1. I just noticed Factory Entertainment is doing a run of 3.75” Battled Star Galactica figures and a ship. For me, they hit the sweet spot of just enough joints for pose-ability but a good retro feel. And, the ship is well sized and detailed for the money. It seems like Hasbro is kind of caught in their needs to run things at a manufacturing scale that makes sense for them. But, others are not so limited. Why can’t a company like Hasbro (or Disney) enlist them to bang out some early Star Wars stuff?
--Dan

I bet Factory Entertainment would love to. I've known those guys for a while and I really need to catch up with Jordan and Jim, it's been a while. (Jim read my old newsletter! It was a huge treat to find that out about... gosh, it must have been about 20 years ago?) The people there love this stuff and really want to do amazing stuff. Their tin lunch boxes, their figures, and especially their prop replicas are best-in-class. And they do plush, and key chains, and other great stuff. Go buy Factory Entertainment stuff, is what I'm saying.

Everybody has different needs, and answers to different people. And of course, has different contracts, with different guarantees, and different royalties. I don't doubt that there is a way for someone else to make something compatible with Hasbro's line without necessarily infringing on their license, but that's sort of the key thing. Hasbro's license encompasses action figures, which means they don't want to share. A number of companies have wanted to sub-contract out Mego-format figures, or Retro Kenner when they were hesitant to play in that space, but Hasbro doesn't want to. Heck, Funko's figures had bobble heads and stands (unlike other Pop! Vinyl licenses that aren't Marvel) so as to not infringe, and Hasbro has very rarely ever wanted to share. There were exceptions with Gentle Giant (which, I assume, tied in to a high price point that wouldn't compete with Hasbro) with their 12-inch line, and I assume there were a lot of needles to thread to make a specialized item like that happen.

Hasbro is playing a long game with us. There are some items they tease and wink at for years - we haven't had any sort of "playset" for a Death Star since the 1990s. They have never brought a new version of that first Imperial Dignitary back. And I have to guess those things are related and coming, but I digress. Hasbro works on Hasbro time scales, given their slow roll on The Retro Collection Kenner-style figures. Since the modern line kicked off in 1995, we had 4 guys in 1995, Rocket Firing Boba Fett in 2010 fifteen years later, and then nine years later we got a tiny wave in 2019. When it comes to big old trilogy ships, we got the Millennium Falcon in 2008, then the Sail Barge in 2019, and honestly not much else of considerable size that wasn't a remake of a 1980s or 1990s mold. Hasbro knows we want this stuff, but be it economics, or Disney's marketing interests, or some other reason, they just haven't done it yet. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. They're capable, there are prototypes of all kinds of things the public will never see, but it's not for lack of creativity. There's a roadblock somewhere. (And sometimes it's a person.)

It would be fascinating to see another company find a way to play with Hasbro's figures, be it resin dioramas or kits or something else entirely. Heck, I tried to convince someone I worked with to convince Lucasfilm to grant a "toy box" license, so you could sell a big hollow ship with shelves in it to store your other figures and toys. That didn't work out, but wouldn't a big Sandcrawler storage box be amazing? Oh well. Someone out there is probably working on something right now that would knock your socks off... and I'll leave it there.

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2. have always been fascinated by people that know what they want to be at a early age. (Because I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up, but yet have had a full career.) What was your ah-ha moment? Like; people need a news letter! And, I’m the person to do it!
--D

Well, we're out of questions - so I'll take this not-exactly-toy question. And to the asker of this question, your email account has been bouncing back, so write in again if you like.

In 1995 I was dying for a new figure line - I was in high school, and I always loved reading about toys. Nobody wrote a newsletter or a definitive info source, so I started one on August 1, 1995. My dad lost his job and I thought maybe I could somehow pivot to a job in or around the business at some point, or help pay some bills. It turned into a part-time toy shop gig and some freelancing, which helped pay the bills for toys and college. I guess the short answer was "because we had no money coming in" and "because I needed to know everything coming out, and maintaining a list of information made people want to tell me things." I wrote for web sites and magazines for a few years, but things took a bit of a hit around 1999 and still seemed a little wobbly for a few years. After college there was a big toy slump, so I worked in the tech space for a couple of years before Entertainment Earth came calling and they haven't fired me yet. But it's early in the year, and anything can happen.

