1. I am a 3.75 inch Star Wars collector only. I made the decision way back when Black Series 6 inch started coming out to stick with 3.75 inch only. Well of course 6 inches became the bread and butter core scale and yada yada yada years and years later I often feel frustrated with the 3.75 inch scale offerings especially when Black Series gets the majority of the new character releases. I am sticking to my principles (lol) and not switching scales but am frustrated with the character selection and offerings. I love the playsets and vehicles and beast assortments and although we've been getting awesome playsets recently vehicles have been less and less and beasts are lucky to get one every year or so. What more can I do to advocate for 3.75 inch overall but especially new characters and beasts. I also have kept in mind you advocating for a cheaper 3.75 inch line with less articulation but would allow for more characters to be included at this scale. I would also love something like this. I have signed every petion and followed and participated in every poll but the latest poll left me a bit disappointed with the character selections once more. Very little in terms of background characters (although one won the latest poll) seem to be wanted by the fan base. I feel that I am the only person wanting what I want and especially wanting beasts. The Blurgs that came out 5 years after they were last seen on the screen were awesome! I want more! Nobody wants a Mudhorn? I am alone here???
--Bill

The super short answer: vote with your dollars. It's not a "boycott" if a fan will buy it anyway. Support the things you want at full price because otherwise the message is "this doesn't sell."

I agree with you completely about the Blurrgs being late - for the life of me I don't know how or why they took five whole years to start a very anemic 3 3/4-inch kid line, but we did have Mission Fleet with the tiny figures a couple of years ago. But that gets us back to the main problem - competing scales. Hasbro is just robbing itself of maximizing its ROI (return on investment) by giving fans so many choices. I can get two or maybe even three, but depending on how wide you cast your shopping net you could find up to seven different Hasbro figure formats across multiple scales today, in your American city, with kid 9-inch (food/drug), kid 6-inch (value/food/drug), Retro (online/Ross/Ollie's), Vintage (Walmart/Target/Ross/Ollie's), Black Series (Walmart/Target/Ross/Ollie's), Epic Hero Series (Target/Walmart/Ross), and Mission Fleet (Burlington/Ross/Ollie's), plus Hasbro's many one-off figural scales like Force N Telling Vader (at Walmart, you don't care), a half dozen feature Grogus for kids (no shade as long as they sell), and we're not even talking about the Mattel Imaginext figures, the Jazwares Micro Galaxy Squadron, and the even more popular LEGO lines. It would be beneficial - if you ask me - to hack out some of the redundancy and funnel people to buy a specific toy line, or collector line, or in my dreams a hybrid of both. (I know the 1990s weren't everybody's favorite, but what you got, and what it cost, was pretty spectacular just before the prequels.)

What can you do? Stick to your guns, complain a lot, and encourage others to also do the same. Tag Hasbro on social. Buy the things you want them to make more of, at full price, to show your support - maybe buy two. (I bought two sets of The Retro Collection The Book of Boba Fett at regular prices.) I gave The Black Series my full-walleted support from 2013 to about 2022/2023, and then started to slowly drop off here and there and if what you want are the little guys, buy the little guys. You can also write Hasbro letters saying "I still want to give you money. But I only have space/interest/budget for 3 3/4-inch figures and especially vehicles/beasts/bigger stuff to go with the figures."

I wonder if Hasbro would consider shifting 3 3/4-inch to 2-packs. They've done it before - the Comic Packs and the Mission Series 2-packs were great and around ten bucks a pair. I'd pay $25 (or $35) a pair for the right figures with the right features - specifically "new figures" and "priced according to accessories and articulation." I think fans have basically screamed at Hasbro until they caved in to do Vintage or Bust, with the weird monkey's paw wish bonus of somehow requiring even more reuse of tooling that strangles the line down to very few new figures per year and "but he's got a new hat" figures making up the bulk of every wave. And we should be complaining about that more, too.

I'd love a Mudhorn, or Mando's speeder, or more characters from the shows... and those other toys are probably the thing Hasbro is missing. Figures are nice, but it's historically been about the vehicles, the creatures, and their cheap accessories - the figures. Again, look at LEGO - the figures are simple. but they can get you to shell out for a playset or a cargo freighter build. Micro Galaxy Squadron figures are tiny, but there are still $50+ vehicles to chase down, even if they get repetitive sometimes. I don't know why Hasbro thinks Mando in multiple scales is better than Mando but also Mudhorn/Speederbike/etc., but I do not see their sales reports - just the stuff that gets dumped at Ross.

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2. The retro collection line has been relatively successful. It has been scratching the nostalgia itch pretty well. Back in the 90s Kenner/Hasbro tried a similar thing with the Classic Edition 4-Pack with Luke, Han, Chewie, and Vader. I was interested back then, but it didn't seem to work at that time with the majority of the fans. Any thoughts on why this is?
--Mike

My gut says: timing, expectations, and the Internet of 1995's polling sample size.

