1. Adam, amongst the many announcements that came out of D23 the one that I had most hoped for was that they would overlay Galaxy's Edge with an OT look, and all but declare that the ST was a whiff, and that only by embracing the legacy that all that Star Wars is built on can they carry on....or am I wrong?

And also, why won't they bring back Evolutions sets? Such a great way to get all the costume variants of your characters in one place.
--Derek

I'm not a theme park person, so I was always a little surprised that Galaxy's Edge was not designed to be a setting that could be easily changed out completely to support the new movie, whatever the new movie was. Setting it between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker sounded like you're making something guaranteed to be dated, as opposed to something malleable. I hesitate to say "timeless," because unless it was set specifically after the original Star Wars with no recognizable faces or events that could date it to a specific moment, someone's going to roll their eyes about it being old eventually.

I don't know exactly how it works to have Ahsoka and Mando walking around in a Resistance-era story, but I assume "magic" or "the power of myth" or whatever is something I just don't really grasp. I assume Disney will never let the sequels go completely, as can be seen by that new movie which I assume are actually still going to happen. For all I know, it's this theme park attraction that is driving internal conversations to do more movies set in that era, but that's just a guess.

As to Evolution sets, fans demanded Vintage so long and so hard that I doubt Hasbro will ever discontinue that style of packaging. It would be cheaper to put 3 guys in a single box, and less wasteful, but right now toy companies seem to exist to cater to old 1980s kids. I doubt that Hasbro would want to do it again, mostly because they can't charge premium pricing for non-retro Kenner packaging without a fight.

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2. To follow up on your response to the STar Wars vs. Gi Joe and your comments about the number of options Star Wars fans have VS the number of options GI Joe fans have to purchase product from the line, is the future of Star Wars, to keep it profitable and engaging to clients, to cut down on the options, so when new product is presented, there is a real desire to purchase? The sheer amount of clearance items online, even on Hasbro Pulse website, and discount stores like Ollies, etc makes me wonder if the line, as a whole, is just WAY over produced?
--Jeremiah

The future of Star Wars toy stuff - especially for kids - is probably LEGO, as it has been for a while. Action figures aren't a big part of the picture as Hasbro has been either realized it doesn't sell enough to meet their giant company's needs as far as kid sales go, and I don't know if it's because the character line-up has been (save for new movie years) pretty redundant or incomplete since 2010, or because kids just aren't interested in buying this stuff. But if you're an adult G.I. Joe fan, there aren't as many possible things in a store to compete for the dollars of a legacy military adventure brand. If you've got everything on pre-order, odds are there's still money in your wallet that you don't feel bad about spending, and fewer (but not zero) "just different enough to make you mad" action figures. $300 for a single big vehicle per year? You've probably got that.

Hasbro doesn't disclose edition sizes, but anything showing up on clearance is confirmation that they made too many units for the needs of the market. Hasbro also has to make a minimum number of units to justify production of anything, so I don't know if it's "we made twice what we needed because we had high expectations" or "we made twice what we needed because company policy dictates we make that or zero units." It also could be fans can't tell if a figure is new or different from the one they already bought - you have to squint with a magnifying glass to see deco variants lately with the now-at-Ross Yak Face wave, for example. It's not so much that they made more product than needed, it's that the secondary market prices of the old product was potentially not high enough to warrant additional production. Well, I guess with hindsight, I can say definitively that it wasn't needed - otherwise it wouldn't be at Ross for $3.99 per figure. Guessing the fan market is a tough one, especially if your access to the show is limited, and you've got to trust the licensor that Character A is the good one. Sometimes you get it wrong, as we're seeing lately with The Black Series figures across the board from more recent movies and shows. You have to keep these things tight, or the market starts to sag.

We're going to see what happens as Power Rangers shifts from Hasbro to Playmates, and Playmates isn't shy about low-run figures. In the 1990s they did the infamous 1,701 figures, and there were talks of doing more low-run figures around that size a few years ago - this did not come to pass. Why am I bringing this up? I believe smaller companies can be more nimble and can find success at quantities smaller than Hasbro. While Hasbro's stuff has been the best in the mass-market (quality for the price and widespread distribution), they also seem to no longer be interested in making items appropriate to the market's size - it's gotta be big, or it's not going to happen. Playmates might be able to do smaller runs of things and Star Wars may need to run smaller editions to be successful. Well, smaller runs per SKU - there also need to be more SKUs, because adult collectors aren't going to buy the same figure in a nearly-identical outfit unless there are other, new characters to keep the momentum going. Why buy another version of Mando or Grogu when you have six and no new guys for them to pal around with and/or fight?

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FIN

Since 2019 we've seen a lot of small-screen Star Wars, and because of the firehose of content it's not like anyone has been forced to watch or rewatch anything. We've come a long way from "a movie every three years, plus or minus Ewoks" to "if your Star Wars drought lasts more than five months, please consult your medical professional." For merch, it's been quite the week. Walmarts are putting out in-aisle displays with The Black Series figures and Sol's lightsabers. What's more, Reddit claims that All merchandise for ‘THE ACOLYTE’ has been removed from Disney’s online store, which is a new one. I wasn't watching pre-orders on their site so I don't know what was there in the first place.

I certainly didn't expect it to just end with an actual announcement. Normally things just get swept under the rug, or there's a quiet Friday afternoon admission of "we're not going forward with that." I'm certainly left me with a lot of questions - like why LEGO skipped the show completely, why Hasbro spent precious Retro Kenner slots on a show that would never be a great fit for the format, and what is in the pipeline for 2025 - if anything - that we don't know about yet.

If we lived in a world where Lucasfilm only did one show a year, and really went for it with a firm release date, which would allow for merchandise set dates set in stone with things like a guide book or action figures before the series, maybe things would be different. I see the product as promotion for the story - also as "flash cards" to learn names, which can be helpful for fans to feel like a bigger part of the show. Keeping secrets from the audience under the guise of "spoilers" just makes us feel more and more left out, unlike when we had big DK guide books and a complete action figure line before each of the prequels. Granted it could also be fatigue, but having a show come and go - multiple times - without the usual merch (and education) makes it really easy to shrug it off and demand Disney give us the next thing. Ending each story with a cliffhanger/teaser for the next thing may have worked for Marvel, but it also seems to have stopped working for Marvel. I don't know if it can work for Star Wars, because we have a couple of characters and a relationship that we'll probably not see on TV now.

--Adam Pawlus

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