1. Adam, after recently seeing an announcement, if you can call it that, that the TVC Luke's X-wing was marked down (!) to 99.99 on Amazon got me thinking; if you subtracted the license fee, what is your best guess of what that piece of plastic would cost? I'm talking about paying for the materials, the labor of assembly, and the costs of packaging and shipping.

99.99 for a toy just seems to me to have crossed over into a price range of ridiculousness.
--Derek

$100 for an X-Wing from two years ago - which itself was a retool of a retool of a toy from 1998 - isn't too outlandish given inflation. While they saved some money removing electronics, retooling the cockpit, landing gear, interior, targeting computer, droid socket, etc. etc. costs a heck of a lot of money. $50 in 1998 is $84 today, assuming the toy was otherwise identical - but with the removal of electronics and addition of more molds and parts, I'm unsure what should cost more.

I need to preface this with a statement: I do not now, nor did I ever know, what Hasbro pays for a product from the factory before royalty payments. But keep in mind "the product" includes everything, including the box, which you may throw in the trash. (Legend has it that the 1980s G.I. Joe figure packaging cost more than the actual plastic figure!)

I had a long answer here, but what you're asking isn't something I think can be calculated. I don't know what the license royalty is, and the various anecdotes over the years I've heard from non-Hasbro non-Star Wars manufacturers have said things like every $1 in materials cost results in at least $4 worth of increased retail cost to the end customer. But that was just if you wanted to add features like electronics or something and not the base product. I doubt this holds true with Hasbro and Disney and Lucasfilm - but if it did, you could say $25ish could be a guesstimate as to what the boxed toy costs per unit if it had a run that got the price-per-unit down. I assume it would actually be much higher given the complexity of these toys based on the other ones I've heard, and that's before including freight and licenses and all of that.

When you pay for a toy, you have to consider costs for everything can get a little ridiculous. It's just not shipping to you - the factory puts it on a boat from China. The US port sends it to a distribution center via truck. That distribution center may send it to you if it's Amazon, or it could go to a regional DC to go on another truck to get to a big box store or a dotcom warehouse. And that's just freight. Tooling costs tens of thousands of dollars to create simple figures - I assume an X-Wing would cost considerably more, even though this is old tooling I'm sure there are storage fees, maintenance fees after years of use, and retooling fees when new features are added. You have to pay to do safety tests. You have to pay lawyers. The artists that design the box, stickers, and paint need to be paid. Hasbro has a whole team of designers and marketers, warehouse guys, parking attendants, janitors, and so on and so forth. Lucasfilm and Disney get a cut, and also are involved in the approvals process and there are people needing to be paid for that, too.

I can't answer the "is it worth it?" question because that's up to every customer. Nobody is getting rich off of toys unless you own the IP and just cash the royalty checks. Look at it this way - before Toy Biz introduced Marvel Legends, they had Spider-Man Classics. Those were sold around the same time as Hasbro's Power of the Jedi line, which had 6-10 joints each and were $7. Toy Biz sold Spider-Man Classics in 2001 for $5.99 - and they had display stands. They were 6-inches tall. They included a full-size comic book reprint. They came in gorgeous, sturdy clamshell packaging. Also Toy Biz technically owned Marvel back then, so one would assume royalties weren't a thing - and it just goes to show you what can happen when you start cutting out an IP holder because you are the IP holder. I assume the secret sauce is to make a product that is wildly popular to kids, collectors, and the increasingly-important "fan" who is just an adult that buys nerdy genre plastic character things, and modern Hasbro/Disney/Lucas/etc. is far too big to engage in any sort of planning that will bring down costs again. Maybe - maybe - if they were selling hundreds of thousands of units again, and kids and collectors all bought the same figures, but I doubt it.

