1. I recently saw some incredible retro-style weapons made by Trash Compactor and Stan Solo. Simply amazing. How does Hasbro let this go without at least putting out their own versions with the official label?
--Derek

Hasbro is not too big to fail, but it may be too big - and have too many mouths to feed - to find this kind of product worth their while.

Stan Solo, Smith Lord Creations, Healey Made, and other fans have been making retro-style figures and accessories for years and nobody has sued. I don't know if it's more of a Hasbro or a Disney call to make, but generally speaking this kind of product probably has a pretty low run and probably is being made to cater to an audience Hasbro won't cater to. Potentially. I've seen that there may be at least one thing coming up that may bump heads with this world, but it remains to be seen if anyone will care enough to do anything about it.

I assume it's like the Disney Vault TV Funhouse sketch on SNL. Sure, Disney could make a fuss about it - but it would draw a lot of attention to something and probably not generate any great goodwill, or revenue, in the process. Calling attention to low-run fan-made items could be a runaway Streisand Effect, but truth is I don't know if the amount of money being generated is significant or not. $30-$50 figures in hundreds (or thousands) of units ain't chump change.

Why won't Hasbro make more? Ask the bean counters. I don't assume it's worth their while to make a lot of $12 figures in the current market because Hasbro would rather be selling $25, $33, or even higher-priced items in even larger quantities. It would be nice if Hasbro had a "Hasbro Collector" sub-brand, not unlike Rhino's lower-run "Rhino Handmade" record label a few years ago. But Hasbro is a big company, and wants to sell big units of things, and that's why you can find some of their convention (or "convention") exclusives still in stock on their web site months later.

Given my druthers I would hope Hasbro could somehow shift gears to Retro and maybe make more figures, more frequently, perhaps even as bundles of 2-3 carded figures if need be. One of the things that really kept the line interesting was momentum. Between basic figures, Battle Packs, Comic Packs, Evolution Sets, vehicles, and other exclusives, you probably had something new to see on-shelf nearly every month. That is most certainly not the case in any of Hasbro's many product lines today, with months between waves and sometimes 2 or 3 waves drop at the same time. But, that's probably more of a logistics problem on their end and it surely proves you can have too much of a good thing. It also makes the fake Retro guys a lot more attractive - if I'm going to be dropping $300-$500 on a wad of 6-inch figures all at once, why not just spend money on the retro-style figures, even if fake, that are what I really would prefer to own?

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2. As any Internet homepage is driven by the goal of amassing viewer traffic, as the Star Wars collector hobby has arguably peaked from a height in the mid 2000s to early 2010s, has traffic on the website similarly peaked and declined?
--DI

I am not good at collecting ad revenue - I see number of clicks on stories, and it's pretty low. Figure of the Day passed the "if it goes under this number I should stop bothering" number a while ago, but since the pandemic went on and I had nowhere to go (and I kind of don't want to pivot to video yet, if ever) I keep doing it. Q&A is still doing OK - about what it should on the low end.

The hobby is still huge and there may be more money in it than ever before with $275 lightsabers and $25 "basic" 6-inch figure. It's just incredibly shallow, and if an action figure line is only going to be about the top-billed guys and troopers... who cares? I assume most collectors in the 1990s had a list of Imperials, Rebel Pilots, Aliens, and Droids they wanted - and Hasbro isn't really delivering on those areas. The hobby is so unfocused now that a site could post dozens of stories a week and not tell you about a single thing that appeals to you. I don't hate the 6-inch line, but I'd rather have 3 3/4-inch stuff and I do hate the pricing of the exclusive big guys to the point where I'm not buying many (or in some cases, any) unless they hit clearance. And I assume a lot of fans have done the same with other categories - probably retro, maybe vintage, everybody has a favorite segment.

I think the big problem is demographic shift. In the 1990s, everybody was an original trilogy fan, and everybody bought Kenner figures. Then came LEGO, Gentle Giant, Sideshow, Hot Toys, and new movies, new TV shows, games, and so on. The pie keeps getting sliced thinner and thinner, so no one site can cater to everybody. Galactic Hunter is all about action figures, and it's starting to slide back to 3 3/4-inch action figures, and if I'm being honest, it's probably going to tilt more to retro stuff when it comes to fan-made figures, creatures, vehicles, and the stuff Hasbro isn't doing. And it's a small audience, but this site (and my tenures at the original Adam's Star Wars Newsletter, Rebelscum, Yakface, and so forth) are about amusing and informing myself first. Anything you get out of it is entirely coincidental.

Thankfully a few kind readers contribute to the Patreon because we don't take advertising revenue here. I make a few bucks from stores with Amazon and Entertainment Earth affiliate links where I get a few pennies on the dollar for sales made after you click, but that's it. This is a volunteer project at this point and my only goal is to not cost me both a lot of money and time. Time I can give up a bit, it's not like Walmart is open 24 hours anymore, but it's really great to have a few people kick in a few bucks a month for servers and equipment.  (My digital camera battery is probably about to die.)

I think Star Wars as a viable product has a lot of potential, but everybody needs to cool down. My favorite segment is Retro, but having it compete with Vintage and Mission Fleet and Black Series and who knows what else for resources and SKU count means every line suffers. I never want to see a year with 200-300 figures in circulation again (which we got in the 2000s with Battle Packs and Evolutions and Comic Packs and Exclusives and Tins), but I do find the current "variety" incredibly dull. I get way more excited by a Healey made figure these days than a lot of the stuff we get from Hasbro because the Hasbro stuff isn't weird. They do astonishingly good work - especially in The Vintage Collection with their new sculpts. But do I really care about another gaggle of ARC Troopers? No, and I don't think anyone following these sites for news is getting the rush we used to get out of a new wave announcement. It's just humans, a couple of villains, and frequently missing main characters. I hate to say it, but the era of awesome launches we got at The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens spoiled us rotten. Those were great. Bring back the likes of Sarco Plank!

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FIN

So we're three weeks into The Bad Batch, and it's pretty good. Willow has come and gone with less conversation than Avatar, but was arguably an interesting-if-low-budget-time with one of the most suprising soundtracks I've heard on a fantasy show. But what is arguably much more interesting is that Archive.org put up the lost episode of Star Wars Detours and, apparently, I had no idea it was there. (Thank you Matt.) It's really interesting to see what could have been an alternate, snarky move forward for Star Wars that could have completely recontextualized the characters from the first six films, and potentially given the action figure line a much different direction to follow than what we got.

It really did feel like the end of the road for Star Wars when I first heard about it - "let's make fun of this thing we all grew up loving" seemed like a weird choice for the future of the business - but it probably would've been a good opportunity for Hasbro to rerelease old figures while giving older fans a reason to dig out their old toys while picking up some new ones. I assume the end result would be similar to where we are today - with a 6-inch line, probably some other TV projects with varying levels of success, maybe a movie or three.

Word on the street has varied from one or two full seasons being animated along with as many as three being fully or partially scripted, with various comedians involved occasionally referencing it in a podcast taping or live comedy event in Los Angeles. As far as I know there are zero plans to ever do anything with it, but I think after we've seen what Disney's mostly done with taking it seriously, maybe the goofball spin could be a good way to get a lot of older fans back into watching something called Star Wars. Rumors - and when I say rumors, I mean I have no way of knowing - are circulating that Mando season 3 has undergone some messy reshoots and that's the crown jewel of the franchise under Disney's eye. Hopefully it'll be fantastic, but in the off chance it takes an unfortunate direction this spring, at least there are some additional Detours for the franchise to go.

--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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