1. Other commentators on various collecting sites have posited that, given the large licensing fees and current market conditions, it's no longer feasible (cost-effective) for Hasbro to continue with the Star Wars brand. What's your take?
--Chris

You can make it work, the big question is "how." My hope is it sticks with Hasbro and it gets new direction. (I am available for consulting.) In a perfect world you'd get lines with multiple tracks, but having multiple scales each with a "classic" and "new" assortments might be difficult to juggle. I don't believe it's impossible to get right - you just have to realize that someone is going to be angry with how things turn out, no matter the outcome.

Today's Hasbro has a lot of people to please and it's impossible for anybody to make everybody happy. But they're trying. Disney wants its partners to push its new content. (I can't imagine Hasbro was super excited to make The Acolyte Retro Kenner figures instead of, well, anything else.) The product helps push the content, the content should help push the product - but with over a dozen movies and hundreds of episodes of TV, plus books and comics and games, Hasbro doesn't have the bandwidth to make one new character from each thing per year, necessarily. I'd love some new Solo alien figures. We're not getting any.

If a new licensor got Star Wars - and I want to reiterate, based on history, I assume Hasbro will want to keep it - my hunch is we'll get some sort of Greatest Hits line (which will please neither hardcores nor newbies) alongside some sort of line focusing on the new stuff. Just look around at what McFarlane and Spin Master are doing with DC and Batman, or Mattel with Jurassic World, and you'll get a pretty good idea of what can happen at a company when a license transitions. You might get some new stuff, you'll get some classic sub-lines (Jurassic World Legacy, Batman 1966) but the bulk of the line is a grab bag focusing heavily on the newer stuff. Depending on your preferences, Mattel's Jurassic World line in the past few years has surpassed what Kenner did over 15 years - but there are far fewer characters and creatures to have to replicate to make fans happy.

I've been a proponent for Hasbro to reconsider price points and maybe even trying to make some characters work for both kids and collectors. Not all figures in all lines need to be super-articulated - R2-D2 does not need to be a $17 3 3/4-inch action figure when the same toy in a kid line would be eight bucks. But I wouldn't take a single joint out of G.I. Joe, because being America's movable fighting man is kind of the whole point. Spider-Man needs all the articulation he can get... but Agatha Harkness could do with a little bit less and it wouldn't be missed. Han Solo needs articulation to sit in booths or ships, but Mon Mothma doesn't. There are places to save a few pennies and change up price points, but someone might be upset - maybe Hasbro's c-suite won't like a price point reduction, and that could be remedied by making more 2- or 3-packs. It might not be Hasbro's bean-counter desires to make a product under $17, and to them I say, OK - can you make a $25 2-pack with one super-articulated figure (like a Stormtrooper) and one not-so-super-articulated figure (like R2-D2) in a single box to cut down on packaging costs? Sure, some carded collectors might get angry, but see what happens - do you pick up or lose customers? Fans are going to be angry no matter what you do, and it might be a good idea to put The Vintage Collection on hiatus and do something a little bit more cost-effective.

Not every figure needs to have 24-30 points of articulation to be good. There is a lot of money in not alienating younger fans or fans who may not have the greatest manual dexterity. I just got the very good Dinoking gift set, and compared to most of the modern Transformers it's amazingly simple - but good. So many of these toys are overly complex puzzles, this is something a child could figure out and enjoy. It's a treat to shift between modes, and it's a big robot combiner that's got better-than-G1-and-most-Beast Wars (and Combiner Wars!) articulation. I'd like to see more things like this, so I don't need a road map to figure out how to go from robot dinosaur to robot person.

The current Hasbro really does want to make fans happy. You get your articulation, you get premium accessories much of the time, they're trying to get the best figures that you are willing to open your wallet to get. If anyone put out cheaper figures from streaming shows at lower prices, especially before the show begins, I think sales would improve. (See also, the new movies.) People will buy figures when they hope the movie is going to be good. People will not buy movies after they see a new series and decide they don't like it, or if after every episode there's some question as to its quality. (The Mandalorian did a good job delivering good stories weekly, none of the other shows really did. Dragging out a single story for eight weeks to end on a cliffhanger? You've wasted my time.)

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2. Just saw the yellowed snow trooper photos Hasbro released; brilliant! Embrace the horror, I say! Take all their old yellowed stock, repackage it, and foist it on the consumers while saying with a straight face “No, that’s how they are supposed to look!”
--Derek

"Is this what you want?" is really what we need to ask - I don't think anyone who's all-in at this point does so because they love every last product, and given how much stuff gets marked down, they don't feel good a bout it either. Different things appeal to different audiences, and now we've got 47 years of fans with different tastes. The Mando Transformers, maybe not for you. New production of The Black Series Commander Cody in a new box - when you can get the old stock at Amazon for under $25 right now [yes that is an ad link] - makes no sense to me, but that's OK, I'm not going to buy one.

So what's new? No retro and no Epic Hero were seemingly shown.

