeder 3000 set], considering the cross-appeal of Star Wars and Disney Parks fans? Or calculated to ensure ravenous demand?

Haslab ships run around 10K units, so a ship like the Starspeeder seems like it would have been an easy sell-through at double its initial run, probably triple...

And the addition of a loose pilot droid so you don't have to open the carded one is exactly how Haslabs should be...though do you think it opens the door for another run without that carded pilot to ensure the first run remains 'collectable'?

Plus, they have the tooling for the ship, there is plenty of demand, they could run off some stripped of the video functionality to sell in the parks at a cheaper price (or even do the modern livery repaint instead if they really want to preserve the limited nature of the first run, but omitting the carded pilot seems like it would fulfill that)...
--Chris

It's complicated. But they probably made a good move, nobody wants their high-end collectibles to wind up at Ross.

For a convention exclusive of any kind, you want that item to sell out pretty much immediately - and this did. Most factories for toys have had minimums of around 3000 pieces, although depending on price point it might go up or down. Some factories will produce fewer units if you're willing to pay a higher price per piece (or, you know, give 'em away or destroy them.) For a non-Disney company that is not Hasbro, 3000 is often a pretty reasonable run size for a collectible item because they don't have literally thousands of employees to feed. Disney is a much bigger beast, but their bottom line will not be impacted by this one product. If anything, this sort of piece is a marketing beat to get people interested in D23, which, I am guessing for Star Wars old-school fans, it really hasn't. People want the item, talk about the item, talk about the con, and now interest has increased in D23 next time around.

Hasbro generally sells more than 10,000 of a thing. I don't think that's a big secret - back in the 1990s it was semi-well-known Kenner didn't make below 30,000 of almost anything. There were exceptions like a 12-inch Stormtrooper Luke and Han set with 20,000 printed right on the box, but that was one of the exceptions to the rule.

When you have a $300 item like the Starspeeder, a lot of fans (myself included) may have a knee-jerk reaction of "I'll wait for a sale." And good for Disney, it sold through at full price in no time.  Looking at the competition sometimes HasLab ships are slow to sell, and if Disney made 6000 Starspeeders and the market was really 4000, the amount of unsold inventory could really hurt the for this kind of item. And that's something Hasbro has learned in recent years too - if you make more than the market wants, unsold inventory trains everybody (including those who purchased it) to wait for a sale the next time. Anyone who wants Disney-era characters of The Black Series will get a bargain on eBay today.

I have heard fans whispering about a second Starspeeder run without the screen, but I don't know where this comes from. The electronics aren't that expensive in 2024, and $300 isn't that pricey for what this is relative to what Hasbro would sell you. (Disney also doesn't owe anyone licensing fees, which helps.) It remains to be seen what they'll actually do but seeing as how we never got another run of a low-risk item like R2-RNBW, I can't imagine anyone at Disney is necessarily looking to bring back a big, risky item unless the secondary market prices result in some massive swell of demand. Since it's selling for $900-$1000 as I write this, it's not impossible - but you guys need to make a stink and write letters to Disney if you want to make a difference. I don't think anyone at Disney reads my stuff. But if they do, opening it up for pre-orders and cutting it to backorders might not be a bad idea - there's money on the table.

A brief tangent - nobody is really sure of the precise size of the "one of everything club" membership. I think a lot of fans have bled off due to repetitive releases (i.e., the same R2-D2 on multiple cardbacks) or items that may just not float your boat (prototype deco, Carbonized deco, etc.) Some people just don't have room for everything and after nearly five decades, no longer want to store all of this stuff. Hasbro's own line would probably guarantee its longevity by underserving the market for a year or two, because if you make a new toy and secondary market prices drop after a "collectible" item leaves stores, that does not bode well for its future.

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2. Do you have any backstory you can share on the Star Wars Imaginext line? I was eyeing the large Vader Bot (for me, my kids have, sadly, aged out of pre-school lines). The die-cast figure (or "character key") seems insane for a pre-school toy. Presumably a weird license carve out? Is Imaginext going to run alongside a Hasbro line?
--Steve

I do not! I missed those sales meetings - but historically, when you see weird material choices or weird price points, that's a licensing issue. Hasbro as certain price points so the appearance of something over $80 usually means they're trying to not interfere in whatever Hasbro is doing, or perhaps even Jazwares. It's so off-the-mark for the generally by-the-book Imaginext line that it has to be something specially done to get around existing licensing deals.

Given the Imaginext toys seem to be Jumbo Figures (more like what Jakks used to do) I assume the metal figures and lack of vehicles - with few impulse-price items - that this is some sort of trial balloon done within the confines of the available licensing parameters. Maybe they can make a case to sell X-Wings or N-1 Starfighters when Hasbro's license is up for renegotiation, by carving out a new slice for this kind of product since Hasbro hasn't been doing much with it. If there are any plans for non-metal 3-inch figures, I am unaware of them. But there is a $20 Death Star Tower with Darth Vader, which is impressive because Kenner and Hasbro never did give us the boxy turret as an action figure-sized toy. It's also unimpressive... and you'll realize why when you pick one up. There's just not much meat in that gym mat.