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2. Do you have any insight/theories on the types of plastic that Hasbro uses? It seems like many of the recent releases have softer plastic that previous years. Some of these releases, like the Gaming Great Battle Droid, are particularly bad. There doest seem to be a lot of consistency either. The recent Tusken Raider came with almost floppy accessories, while the Purge Trooper's electro staff was stiff and sturdy. Some of my older TVC figures feel better made because they are less rubbery and more substantial. Is this just an illusion? Is softer plastic actually better for longevity of a figure because it'll bend but not break? Is softer plastic better for “joint health”? Will they keep their tightness longterm or just get loose faster? Is this all just a cost cutter measure for Hasbro?
--Joey

The kind of plastic is less of an issue than its durometer. Many accessories are PVC or (I think) HDPE over the years, and while it's possible we've had an ABS here and there it's unlikely for most mass-produced toys for kids - it's a very hard plastic and has no give to it, so if it's thin it'd just snap. (1980s vac-metal C-3PO figures are a good example of that.) If you were an army builder in the 2000s, you had an opportunity to see the very same figure change a tiny bit from release to release - some Clones had more flexible blasters, some were more prone to yellowing, etc.

This generally has nothing to do with cost-cutting, it's just trying to get a product perfect doesn't always work out. There's a push and pull between safety (and the figure not failing safety tests) and getting you a good, sturdy figure. If Tusken Raiders had ABS gaffi sticks, they'd be perfectly stiff and hold up well in a display. Also, they'd snap like a twig in normal child playing conditions.

From batch to batch, the flexibility of PVC plastic can change - the chemical composition could be just a bit different and you might see slightly less hard accessories. Admittedly, this is beyond my area of expertise beyond "it can happen." Hasbro has commented that some figures need to be a little rubbery so they won't snap if you push on it a little too hard, and a Battle Droid could be a good example of that. I've had many 3 3/4-inch Battle Droids sag - the plastic will bend - over time if the figure is on a peg display base. It's bizarre, but short of altering the design a bit more, this is something that is likely to happen when you've got particularly skinny figures. It happens with Funko Pop! Vinyl figure legs too, particularly the skinnier women they produce these days - especially ones with display stands.

Differing thicknesses make a big difference too, and it could just be that batch was properly mixed, but with enough variance that some is better than others. The same thing happens with colors - you can aim for the same hue of red, with the same Pantone swatch or mix or whatever, and it might still vary from batch to batch.

I can't speak to joints as they seem to vary from figure to figure, so it could just be a tolerance issue where even the slightest variance from a very specific size could result in a loss of friction and then it sags a bit. Transformers collectors have a technique involving Super Glue over a joint and continuously moving it so it doesn't harden and freeze the limb in place, but there is absolutely no chance I would recommend doing it to anybody, ever.

Properties of plastic can also change a bit over time, too, but that's something I can't even begin to quantify as things go through off-gassing, or mold-release oils get weird, or so on.

3. We've heard a lot about whether the way things are now (empty pegs, quick sell-outs) are the way they are because of happenstance or corporate design and I've heard good arguments for both sides, but examining my own behavior, something occurs to me: I'm buying things that I may not have bought if I had more time to think about it. I told myself that I wouldn't buy the Walmart Tom Holland Spider-Man that dropped [October 7], but I happened upon a tweet and when I got there, there were 3 left and it was still in my cart when I checked out, so now I have it, but do I want it? I don't know because the powers-that-be didn't give me time to think about it, but I don't think that I do want it! I even wanted the Droids Boba Fett and I got it, but I feel the same way about it. It's the same as a run on gas or bottled water or toilet paper — get it now or you may not get it and you may want it or need it later, so just get it now. We're in a permanent state of disaster preparedness when it comes to this hobby.
--Shaun

It's probably both, and hype/FOMO is a real marketing tool used by a lot of companies. Demand is way up because people are coming back to toy collecting during the pandemic. There are shortages due to bottlenecks in production and delivery all over the world. In some cases stores reduced their orders because they were afraid of getting stuck with figures and have not yet corrected their order predictions to better meet demands for the items... which, in some cases, can be estimated before anybody actually knows what the figures actually are. Also a lot of stuff is sitting on boats or in a yard in California somewhere.

What you describe is basically how action figures have been since at least 1989 with the then-new Tim Burton Batman movie. When adults get interested in these things, you can't really predict the market anymore - with kids, you can count on major holidays (Easter, Christmas, Last Day of School, etc.) as well as new movie releases, home video, and the like to goose your sales. You once could count on TV marketing to do the same thing - show it to kids, they'll ask for it, they'll go buy it. If you're out of stock, you probably would choose to advertise something else. There was definitely a machine in place in the 1980s and some of the 1990s that worked to get kids to be able to buy this stuff.

