1. I was inspired by your Q&A last week to ask, with the demise of Kay-B-Toys/Toys R US (as we knew it) and other toy stores and only remaining Target & Walmart, will the "thrill of the hunt" ever come back? I have to admit I am very guilty of ordering a new wave of Vintage on EE and just sitting back to wait for them to come...but man, do I miss walking into a toy store/Walmart/Target and seeing a whole fresh new wave sitting there. It does still happen BUT the moments are few & far between.
--Jeremiah

What we have now is a COVID-19 market that's been coasting with an addiction to adult fan money an pre-orders on weird schedules, few surprises, lots of repetition, and production runs that are too high for the market's needs. Combined with (as you point out) a lack of shelf space for all of this stuff, Hasbro is basically competing against itself for the high-dollar part of the low-end market. Since a lot of stuff isn't hitting store shelves - so ordering cases for these collector figures is the best thing to do. It's not merely convenient - it's the only way to get most things.

If Hasbro can find a way to engage collectors AND kids AND fans on the low end - see Hot Wheels, Funko - I think they can win. (This is not an easy thing to do, most toy lines don't last for more than a couple of years.) Given the right engagement I bet The Retro Collection or some new $10 format could make it happen. I know you're scoffing, but think about it - would you re-buy figures on The Power of the Force cardbacks with coins? That's roughly 80 modern figures to reissue. How about packaging with variant photos or a variant movie logo? You might buy someone again. How about going after casual fans? Nobody has easily found a Kenner-style Boba Fett, Stormtrooper, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke, R2-D2, and so on in a store in years - I never saw the 2020 Walmart or 2019 Target figure waves in a store. There's a casual audience of parents (and grandparents!) who might pick up their childhood toys if they bothered to put them in actual stores at an impulse price. The average consumer is not aware of ShopDisney - but if Target had an endcap of 1970s or 1980s toys from multiple brands, that's cool. And they've done it for girl's toys recently, too.

If you're a toy company and want fans to hunt, you need new stuff on-shelf and engage customers fans every 1-2 months. (We don't have that now, but switching from 8 figures per wave to 4 might improve frequency and engagement.) If any you company wants people to go through pegs and buy something on a whim, you need constant newness at a price people will pay. I personally don't think you can get people excited about hunting/buying/hoarding at high price points for much longer. Low prices can make new collectors, a $5 or a $10 toy (or a $1.25 toy) can make a convert out of almost anybody. The current market conditions will not allow for toy hunting in Hasbro Star Wars to bring people to stores. (Heck, maybe that era is over, but you'd have to try something new to find out.)

If you look at other toy lines, there are still some thrills-of-the-hunting to be had on lower-priced items. Mattel seems to be getting it right with WWE and Hot Wheels and Matchbox. Masters of the Universe exclusives seem to sell and are hard to find. Treasure Hunt Hot Wheels cars have fancier paint, and draw in speculators and seekers of a quick buck - and while we don't love that kind of fan, their money spends, and it results in more toys being made. (If Credit/Carbonized figures were a chase figure, I think that could work. I'd buy if I saw 'em. I wouldn't cry if I miss 'em.)

McFarlane Toys has some Super Powers figures only in assortments, so you can't pre-order just the one figure online - Hasbro could do the same, if "Treasure Hunt" is not their preference. Hasbro could do "chase" prototypes in The Retro Collection or "chase" The Power of the Force packaging or variant photos on The Vintage Collection. Will they do it? I doubt it, but it's the kind of thing you eventually need to do to keep things lively for collector brands. Collecting Star Wars is like a relationship where the spark may be going out. How are you going to spice it up? The answer is, obviously, sell people Amanaman.

The one consistent thing I've noticed with Hasbro products is that lower-priced items tend to go up in price, and higher-priced items tend to decrease in price. This isn't 100% - but if you started buying The Black Series today you can get dozens if not hundreds of figures below retail price.

It's also worth noting that today's under-30s have no concept of Star Wars as a scarce thing. Kenner missed 1977, so people had massive demand for toys. Xennial kids had virtually no action figures on-shelf for much of the VHS era of 1986-1994. But since 1995, there is a store near you selling Star Wars toys. Maybe it just needs a hard break and a harder reboot to fit the needs of a market that has changed a lot over the last four (almost five!) decades.

So having said all that - a lot of what Hasbro is doing is a good start. Epic Hero Series got out some cheap figures and vehicles. The Retro Collection's themed wave boxed sets are a good idea, but arguably, the wrong TV shows/movies for that product's audience. The Black Series did a good job trying shipping Vader and Mando to stores in huge numbers assuring demand will be met - and hopefully create demand for more purchases. I am impressed by the quality of The Vintage Collection but the lack of real newness just hurts. $17 or a figure we already have, and then we don't get new ones because the ones we already own, that they remade, didn't sell? That's hard to put a smile on.

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2. So how many characters in The Retro Collection are presumed dead?
--Filler Due to Lack of Questions

Would you believe probably more than half? Disney really hates letting anyone get out of these movies alive.

I've been going through Kenner and The Retro Collection figure stuff to make some comparisons about what some lines have that other lines don't - it won't surprise you that Retro is lacking in aliens and droids. It won't surprise you that Kenner did a rotten job with women in its line, but also, so did Lucasfilm of the 1970s and 1980s. And 1990s. And arguably most of the 2000s before the cartoons.

