1. If you could look 10 years into the future for Star Wars collecting, do you think we would have more or less lines available? Does Vintage outlast Black Series or vice versa?
--Jeremiah

Here are my predictions. Hopefully I'll remember to check in on them in 5 and/or 10 years.

If Hasbro refuses to let the license go - and in their position, I would hang on to it - I would expect new formats to cycle in and out, as we've seen since the line came back. Lines will go away and return, formats will be renamed and tweaked, and I don't believe any group of fans will be satisfied. Not because Hasbro doesn't make good stuff - but if you get 2-3 figures from the show you like per year, it's never going to feel like you had a fun year.

The Black Series and The Vintage Collection will have a disruption for 6-24 months, but will return. The secondary market prices for some recent toys are through the floor, and stores aren't good at purging dead stock. Discontinuing the SKUs and giving the brand a break has got to happen.

Collector figure prices will be at least $7 higher than today. Disney's not reducing its royalty bill, China's not making things more cheaply, freight prices aren't going down, and there's a nonzero chance of tariffs increasing prices this year. Heck, a 10% price increase could mean we're at $27.99 (or $18.99) by Christmas 2025.

We're going to bleed 20th century collectors. In 10 years, Star Wars will be 58 years old Its original child fans are going to be in their 60s or older. Unless Hasbro can get behind smaller runs, the company will likely not be able to keep making the existing collector-level stuff at current minimum quantities without more variants and re-re-releases. This could be resolved if some toy format could be done cheaply and appeal to kids, but LEGO and Hot Wheels seem to be the most interested in those lower price points/kid-friendly products today. In short, we've already lost a ton of original trilogy boosters - and the VHS-era kids are getting older - plus there's not much to keep them around, either.

Hasbro will not let The Black Series go, even if it continues to be $2.99 at Ross, and they will experiment with $50+ deluxe figures. We might get smaller lines, or few, fancier, more expensive figures, but I don't think the 6-inch format will ever permanently go away.

The Vintage Collection will continue to disappoint fans born before the prequels. The ratio of "new 1977-1994 guys" to "new versions of guys you already own multiple times over" has been the way it is now for ten years. I can't imagine this will change. Newness will probably continue to be main characters (or easy repaints) of Disney+ content. If there's ever a new 3 3/4-inch kid line focused on a new show (or movie) exclusively, maybe we'll see some changes - but I doubt it will be in Vintage and the focus on new media (even in a 40th anniversary year) has been kind of a drag.

Hasbro will experiment with The Retro Collection, either in its current format or some remastered/enhanced version. With prices going up, and the super-articulated lines being devalued, it would make sense for Hasbro to mass-market these $10, nostalgic, cheap-to-make figures that already have decades of demand behind them. They don't have long to make one final grab at nostalgia before fans are too old to care, and from the feel of things, we may already be at that point.

Epic Hero Series will be replaced 2-3 times by 2035. And I say this as a fan - the product Hasbro delivered is good, just with tiny portions. There's not a lot of stuff that hangs together, and a lot of it is being dumped at Ross. We will probably see some sort of bigger figure, smaller figure, or some incredibly cheap unpainted toy figure again before we loop back around to another kind of 3 3/4-inch figure for kids ages 4 and up.

Previously unmade obscure characters and aliens will eventually only be made for HasLab or crowdfunding services (or not at all [see the past 5 years]). At some point Hasbro will run out of giant items that fans will buy - so instead, we'll get a really big $300 wave of figures. Fans may not pay $1000 for a Death Star, but how about 10,000 sets sell for $400 to get us Ewoks and Droids The Retro Collection figures from series 1, 2, and unreleased sidekick droids/Teebo/Kneesaa/etc.? Maybe.

Fans will (and do) hate me for saying this but I think the best thing we could do for The Vintage Collection is to axe it for a few years. Put out a line of nicely articulated (say, 2003 level or slightly better) figures with cool accessories for a little while. Maybe let classic black-and-silver work for a dad/kid line of some sort for a few years. I get the feeling collectors are unsatisfied with The Vintage Collection in its current format, and you're not going to be able to get higher-quality figures at a lower price. So your options are to change the product specifications, or if you want better figures, they're going to be more expensive. You can't have it all, unless you're willing to pay for it... and the old, well-to-do adult toy collector with a job will probably be louder than kids anyway.

