JediTricks wrote:A learning experience? With every movie, Hasbro does worse and worse on the toy lines. The packaging was supposed to fix the first 3 movies' failings and instead caused a much, much bigger one which Hasbro said this summer will be repeated next year in a reverse color, IIRC.
I was referring to just the AoE line being a learning experience, I have no idea WHY they decided to try something like that after they had done pretty good with the 2007 and ROTF lines (alright ROTF took time to find its footing, but still). Like I said, I’d THINK that experience would lead them to not so that again after AoE, except like you said (and as I alluded to) they’re already primed to do so with RID15. Whoever the packaging czar is over there he must really be attached to this concept, regardless of the evidence of its failings.
Totally disagree with you. I got Skids recently, the figure's plastic is so thin that it arrived in the package with stress marks all over it. Less paint apps and the paint apps are sloppier too.
Well for one thing, Skids is a shit character so it’s no surprise he gets a shit toy.
Seriously though, I’m not going to count paint apps or anything, but I know a lot of the BW stuff and on could be pretty light on paint. It wasn’t until RiD came over that they really started to get crazy with those, and even then the paint jobs were still a downgrade from their Japanese counterparts. As has been clear pretty much from day 1 though, you obsess over paint a lot more than I do.
I can't speak to Bandai's Power Rangers now, but I remember clearly the Power Rangers of the '90s being total cheapo kiddie shit: thick plastics, exposed screws, simple joints and paint apps.
That was my point, yeah. Until Hasbro’s offerings actually get down to that level, it’s hard to disparage them as much as some do.
LEGO continues to deliver the same quality,
You get what you pay for.
Mattel is able to see the difference in needs between mass retail and collector stuff,
That’s a laugh, unless by ‘needs’ you mean they know the proper lubricant to use before they bend them over and ream them. Look at Mattel’s ‘collector’ efforts: Their Watchmen line was a failure out of the gate, costing more but looking worse than Hasbro’s Marvel Legends that sell for half the price at Wal-Mart. MOTUC has always been a joke, offering average, department-store crap at premium prices through a janky webshop that they admit caters to scalpers (look at the latest Skeletor, where they just slapped a larger chest-shell over the stock body instead of sculpting a new one!). Their distribution for their retail lines is even worse than Hasbro has gotten recently. As barely as Hasbro’s keeping TF afloat at this moment, if they ran it like Mattel, it’d truly be dead in the water.
NECA continues to focus, DC Direct continues to focus on their work, Diamond Select continues to deliver straight across the board
And that one’s hardly fair. Those companies are fully collector-focused, making premium, adult-oriented figures intended to be sold through specialty retailers like comic shops (plus TRU). It’s not an all-inclusive kids-toys-but-collectors-can-get-them-too deal like Hasbro’s stuff sold at discount prices through Target. Yeah, if Hasbro was willing to sell premium figures at $40 a pop special ordered through your local comic shop, we’d probably see a jump up in the quality of those toys, but TF has NEVER been about that, so comparing it to companies and lines that are makes no sense.
This does bring to mind that the landscape for toys has changed since, say, the late 90’s/early 2000’s. The market can’t really support toys that kids can afford and ALSO cater to all the needs of collectors the way stuff like the original Marvel Legends did back in those days, which is why no other companies are doing it yet we still expect it of Hasbro for some reason. In that case, maybe that’s one way Hasbro could go back to the drawing board as it were, scrap the compromised dime-store attempt at a collector’s line that Generations is right now, and start doing specifically premium, collector-level figures sold like DC Direct’s stuff (or Bandai’s SH Figuarts or Robot Tamashii lines, look them up). You’d think the mountains of canceled and liquidated product that retail chains won’t sell or get to would be a wake-up call to Hasbro that it’s time to start doing something differently.
Bank of America?
Jumbo figures are a response to Jakks Pacific, that shithole of a manufacturer that has somehow become a top-5 toymaker thanks largely to jumbo figures in all sorts of pointless scales. So we have $30 18" figures, then Hasbro has to do $10 12" figures, Jakks does 24" figures, and I think Bandai's 31" figure might be from Jakks as well (yup, "CDI" on the box, that's Jakks' Creative Design International), and so on and so forth. I haven't seen the 12" Power Rangers figure yet, or maybe I did and it looked like all the other junk in that line lately.
What’s really stupid is that it could ALMOST work for Bandai’s Power Rangers line; I might actually be tempted by a fuckhuge toy of one of the mecha from PR/SS (a 31” The Megazord would at least be one hell of a centerpiece for the display I have going on with the SHFs) but doing bigass versions of the Rangers instead with that staring you in the face? Dumb.
TF was doing 100 million a decade ago, I know it's as much as 5 times more since the movies but a hundred mil in sales ain't nothing. Every movie year since '07 though, sales have been down. In between movies, sales have been higher than they were in a long time, but not predictably, they ping pong wildly.
Hey, after the cash explosion that was the ’07 Movie, sales would almost HAVE to go down. We’re probably never seeing TF blow up like that again.
TF AB reeks of the AB brand dying and grasping at any straw they can, and since they already had a relationship with Hasbro through Star Wars, they picked that one. But TF will be propping up AB, not the other way around. The TF line seems to be spinning out of control, stabbing blindly for help.
Check this out: I am actually more excited for TFAB than I have been for any new TF line in the last few years. Little characteristic figures that can drive the vehicles, then transform those vehicles INTO robot bodies/armor without removing them? That’s SOMETHING, I’ve never seen that before! They look neat as hell, and for shit’s sake at least NOT like all the other transforming toys the brand has been putting out. I’m in for the first few of them at least, to see how they turn out.