I might be misremembering but I think there was an article in Topps' Star Wars Galaxy Magazine in 1995 or 1996 where - this is from memory - I think Steve Sansweet wrote about Kenner in 1995 and the then-new line and there was a quote to the effect of that the designers thought "fans would not be too excited with reruns." And that may have also colored the reaction.

When the infamous Classic 4-pack first hit at Toys R Us, some online collectors were vocal about how much they hated it. I overheard (and do not know if this is true) Toys R Us sold over a whopping 250,000 of them - that's an obscene quantity. So the very short answer to your question might be a predecessor to what modern kids call "gatekeeping." But it also might not have been a great representation of the toy collecting world at the time, which was more than teens and twentysomethings on 14.4kbps lines.

This toy set came out in 1995, and not that many people were online yet. Dial-up internet wasn't remotely close to broadband, and there weren't proper forums yet. So a sliver of the population was around on Usenet expressing their concern in an echo chamber where Kenner employees rarely peeked (but they did sometimes call a few of us.) I remember people complaining about the inferior quality of the Classic 4-pack, there were complaints about how it might impact the value of the original figures, and people didn't like that they weren't exact copies while others said it was too close to the real thing. That's how it was in the hardcore collector circles. "I hate this, I'm only buying three instead of five to teach them a lesson." The lesson taken was "look at how much of all of this we're selling!"

While the color match on the 2019-2024 "Kenner" figure reissues tend to be remarkable, advancements in digital sculpting (or perhaps the toolmasters in the Vietnamese factory) are not as good or as sharp as those 1995 reissues. (Or the 1978 originals.) I've certainly cornered a few poor/kind souls trying to find out why this is, but haven't been able to get an answer. If you've got an urge to buy a figure that felt like it was made by an actual Kenner employee who sculpted actual 1979 action figures, you do have a few options - but they're technically not Star Wars. Fan Roger Harkavy at Garden State Kaiju makes a "Mudbelly" sculpted by one Steven Geddes, who sculpted the original Kenner Dewback, Walrus Man, and other toys you may have owned. The same sculptor did work for Healey Made - specifically the Raider, Trooper, and Assassin action figures and a number of Super7 ReAction Figures. I don't have a full list of his work (and boy howdy would I love to find one) but he did most if not all of Planet of the Apes and the first several waves of Universal Monsters ReAction Figures. I recommend getting any apes or monsters that you can.  And Alien, Super7's Alien ReAction Figures mostly come from unused Kenner concepts we saw in toy magazines.

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FIN

Wow! What a week! A new wave of Retro revealed, a new TV show debuted, and the HasLab The Vintage Collection Ghost ship is supposedly getting ready to ship. (The deadline to change addresses was Thursday, so I assume that means label printing could start any day now.) Star Wars seems increasingly Q4-heavy.

Skeleton Crew kicked off last week with more creatures than we've seen for quite some time and less Jude Law than I would imagine. Given his helmeted debut and shadowy return, I assume he wasn't on the set very much. Given the nature of the whole prestigey streaming series, I think some companies have misunderstood why you might want a story over several episodes, or an entire season of 26 episodes, or perhaps to make a movie instead. When you've got a mission/monster/planet of the week (X-Files or Star Trek or even The Mandalorian) it's pretty easy to make an audience happy. Give them a story, finish the story, and maybe leave some crumbs out to pay off later in the season.

My reaction was "I liked it but I don't know if it's good or not," which is the problem when you have a movie extended over 8 episodes instead of a TV series with 8 episodes (or a 2-parter here or there.) As exposition goes, it's fine - lots of cool aliens, and it took the kids about 80 minutes to meet Jod Na Nawood. By comparison, Star Wars took about 29 minutes for us to finally met up with old Ben Kenobi.

I would absolutely love The Retro Collection figures - especially pirates - from the show. And who knows, maybe we'll get some! Sunday morning was good for Kenner fanatics, as Star Wars: The Retro Collection Pipeline Reveals More from 1978 Time Warp. Six previously-unknown releases are coming in 2025, and at least 5 of them weren't ever made in an official capacity. It's a safe bet the Sandtrooper and Han Solo Stormtrooper will reuse some old parts, and I bet Luke uses the 1978/1980 head, but that's OK! Kenner would probably have done the same thing.

I know the line isn't for everybody, and I know it isn't perfect. A lot of the new designs have shared very similar poses and the ability for them to hold their accessories well range from "pretty good" to "I don't think they tested Han Solo's hands before making the molds." But taken as a big collection, it's still pretty cool - and a lot easier to get my hands around than hundreds of The Black Series figures or thousands of non-retro 3 3/4-inch figures.

--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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