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2. just curious... what’s the cheapest you have seen a TVC Bespin [2011 Lando Calrissian] sell for at retail (including the likes of Ollies).
--Derek

While Walmarts near me have tons of him, one thing they no longer have are price scanners. The in-store price isn't the same as the on-web price, and they keep steering consumers to scan an item with their phone - and the phone price isn't the store prices. So this may sound like a lousy answer, but it's "I don't know if I have seen it marked down." I know you can take the figure to the self check-out, scan it, shrug, and leave it there... but the people at the store have enough to deal with so I just don't buy nearly as much stuff at Walmart as I used to. If I can't figure out how much it is, I don't need it.

Since there are no Ollie's in my time zone, as far as I know, I haven't seen him there - or Ross, or TJ Maxx or Marshalls - but searching online shows he has been available for as little as $6.93. That's quite a discount.

The Vintage Collection is in a weird spot. Collectors more or less agree that it's more expensive than we'd like to pay, and that there's little new offered - but we demand more of it. Few waves have all-new tooling, and most waves are at least half old molds or new molds of old characters. These aren't things long-haul collectors tend to want to buy at a higher price. As a bonus, Hasbro is trying to deal with the loudest fan demands - more realistic paint, more accessories, more articulation, more soft goods - and that costs more money for them, too! When you have a figure back up on the pegs like Lando - a great costume, a spectacular role, and a great actor - new fans aren't coming to buy him. There's no playset or vehicle or other figures to go with him. He's dead in the water until the store blows him out, and as far as I can tell, they're not marking him down.

I know some fan reading this is probably really angry that I suggest they put TVC to bed. To you, let me ask you to do something before you write me an angry email. Take a look at a checklist of The Vintage Collection, and pay specific attention to the 2024 releases, the 2023 releases, and 2022 releases, and count how many of those figures each year you're glad you bought today. Were there more than five or six really exciting figures in each year that you're glad you bought? How many did you buy out of your lifelong obligation to the format? It's been a pretty bad few years unless you're someone who just wants a complete set of everything, because the last few years have been mostly redundant with a sprinkling of Disney+ characters. Those Disney+ characters (indeed, all all-new figures) tend to be Hasbro's very best work. Reva, Jod Na Nawood, Sol, Mae, Osha, and anybody who wasn't "new head on old body" (Thrawn) have been largely exquisite - but to get them, we're dealing with "trooper from game" or "Clone re-reissue" or "just different enough to make you mad Maul-flavored Mandalorian." (I'm not particularly upset about that last one - I love that character design - but it's the cartoon version in new colors, which isn't quite what the photo on the Ahsoka cardback shows.)

This is why I'm saying "Would it be the worst thing if Hasbro tried a new format for 1-2 years?" Look at The 30th Anniversary Collection - not everybody was super-articulated, but you got some new Sandcrawler droids alongside new aliens with curved Cantina bar sections, a really good pair of Biggs Darklighter figures, Yoda on a Kybuck, a yearlong McQuarrie Concept program. While you got troopers, they were pretty good troopers. And they were a little cheaper. If Hasbro could develop a collector line for $10 or $12 that maybe removed a few points of articulation - maybe ankles, maybe a wrist joint on select figures - and gave us a sidekick droid or bigger accessories like furniture? I'm all for it.  As I keep saying, The Black Series is a line I used to buy (and am still glad if you enjoy it!), but I don't need to buy the same guy for the fourth or fifth time for a slight deco improvement.  New fans, or fans who missed it, will - and that's a decent audience - but it also means a lot of collectors can mentally check out for months (or years) at a time.

An alternate 3 3/4-inch collection would allow the line-up to change a bit, with a fresh look on pegs, a lower entry-level price point for new fans, and best of all - fans would demand Vintage to return. This could create a lack of the indifference like you read in the previous paragraphs. Since 2018 TVC has been plagued by "figure you have on new cardback," and rarely never-before-made characters that fans probably expected to get, so why not try something new for a bit and see how it works? Nothing Hasbro does is going to sell those unsold Lando figures right now, so tweak the formula (as we'd seen done with numerous format changes from 1995-2019) and see what happens.   Let's put some life back into our toy collecting - even if it's just adding coins and a Power of the Force logo for a year, we could use a change and I'm sure customers would like some visual difference on the pegs.