If you collected action figures in (or since) the 1990s there was never a "good old days" where you could have a few weeks or months to find what you wanted. Some kid lines were in ample supply for a while, so if you collected Beast Wars in the 1990s you had a pretty big window to get what you want. But if you collected Star Wars things were scarce for a long time, sometimes a couple of years, before demand was met and prices plummeted. It could happen again. People were paying $40-$50 for POTF2 Lando Calrissian at one point - a few years ago you'd struggle to get $2 for him - and today he's $5-$10, which is effectively keeping up with inflation. There are some figures that for one reason or another will be rare and expensive due to low production, but a lot of this stuff may not be that low. And bought by adults. And they're all sitting mint in sealed boxes until someone flips them, which could be (to put it ghoulishly) something that happens as our generation dies off.

The "permanent state of disaster preparedness" is nothing new. As long as I've been collecting, toy hunting and toy runs have been part of the game - you might see something, you might not. Collectors claim a figure never came out, despite the fact I bought one in their city. Stores only get a few cases at a time, and if they only get one or two, a single collector can clean them out between restocking the shelves at lunch and when a fan might drop in a store on the drive home. Now that much of it is online, we're all at work, and bored, and ready to buy. Once things hit critical mass - as in, available - fans complain about pegwarmers, stores get cranky, and stuff might not sell until Christmas.

"I don't think I want it but I am buying it because I'm afraid I can't get it later" is the 1990s in a nutshell - and a lot of those figures are worthless, or were, as they were dumped at comic shops, record stores, or anywhere that would accept second-hand merchandise. This is the bubble I sometimes warn about - if enough fans are doing this, that means there could be tens of thousands of mint, carded figures just waiting to be sold when people snap out of their temporary career as a toy collector. Remember, there was a time when Starting Line-Up figures and Spawn were a huge, huge deal in toy collecting. Playmates' Star Trek was once super hot. Things can change as people get bored and dump their stashes... or age out of living.

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FIN

Pulse Con is over - finished! I liked the Transformers reveals a lot, especially the name-dropping of who designed what and highlighting a lot of details. Star Wars followed the pattern of other con reveals - not a lot new. I mean, now that we're largely middle-age people watching a screen at home to buy stuff, this is effectively (along with Nintendo Directs) a shopping channel for a customer base that's effectively shooting fish in a barrel. We want this stuff. They know we want this stuff.

The Rancor Monster at $350 feels high. It looks like it might be 18 inches tall, but the measurement with the arms outstretched seems disingenuous - I appreciate wanting to show just how big it can be, but I only want to know one thing: can it fit in a DELTOF? It's looking like it'll be a tight fit, and you'll have to remove one shelf to make it work. And I just might - I have no idea where the heck I can put this. I have no idea what the stretch goals are, but it seems this particular creature is premature given we have none of Jabba's entourage yet. I hope he gets an Oola with him - but a Jabba's throne, a Bib Fortuna, Malakili, and/or Giran would make all the difference. It's interesting to hear the designers say this was something they were excited about and fought for - I never once sat here going "gee, I hope we get a Rancor." A Cantina, sure. An A-Wing or Jedi Starfighter? Absolutely. The Rancor Monster in the 3 3/4-inch lines tends to be a little big, so I don't need one that's even bigger. Having said that, I won't say no if it gets the goal - but I don't want to be an early adopter. I want to see what the stretch goals are.

The Vintage wave is not bad as reissues go, Ahsoka and Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi should be strong sellers in the same way Anakin probably won't be. The upcoming name-drops were pretty good, but a lot of what were actually shown feels a lot like "you have this character, here he is with different paint and maybe a new accessory." Since there is a lot of unmet demand for Mando and Grogu collector figures I expect it'll all do well, but I was a little disappointed Mayfeld used the trooper costume. I was hoping for his sniper outfit from the first season.

So hey, new stuff. It's coming. There are lots of reused molds, I'm sad to say, but I also just got my The Vintage Collection IG-11 in the mail and I'm incredibly impressed with it. (New mold!) So as always, stay tuned, keep picky, and be sure to pre-order if you want something. Generally speaking nobody is predicting things are going to get a lot better for availability thanks to global production and shipping issues.

--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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