1. I have a question about Mission Fleet. Although it's much maligned by Star Wars collectors it does have a dedicated (if small) fan base that loves it. Hasbro has been pretty quiet about the future of the line. The last wave was announced during the Kenobi show roll-out and most of the toys hit the shelves awhile ago - we're just waiting on the Inquisitor Shuttle & Air Speeder. But the're no-shows leading many to assume the line was quietly canceled. Any word on that? It would seem odd that they would cancel one line in this scale/style when they just announced similar toys for their Indiana Jones line.
--Sean

The short answer - as far as I know it's still going forward with new stuff. But as far as you know it isn't - in a normal world we'd be going through Toy Fair reveals right now, but there was no Toy Fair this February. Hasbro doesn't put a lot of marketing effort in revealing non-collector reveals, so if there's no convention or public event to put the new stuff on display you're not going to hear about it until a pre-order, or it goes up for sale in a store, whatever comes first.

If the line was quietly canceled - and most toy lines are - it has not yet come across my radar and I'm anticipating more releases (and continued replenishment) between now and the time Hasbro considers the line unprofitable. I still hope they replace it with a kid 3 3/4-inch line with figures in the style of Mattel's Jurassic or Spin Master's DC line, but nothing is so sacred that it can't be killed off in the "kid world" of toys.

Take a look at the Hasbro offering at large - kid stuff, not collector stuff. All of their brands are putting out a lot less. There aren't as many games, or Ponies, or FurReal Friends. There's n more Littlest Pet Shop, either. Kid lines tend to be refreshed much less frequently, so an entire year might be $200 or so worth of product - you know, a reasonable number that would be nice to see brought back to fan/collector, too. Hasbro's marketing people have little incentive to promote these things since we tend to just shrug, so they don't - they just quietly show up in stores and sell. There's even an Amazon Exclusive set of figures and it's on sale, but nobody really bothers to check these things, or announce these things. Maybe there's a really good fan page showcasing all this stuff, but most stuff is on YouTube or TikTok so I don't see it.

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2. Was the C1-940 astromech colored like Mickey Mouse really released at the Disney D23 Expo in August, 2023? Aside from a couple youtube videos and an out of stock page on a Euro Disney site, this droid has very little internet presence and no wikipedia entry. Do you have any information?
--David

While I skipped this one, I did see a number of posts on social media with people indicating they ran to D23 and picked up the Mickey Mouse astromech droid. A bunch did indeed make it into collector hands unlike the under-distrubited R2-RNBW. I'm hoping they bring some of these back in better distribution, but admittedly, I don't know what the FOMO factor is in scaring people into collecting them all. (I see it as a bit of a turn-off, as soon as I get wind of "you can't have this" on a toy line I tend to go "OK I quit.")

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FIN

Can we cool it with the ridiculous spoiler secrecy yet?

Having not seen the Avatar sequel yet, I don't know if I'm missing much - I'm sure it's visually amazing and gorgeous to look at, but there are so many movies and TV shows that roll in with unprecedented hype and so few really make a massive impact. It could be age. It could just be we've got too much time to think about whatever it is and the end results will always underwhelm. (Lookin' at you, Obi-Wan Kenobi.) The amount of marketing we're subjected to in the past 25 years for movies, TV, and so forth rarely gives us an end product that delivers on the promise of whatever it was - there's a certain benefit to "under-promise, over-deliver" and we're getting none of that.

This week we got the The Next Generation reunion people wanted from Picard and a new Indiana Jones trailer. We'll have new episodes of The Mandalorian this week with no toys, presumably for confidentiality reasons. And as always, there's a lot of secrecy and obfuscation - but is it ever really worth it? Since The Phantom Menace - heck, even the early marketing for The Fifth Element - we've seen a greater emphasis on hiding things and misdirection, where giving us little and telling us even less about the plot is de rigueur. By and large I would say most of the surprises are not worth the ridiculous levels of secrecy we're getting. Toy companies hide the fact that a figure in a wave is literally a character in the costume from 1980. I can't say any of the secrecy from the first two seasons of Picard was ultimately warranted, or maybe I'm just too jaded to do much other than ultimately shrug. It's a lot of exposition and slow-drip reveals that get us to a point where we look back at what we just saw and go "Oh... I guess that was it." And that's if we even look back at all - I applaud the MCU's masterful misdirection by making you think about a mid-credit teaser, rather than the movie you just watched, at the end of every new adventure. Did you like it? Doesn't matter. Get back on the hype treadmill.

Granted, sometimes the surprises pay off. The reveal of Grogu is precisely the kind of thing you should make a secret, because a) it was the climax of the episodes, and b) there is zero chance fans wouldn't dump on it for being corny ahead of time. The same would probably be true of Rey's reveal as the new hero of the sequel trilogy. We'd be dealing with months of hand-wringing, rather than just seeing it and going "Oh, yeah, she was great. Let's see her next time." I'm not saying to tell us everything, but with the decompressed storytelling of some things - new Star Trek in particular - we're being to asked to watch an episodes of catch-up/exposition, and sometimes eight episodes of running around in circles before something of a flat finale. Andor escaped this gravity well after three truly dull episodes, but again, maybe I'm just wildly impatient. I'm super glad they basically reset the show every few episodes so if you didn't like the current story, it ends, and you get to go on a different adventure. It's also what I loved about TV in the 1990s - you can get something new. You're not stuck watching the same movie for 10 weeks.

I'm hoping we see Disney, Lucasfilm, Hasbro, and the rest try a little bit harder to get stuff on-shelf for future endeavors. The Mandalorian seems underserved, whereas Obi-Wan Kenobi show non-figure toys felt like overkill in spots, and Andor felt shockingly ignored. I know people want to keep a lid on the secrets, but the toys tend to serve as a quasi-trailer for the project. I see a cool action figure and I get excited. Does it matter if it's big in the movie? Not really - Sarco Plank was a cool figure and Sarco Plank remains a cool figure. The minimalist launches as of late just feel like we've gone from being spoiled to some extent - The Force Awakens was a really good launch - to smaller and less interesting launches, before ultimately dialing it back to our current big nothing. Hopefully toy morale will improve, I do not wish the beatings to continue.

...having said that, hey, Retro ROTJ and Black Series Mara Jade are shipping! So far so good here.

--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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