For Vintage fans: Sabine Wren's Howler is both cool and kind of obnoxious if you bought a deluxe $25 Sabine (or had your order canceled due to Hasbro not shipping some stores) last year. I don't know enough about Jod Na Nawood to know if I care or not, and a reissue of Dr. Evazan may not excite me as I bought one over a decade ago. However, a lot of people just bought a Cantina and he's really expensive if you missed him in his previous releases. Given how many bases Hasbro has to cover, you get a reissue, a New Show guy, an apology fix/reissue, and a new army builder. If ever there was a drop that illustrates the conundrum with trying to appeal to so many disparate factions, this is it. Disney wants new guys for the new show. Disney wants product to chase last year's new show. Fans and Hasbro want figures to put in the Cantina. Fans want troopers and new original trilogy guys. If you've been all-in for the past 15 (or more) years, you will not be happy when Hasbro puts out a figure that you already own, again, and you may not find a single character from a new show reason to pick up on that. We're collectors. A single "souvenir" figure doesn't connect with a lot of us - if we don't like what we see, and there's no promise of more, why buy that one guy?

The Black Series fans fare (arguably) better with six collector figures from a show aimed at kids... so that may not work out. What I see looks perfectly good, but I'd rather have seen them in a kid format first. It sure looks like Hasbro did a good job with sculpts, articulation, and especially accessories with new characters like Wim, Fern, Neel, and KB - but after a decade of shows that range from "amazing" to "most of my friends didn't bother to finish watching the series despite paying for it," we have got to hope that the show is so good that people jump on it. I don't think that's going to happen again until Disney deprives us of new stories for five or ten years. We need hype, what we have is exhaustion. Exhaustion and new figures being dumped at Ross for 50%-66% off.

If I were Hasbrodisnifilm, I'd probably want to treat the next big media push like The Force Awakens - do a handful of The Black Series guys, make a kid line with simpler, cheaper figures and vehicles, and later, go back and do super-articulated figures where it makes sense (Rey, Kylo Ren) and let things be where it doesn't (Zuvio.) I've got no real need to ask for Epic Hero/Retro The Force Awakens - even Vintage really - because what we got was really good during the first go-round. On the other hand, The Mandalorian toys have been spread over so many waves (and years) that it never quite feels like we got a good shot of anything, sort of like how one reissued Cantina patron seems like Hasbro is taunting us, while a trio or foursome would actually resonate and make a statement that lasts for a while. So if and when The Mandalorian and Grogu comes out, I hope we get a Force Friday and I hope it's 90% new movie (or at least specifically the streaming series) stuff so we can feel like an actual statement was made instead of a slow trickle.

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FIN

We went to see Saturday Night last week - of interest? I think so. Not only was it pretty entertaining for comedy nerds, but the guy who voices Ezra Bridger on Rebels played Al Franken. Analogue announced its Nintendo 64 clone, and await footage and reviews to see how that turned out. They do good stuff, their portable Pocket system is in stock for Game Boy games as of my writing this.

It's been a really eventful week, but not so much for Star Wars toys. Walgreens is set to close 1200 stores, a dramatic shift from a store we wanted to avoid, to a store we hunted toys at regularly, to a store we're avoiding again. The same is happening with CVS, who hasn't done much neat with toy exclusives since the beanie craze in the 1990s. We're also hearing True Value Hardware is selling to the never-not-funny-to-me Do It Best chain. With additional closures of Big Lots, plus a few snack places and restaurants suddenly going belly-up around here, I feel like I'm witnessing a four-year time delay of the pandemic prediction of retail taking a massive hit.

I'm sure every generation feels like this - Kenner kids of the 1970s' stores were mostly defunct by the 1990s - but it really is remarkable to see how bland American retail got, with minimal reasons to go out to hunt toys. The stores all have very few figures - there's no reason to hunt if the same 0-5 characters are at all the stores. There are no exciting vehicles, and no specialized toy stores to browse anymore. Target may well be the best place to peek in during lunch, and you can see everything there is to see in about a minute or two, maybe longer if you aren't familiar with what has been on-shelf for weeks (or months.)

That isn't to say there's no growth - it's just not in places that's good for action figure collectors. If you're a toy company, the butts you want to kiss are Dollar Tree and Five Below because they buy hundreds of thousands or millions of units. Hasbro has some pretty good cheap Transformers there, but you don't see a lot of good stuff for other action brands. Maybe $1.25 mini PVC figures, but nobody will be inspired to collect or have fun with that. The entire business probably needs to reform itself around this new normal, and I don't know where that will leave us. Is it possible to engineer a figure (possibly with less impressive packaging) for $5 or under? And what would it look like?

The industry (not just Hasbro, but not all action figures) seems ever-focused on higher margins, bigger profits, and items that cost more per unit than ever before despite all evidence that the mass market does not want that. If someone can crack the formula for how to bring character collectibles to kids and fans of all ages at a lower price - for example, look what Funko did (like it or hate it, it was successful and made people happy.) If ever there were a time to have somebody out there really change how things are done, it seems like now would be that time.

--Adam Pawlus

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