1. A question was asked about the product development cycle for the upcoming movie Star Wars: Starfighter, and you guessed the toys have been in dev since last fall. But let's suppose, for some reason, that movie isn't released. What do you think would happen to all the toys that have been made and ready to sell? Would they be sold anyway, withheld, or maybe a sticker with a different name placed on the packaging to distance the toys from the movie?
-Chris

A correction - I believe development will be starting for Starfighter toys this fall. About 18 months is typical, although movie toys can sometimes have longer (or shorter) development periods. 2025 would be a sensible time to start working on an early 2027 product.

I don't think the scenario you describe will ever happen with a Star Wars movie. We have recently had some Transformers toys from Transformers: Reactivate - the toys came out, but the game is vaporware. There are some other toys in various lines that are retools of things based on designs that were from unmade projects. Usually companies try to find a way to make their R&D work somehow.

It is rare - but there's precedent - for a warehouse of toys being destroyed before they ship out. If memory serves that was the story of Mego Logan's Run stuff. Hasbro G.I. Joe: Retaliation toys came out before a movie delay and Hasbro did make an effort to recall them (not like "government recall") but I don't know how many got shipped back. Generally the movie dies far before the toys get manufactured, so there are some complete toy lines that a toy company you know made, for a movie from a major studio, but the movie didn't get finished and you never saw the toys. Or a trailer. Or anything.

If memory serves, packaged test shots might show up at hasbro as early as eight or nine months before the movie comes out. If the movie got axed after that point, it might be too late to change course barring Disney stepping in and saying "thou shalt not release the toys." Hasbro has been good about identifying movie titles on The Black Series and The Vintage Collection packaging... but take a look at the kid stuff. It's mixed. Most figures from 1999 The Phantom Menace, 2018 Solo: A Star Wars Story, and 2017 The Last Jedi launches don't have the movie title anywhere on the packages. They just say Star Wars (which I feel is a massive problem, but that's another topic.) If Hasbro just has Star Wars on the packaging - no specific chapter title - they could just ship it and a lot of fans wouldn't be aware it was from an aborted movie.

But if the figures were made and ready to sell? It depends on what happens, and when. If stuff was on the way to customers (stores), it's possible a company might ask to buy them back, and it's possible the stores will say "no." Or "yes." Over my many years I am aware of figures that were problematic due to any of a number of reasons, and manufacturers have requested the product be sent back, or modified, or destroyed depending on the circumstances. If the product was already en route to an end-user customer (fan/collector), nobody is destroying anything.

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2. Will Hasbro provide an overview of Epic Force or their imaginext series? Epic force can greatly supplement the vintage collection and has proven to get better each series. The Dark Trooper for $7.99. Is a bargain

Also the imaginext play sets are great for little kids but at reduced prices can make great custom fodder for vintage collectors. The Imperial turret I purchase on-line for under $7. A Hotb ion cannon for $26 still might make an excellent base for a custom. If, that is, fans know what is coming in those Star Wars lines.
--David

Not likely, as the fan-facing marketing tends to skip a lot of reveals to fans.

Epic probably will end like other recent Hasbro "kid lines." Hasbro doesn't keep them around very long. Imaginext may stick around doing the barest of barebones line extensions so they can keep working with Lucasfilm and prevent someone else from capitalizing on the license while having to tapdance around Hasbro's license. You're not going to see streams explaining the new product in either case, and I wouldn't expect much more from either line.

Hasbro (and for Imaginext, Mattel) have not been great about announcing kid stuff. Collectors get more love because it's tied to pre-orders and a marketing department relying on what they call "activations." When we were dealing with the end of the 5-jointed "Celebrate the Saga" figures, that was the last time there was much news shared with fans got kid stuff. Getting information on Imaginext is quite difficult, and I'm not even entirely sure what's being made - some items I don't find out about until I see at Ross. I couldn't begin to speculate on the future of Mattel Imaginext for Star Wars. But that $7 turret you bought is a clearance price, and that probably isn't great for the future.

The only time I remember Mattel addressing Imaginext to collectors was for Masters of the Universe to say "it'll be here soon!" They made 3 XL figures, none of which I think were sold in the USA (certainly not anywhere I saw), and the expected playsets, vehicles, and 3-inch figures never materialized. Maybe they'll make some for the new movie? It's a good line of toys. I am fond of the line, and it's kind of sad to see their retail presence shrinking. Especially the non-licensed stuff, it's been good.

Based on how Star Wars Imaginext performed, Mattel probably doesn't have a lot more product to crank out. The markdowns are plentiful and I assume we're going to see more stuff on clearance sooner or later, mostly because it feels like Star Wars doesn't have the cachet it did 20 or 30 years ago. People aren't stuck on it like they were in the 1990s.

I can armchair quarterback the lines all day long, but what matters is that it's not sticking right now. Maybe a different product mix would work - I still think focusing on a specific movie or TV show would do wonders. But, maybe I'm wrong. It's not like we're going to find out.

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Adam's note: this was originally posted during a roughly two-week period where our server broke the site and said nothing was wrong, before it magically reappeared.

Why does this site look like this? Our host did something to break Drupal, and I am not learned enough to know what it was, how to ask them to fix it, and my requests to reboot the database server went unheeded. So, for now, or forever, we're going to work with this layout. It's based on what I coded for 16bit.com about 25 years ago. Hopefully it can hold up to the strain of fewer readers every year.

I've been trying to put together a few fun things for August. August 1 will mark 30 years of me writing about Star Wars toys online, and I wasn't expecting to have to redo, repair, or replace this particular site. If nothing else, there should be some fun Q&A things and if there are articles you remember and miss, let me know, I'll do my best to restore them. It's not really possible for me to restore the old site with my technical lack-of-knowhow/whatever our hosts broke, and restoring all the content manually isn't really possible. I'll be putting some stuff back up, but I also know people don't tend to delve into the archives much after the first 2-3 weeks.

The big downside of this new site format is that it doesn't offer any kind of tracking to know how many people are reading. Hopefully you dig it, and tell a friend, and use it to test your vintage CRT iMacs or other low-resolution screen computers. It should work on old browsers from dial-up era machines... but probably won't fare well on most smart devices.

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