One thing that did surprise me, though, is how many of the characters are dead. I don't know if this has a big impact in kid purchases, or collecting the line in general, but part of what made toys fun is you could imagine your own adventures - or at least, I would. Obi-Wan wasn't off doing a lot. But Walrus Man and Hammerhead bought Luke's old landspeeder, because someone had to. Going over the roster of characters in the modern Kenner line, most of them are presumed dead. Obviously we don't know for sure what Publishing has done/is going to do with everybody, but it's a safe bet most of Jabba's employees are gone. Disney killed off most of the non-Wookiee, non-droid, non-Lando stars of the original trilogy, and George Lucas did the same to the cast of the prequel trilogy - Jar Jar lives, of course. Only two retro figure characters from The Acolyte made it to the end, we saw Admiral Ackbar blown out into space, and with the death of Carl Weathers (and probably Moff Gideon but for all I know it was a clone) there are a lot of characters we'll likely never see again. I have no problem retiring characters, but it seems short-sighted and a poor investment to be so gosh darn eager to slaughter someone when you could let kids imagine them having further adventures, making friends, and whatnot.

It's my feeling that when you have a franchise with popular characters, the best thing you could ever do is to always leave the audience imagining more. I assume the bad guys will frequently be defeated - often killed - and we've got a whole new adventure starting Monday night with Skeleton Crew. You can't keep a great bad guy down, as we learned with Darth Maul and Boba Fett. It's fun. It's good for business. And with any luck, maybe a familiar face will show up to menace Gigolo Joe and the kids from the space suburbs on Disney+ Monday night.

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FIN

The wildest "news" of the week last week was that Elon Musk wants to buy Hasbro to have the Dungeons & Dragons IP for a video game. Given Hasbro's market cap and the fact you can just, you know, ask Hasbro to license it, it seems a bit silly but we're in an era where silly happens on a regular basis. Hasbro's stock shot up a few points Friday morning after the news got out, but not enough that it seems to have made a giant difference. Obviously there's no way to know if it would impact the toy business - which Hasbro's current CEO seems less interested than its gaming business. The thing I want to know is if there's anyone who works there or wants to buy Hasbro that thinks it might be a good idea to start leaning more on making toys for actual children, as an action figure line with 9 figures is probably never going to appeal to anybody and there's no real girls or doll business to speak of. But that's not what I meant to write about.

The question of tariffs keeps coming up in toy world (and uh, everywhere) and the answer is a pretty flat "nobody knows yet." I brought it up briefly a few weeks ago - the short version is "20% would be bad but not destroy the industry (but expect changes), 60% would pretty much destroy any collector line." Wiser people than I have described any business process as having three aspects, and you can have two of them: good, fast, and cheap. (Some of these are in the eye of the beholder.) For what you get, Hasbro is pretty good at "good" and "cheap." ($17 is a lot of money for a The Vintage Collection figure, but $17 is also $9.99 in 2004 money adjusted for inflation - Vintage has been pretty flat.)

If there's a big tariff on Chinese goods, Hasbro could move the factory somewhere where it's lower. (Barring huge leaps in automation, this won't be America.) If more toys went to Vietnam or India, you could probably have some good stuff - but it would take time to train the people, and to move the tooling, and there would be new setup expenses. But if it did get hit with a 60% tariff, that could mean $26.99 action figures, which I think would drive a lot of people to quit unless each and every figure was new and exciting. (And they haven't ever been - since wave 1 The Vintage Collection was mostly updates of existing figures, with a few new guys sprinkled in.)

You could cut parts to keep pricing the same - but I don't think fans would go for it unless the pricing went down. I personally would not be the slightest bit upset if a figure with "salt shaker legs" (any figure with a hard plastic robe preventing leg articulation) had a reduction in joints below the waist. It might not be a bad idea to do a few waves of figures with fewer parts and see if that can result in a cheaper product.

I don't know about speed - I've worked with factories making goods who are frequently willing to give discounts if your ETA is "no rush." That's fine for pins or stickers, but probably less good if you're doing a licensed action figure line that needs to be on-shelf to tie in to a movie. Having said that, Hasbro and Disney have all but abandoned on-shelf toys for recent projects - maybe there's something there. But at best, it would be a slight savings as fan patience is not infinite - unless they stop sharing new products until they're about ready to ship. And honestly, there's probably a lot more excitement to "here's a figure that you can own in 3 months" over "here's a toy that isn't coming out until November 2025." (This is not an exaggeration of what is happening.)

So right now, hope that toys do not get the added fees, and hopefully all will be well. A 60% upcharge on a $25 figure made in China will end that product's viability. A 10% upcharge might turn a few fans off, but may not destroy the toy world as we know it. A 20% upcharge on a $8 or a $12 toy made in Vietnam is almost inconsequential - it's not good, but a $2 increase isn't the same as a $15 increase on a product. I assume this means new vehicles are going to be a risky pursuit until whatever happens, happens.

Since questions are short this time of year (this isn't new - I used to take off from Thanksgiving to New Year's) I've been jotting down notes and tallying numbers about - you guessed it - The Retro Collection. It and Epic Hero Series are the only lines I can feel that I can really get my arms around due to their not being filled with repeats and figures that probably only exist because you could reuse the tooling. (In no world were fans asking for Battlefront Lando. Not that I mind having him, it was a fun choice.) It's really interesting to compare what Kenner did in 1978-1985 and what Hasbro did from 2019-2024 (or later.) For example, Kenner made a grand total of 3 women in its run, not including variant outfits. Hasbro's line has 20 women figures - 15 of which are different characters. It helps that Disney added a few more characters.  Anyway, send in some questions if you got 'em.

--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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