I always wanted to work around toys, but I assumed it would be "I'm going to work for Kenner!" and not "I'm going to write about toys, and then some day I'm going to be the guy who orders millions of dollars of toys for a large online toy seller." I guess someone had to do it, and it's not like I have a lot else going on.

One of my friends in High School was (at that point) the youngest certified Windows professionals (and is now in security), another went on to run a lab studying cancer/contagious forms of cancer in clams (he wanted to be either a filmmaker or cure cancer), someone else was a volunteer fireflighter so he worked for forestry for BLM, my best friend in college was big in the anime fan sub scene (and basically ran Anime News Network for over a decade until he died a few years ago.) Oh, and another one of my college comedy buddies was planning on doing music, wound up at FitBit, and is now a Googler. I probably had fewer goals or plans than any of them other than "gee, this looks fun and I want to know more." I just wanted to mess around with toy stuff, and mercifully, it resulted in my not having to actually work in a normal job up until now. I assumed it would all be over around 2008 or 2009 and this would be a temporary thing, but it's still rolling. Hopefully the new movies and anniversaries will do well and new fans keep discovering toys as a hobby.

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We are out of questions for next week. Send 'em if you got 'em!

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The toys for The Mandalorian and Grogu are in stores, and the first one I opened is the Star Wars The Vintage Collection The Mandalorian & Grogu Imperial Remnant AT-RT 3 3/4-Inch Action Figure. It's $68, roughly the same as post-tariff The Vintage Collection 2025 Landspeeder. I begrudgingly accept the Landspeeder because it's more or less a prop replica, but with a few decent toy features like the shifter controlling wheel deployment and an opening hood. And the figure has a lot of gear. It is not a remarkable value, but the last one came out in 2011 for $25 with no figure. Given inflation, tariffs, and Luke's extra gear? OK. I'll deal with it.

The AT-RT is improved over previous $20 entries - the leg gaps are filled. There are multiple points of articulation. There are fully painted control panels with screens and buttons. You can see that Hasbro is spending the money on painted parts of that ship you will likely not notice nor appreciate - and are being charged accordingly. You get a display stand, a clean figure, and a dirty vehicle that don't compare favorably to similarly priced or cheaper 6-inch items in G.I. Joe, Marvel Legends, or Transformers. Granted, the deco on those? Not as extensive. Each added step costs money, and the fans constantly telling Hasbro that money is no object will probably see a finger curl up on their monkey's paw this weekend. Is it the best AT-RT Hasbro could make at this scale? I sure think so. Would I rather have a ship with fewer features at a lower price? Yeah. But this is where I'm at - I got into this hobby to collect toys, not tiny expensive replicas. And the toys mutated into tiny expensive replicas.

I'm seeing the new The Mandalorian and Grogu figures on shelves at Walmart, so you might as well. Someone let me know that Marshal IG-11's production figure has a slightly different marking on his chest than the stock shots (and cardback photo) so unless there's a running change, yours isn't coming up short. It's just the way it is. But at least there are figures out there... along with, it seems, 2021 Lando figures and a freaking army of unsold 501st Clone Troopers.

We're at about 59 days until the movie, and the hype train is not exactly feeling robust. Supposedly there is a plan for another "March to May the 4th" but I haven't seen much evidence of this yet. The movie marketing seems lacking or just not on my radar/local billboards and buses. I feel like there was a decent push for The Rise of Skywalker, but Solo: A Star Wars Story seemed super late, light, and competing against two other Disney movies with Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War both commanding significantly more cultural attention. The biggest movies competing with The Mandalorian and Grogu this May are shaking up to be Animal Farm, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Mortal Kombat II - plus Jack Ryan: Ghost War. I have no idea if that's going to be a big deal or not.

The prequel launches and sequel launches feel like something we're never going to see again, and I mean for any movie franchise, thanks to increasingly splintered media. And movie theater attendance. And a lack of toy stores or any real marketing pushing the toys like an Event. Maybe Doomsday will prove me wrong, or maybe I'm just so old the marketing and hype are invisible to me. But if that's the case, it might be good for studios to re-tune their focus to reach people who aren't involved with this stuff on a daily basis. It's weird to have a new movie coming, and each scale of the line is more or less comparable to what we got in 1996 for the non-movie Shadows of the Empire... with fewer vehicles.

--Adam Pawlus

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