1. Does the "Streets of Mos Eisley" set connect to the cantina in any way, or is it just a "cheap" diorama for those who didn't back the cantina? In other words, if I backed the cantina, do I need this? What's your expert take on this?
-- Greg

If you backed the Cantina, depending on how full it is, you might want this so you can have a display with Luke and Obi-Wan walking past Jawas on their way in. Or you might not. This is the kind of thing I want to see more of, so it will not surprise you to hear I already ordered one and am thinking about a second. (I got two Freeze Chambers, one's still in the box. I meant to get more Tantive IV, and never did.)

My understanding - and read into that as you will - is that this particular item is not meant to be slapped on the HasLab Cantina exterior. It's to make an extended neighborhood around the Cantina, so if you have people walking up to it, they would walk past Mos Eisley buildings before getting to the front door of the bar. I'm not saying the parts absolutely won't connect - I haven't tried it - but it's meant to be a separate entity to build out Tatooine. And yes, that's an important part of the line theme for 2025, you'll see a lot of Tatooine stuff in there.

I wonder if it serves more purposes - like, are we getting more Cantina aliens and if so, when will we see them? Having a set like this without a larger figure program is kind of odd, although it may go well with the dozens of figures we all already own. I don't think it's meant to be a replacement for the Cantina, but for those who missed out it's certainly not an uninteresting addition to put on your shelf. I do wish it were cheaper, I'd probably buy a few of it despite not having a good place to put it. This set is probably going to be a delight for figure photographers, and while I love the door droid I don't know that I'm going to get my money's worth out of this one.

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2. I actually saw the Retro Book of Boba Fett wave a couple times at Meijer last year. They seemed to disappear pretty quick. We don’t have a Ross in my area, but we do have an Ollie’s...which seemed to be the ONLY store around here that ever got Black Series Admiral Holdo. 20-40 Admiral Holdo...and nobody else. How does THAT happen? Leftovers from cases that some other store held back to fill online orders? I’m not surprised the figure wasn’t popular, but I never saw her pegwarming around here...
--James

Massive pile-ups of one character can happen a few different ways.

Since roughly 2014-ish, Hasbro has started to make more of its products in what are called "solid" cases - that is, some online (and very few brick and mortar) stores would order a case of just a single character to better fill orders. (Big Box have since gotten on board with more solids, although that seems to be changing.)

Prior to that, solids were a real rarity - and what you may have seen are the leftovers from a couple dozen cases. This is very common in some neighborhoods and can vary from one part of the city to another. Back for Attack of the Clones, I remember seeing massive pile-ups of "Pilot" Jango Fett and magnet-arm Zam Wesell on the Glendale part of Phoenix, as well as bins of unsold Transformers Armada Smokescreen and Optimus Prime. in the other neighborhoods I frequented, this wasn't a problem. For G.I. Joe: Pursuit of Cobra I saw the same thing with Arctic Destro - a case would come in, he'd remain. Another case came in, he'd remain. And so on until they hit 7 or 9 figures, causing new shipments to cease - the store computer said "we have a full case, don't send more" because it couldn't tell the difference between 8 Destros and 1 each of 8 different figures. This has been a problem for as long as there had been an action figure assortment. One of the most catastrophic examples I remember as a kid were over a dozen pegs filled with TMNT Baxter Stockman at Toys R Us after Christmas around 1990.

In the case of Ollie's, most likely, they got solid cases. Demand during The Last Jedi swayed drastically from "everybody wants stuff" to "we don't want this anymore," as can be seen by the glut of Rose Tico figures and some massive online sales for the character who, at one point, needed additional figures produced. Nothing against the character - sometimes there are just too many figures in one place, and orders stop, and you can't wave a magic wand to make people want to buy them all at full price. Holdo is likely a similar thing, where demand went from hot to cool pretty quickly as public opinion - or rather, a certain kind of vocal public opinion - may have soured the general feeling of the movie in short order. With any figure from a new thing, going on sale or clearance is a very real risk until the actual size of the market is something you can measure. The goal is to make people happy without overproducing, because it devalues the brand - and looking around at second-hand shops, The Black Series could probably use a production quantity haircut for a little while until interest returns.

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FIN

It's been an interesting September, getting sneak peeks in employee shops I don't normally see and the future. And the future looks a lot like the present, only more so. In a world where the same franchises have more or less ruled the roost for most of my time on this planet, I do wonder what - if anything - might come out of the woodwork to be something truly new. We're seeing a lot of pretty neat stuff, remixing that which we've already experienced. Heck, that's what's doing well at the box office. Right now you can see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or Transformers One, the former of which seems to have done a great job blowing through plushies at Walmart and the latter seems to be sticking around in pretty big numbers. Both movies were entertaining, but I don't know that many (or indeed any) of the big movies are willing to break out of what has come before in a big way. Plus or minus Marvel, depending on the year.

It's always fascinating to see what gets made as an attempt to woo new fans. Transformers One is another retelling of the fallout of Optimus Prime and Megatron, this time as a main focus, and it does a perfectly fine job. I assume we could also do a follow-up to Beast Machines or something that takes place elsewhere in the Generation One timeline, and hopefully that's coming at some point. Star Wars seems to - oddly enough - find its best footing with stories that are somehow both prequels and sequels. Cases in point: The Mandalorian takes place before the sequel trilogy and after the original trilogy, and at least at first didn't care if you did the reading before coming to class. The Clone Wars was similar, as was most of Rebels - good jumping-on points. I'm hoping to see more things like this in our future genre entertainment, I still need to see the new Alien movie, and I am unsure of what to make of the Middle-Earth Horse War cartoon coming later this year, or the Joker musical, or the Oz prequel book musical movie. What all of these things have in common is that none of them are new, even the relative newcomer Art the Clown has been around as a Terrifier for a few years - and good for the pop culture powers that be for keeping low-budget genre entertainment alive.

In the unlikely chance a movie studio is reading this, I'd say the big takeaway is that low-budget features with creature(s) are something that should be encouraged. High-concept weirdness is also welcome. Most movies aren't going to make a billion dollars, so shoot for a lower goal and you might have a lot of sequels and future residuals if you can get something out there that resonates with an increasingly jaded audience. We all want to love this stuff, and it's tough to know if you're going to get a The Mandalorian or The Acolyte these days. But we all hope you're trying for more new things, if only so we have a reason to run out and see something in the theaters rather than operating under the assumption that we can (but won't) stream it within two months.

--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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