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FIN

I still like Star Wars! I know it may not sound like it, but also we haven't got a heck of a lot of newness from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, or the Ewoks or Droids cartoons and the Ewoks movies in the last few years. Some! But not a lot. I assume it's what Star Trek fans went through in the 1990s - there was a group who wanted Kirk and Spock, but Playmates and Galoob were intent on selling Borg and Bajorans and O'Brien and Bashir... all of which were awesome, but not, as it were, their Star Trek. Back then Kenner and Playmates were generally very good at making a decent collection. When Star Trek Voyager came out you got a couple of waves of figures, and eventually Playmates just mixed up everything into a generic Star Trek assortment. And that's when things started to decline a little bit harder, or at least, it seemed that way.

This week is a weird week. We got The Clone Wars characters Anakin and Captain Rex as our The Black Series reveals, both of which exist already - but these are updated, and based on Ahsoka. Is it new? Not really. I hope it sells well, because a lot of fans want those characters, and will hopefully pre-order them.

For Vintage we got another 501st Clone Trooper - sensible case filler, all troopers are, but we've got a few - in addition to Baylan Skoll (NEW!), Shin Hati (NEW!), and a redeco (not taking into account the changed costume elements for live action) of the Maul horned Mandalorian Super Commando. I assume these will sell if they make it to stores, because at least they look pretty cool. But if you're sitting around waiting for a new Cantina Alien, I don't know that it's about to change course.

For the other side of things, Star Trek: Section 31 premiered over the weekend and people seem to hate it. I feel like any pilot for a new Star Trek thing gets met with apprehension and revulsion, as decades-long fans are usually torn on it. If you stick with a new show, it tends to get more fans and those fans actually tend to like it over time - but this one is a one-off, so that is unlikely to happen. Similarly Skeleton Crew felt like it has more to say, but I'm not hopeful it will get to say it. This has nothing to do with the quality levels of other project, more of a "if nobody watches it, it doesn't matter." (If you're a fan of both franchises, watch Skeleton Crew first if your time is limited.) Now that the big media companies seem to be obliged to release new content for Muppets, Alien, Planet of the Apes, Predator, Avatar, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, and DC regularly to appease shareholders and/or keep trademarks in circulation, I assume this is how the rest of our lives are going to be. We're going to get new stories in our various fan universes. Some will be amazing. Some will be OK. Some will be contractual obligations. Without massive marketing support (or a toy line) most of them are going to come and go and be forgotten, so enjoy them while you can and/or before someone decides to delist something for a tax break.

When it comes to TV, there's still plenty of good stuff to watch that you may have missed. For example, I'm only just now getting to Kolchak: The Night Stalker - a series that influenced The X-Files - after having caught the TV movies a few years ago (thanks, anonymous web site with videos and/or Svengoolie and Dana Gould's podcast for the hot tip.) It's a monster-of-the-week show, it's pretty dated, but it's actually a lot of fun to watch before bed. I'm still watching old Columbo - I'm late to the game there too - and it's great. I appreciate so many shows are trying to continue the spirit - or IP - of the originals, but there are a lot of actual lovely vintage movies and TV shows that we all, for some reason or another, missed. Another oddball example is Killer Klowns from Outer Space, which I assumed (when I read about it in Starlog Magazine) was never released since I never saw it in the movie listings or rental stores growing up. I saw it on Svengoolie a few years ago, and now the dang thing is in every horror store or every horror licensee and apparently kids love it. I don't know if it's legit love or some form of Skibidi Toilet irony, but as send-ups/love letters to 1950s-1960s alien invader movies go? It's worth a look.

Once nice thing about the streaming era is how much of this old stuff is still around for you to see. Before I leave, I'll just once again name-drop one of my favorites from when I was a kid - the BBC version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's amazing. It looks cheap by modern standards, but it's packed with aliens, robots, neat costumes, fancy sets, and clever animated elements that I'd recommend checking out. Its production values are better than Doctor Who, and also, the Fifth Doctor is in it. Briefly. Find him if you can! It (and Red Dwarf) are a couple of things I would love to see licensed toy lines with actual figures some day, but as I keep saying - it's probably too late.

--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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