If you want a Vader Mech toy, it's important to remember LEGO has cheaper ones at fair-for-kids prices. I wouldn't be stunned to see this kind of thing in other toy formats either some day, as we've had precedent with Marvel stuff making mechs in various toy lines.

I was incredibly excited to see Star Wars Imaginext until they were really expensive playsets with only one figure in the box - and no other figures. But I'm not buying for preschoolers either. They look like perfectly nice toys, but also, you could just enjoy a Fisher-Price Imaginext Space Station Toy Set as they're all over eBay and, sometimes, Goodwill.

These products seem symptomatic of the kind of weird, rapid inflation and overdesign that I feel is hurting a lot of the toy business. Nobody's impulse-buying $80 and $150 toys, and that may not matter to Mattel's bottom line but it's the kind of thing that makes me stop buying a toy line. Does it need to have electronics? Does it need to be quite that large? Probably not. Hasbro used to design toys around specific price points, which is why you'd get a $25 figure 5-pack, or a $10 deluxe Transformers toy that was designed with the idea of "make the best toy you can for $10." Now companies are going after fan dollars, and it certainly seems as if they view us as a bottomless well of money as opposed to kids, who generally have no money.

I would love to live in a world where "collector", "kid," and "fan" brands were all consolidated down to one line that tries to do its best at the price point. Spin Master makes excellent $8-$10 3 3/4-inch figures, LEGO (non-adult) stuff is generally good enough to sell to all ages of potential customers too. Imaginext Star Wars stuff is almost as expensive as a game console, and Hasbro doesn't seem to care that you can buy a decent video game for less than the prices of its action figures. You can't offer fans photo-real mega-articulated collector figures at a price point that will appeal to the normies, especially when the character selection is alienating long-term fans. If fans don't want an $18 Mando, and collectors don't want another $18 Mando, why are we getting more of them when the $8-$10 figure seems to be selling quite nicely?

With Imaginext, there's a lot to pick up - right now the cheapest thing I've seen is at Walmart. It's a $20 Death Star tower with a metal Darth Vader figure. When I heard about it I thought about getting it, but once I got my hand on it I figured I'd just go home and play with my space station some more. Maybe I'll get it on sale some day.

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FIN

It's Labor Day, and that can only mean one thing - you're likely not reading this when it goes live. It's been a slow news week, although Sigourney Weaver is seemingly up for a role in The Mandalorian & Grogu, currently slated as the big movie for Memorial Day 2026. That means it should hopefully be shooting soon, and if we're going to get action figures, Hasbro is going to need to start working on them in the next couple of months. I'm really hoping it doesn't end up like 2019's "Triple Force Friday" where we got a couple of new figures most likely based on completed concept art, but very little new (or exciting) at launch. Don't get me wrong, Mando's great, Grogu's fun, but without new (to toys) characters, new aliens, and new costumes, the action figure part of this hobby gets real boring real fast. Taking a big step back and looking at 2024 as a whole, there were entire waves of The Vintage Collection that were allegedly new, but I already owned figures of every character (in that costume) in the box. That's not great for a line aimed at long-term collectors, so hopefully the new movie will start out the gate with either new movie stuff or a massive suite of the unmade bounty hunters, droids, sidekicks, and other occupants of the first three seasons of the show. You don't have to wait for concept art if you make new stuff based on existing stories, after all.

The next new Star Wars thing to watch will be Skeleton Crew later this year, but there's no firm launch date and as far as I know, no plans for a big toy line drop. Or a big toy line. Or any drops of any kind - I assume we might be looking at another weekly series of one- or two-figure reveal drips, but I don't know. It ties into my concerns about the new movie, in that we've gone through about five years of releases without firm in-stone release dates which means marketing and merchandising partners are left scrambling. You don't need to book theaters for Disney+, so as a result the hobby and business is a lot more chaotic with last-minute reveals and generally unwarranted concerns over spoilers. ("This background alien is in a show" is not a spoiler. "This guy dies" is a spoiler.)

We're expecting a big chunk of new Hasbro Star Wars reveals at its online PulseCon event, and that's a week from Friday - so it's sneaking up on us. If the past year is any indication I don't assume we're going to get new Cantina aliens or Jabba's Palace goons, but hopefully we'll see one or two never-before-made-as-a-figure toys. This week, fans of 80s pop culture are probably going to go see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and boy howdy do I hope it turns out to be good. If the last few years have told us anything it's that you generally can't go wrong appealing to fans of Spooky Season or nostalgia, so I'm hoping this is, at least, pretty good. Or I can just watch the old Blu-Ray again.

--Adam Pawlus

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