Ask Matty – November 15th Edition
We missed the deadline for this round, but her are the links to the sites that did submit their questions in on time…
| Ask Mattel Around the Web: Red Links Are Active | ||
We need your questions for the next round!
Submit your suggestions on the ItsAllTrue.net Forums…
I call MASSIVE BS about the cowl was never to have that feature with the knife and that Red Hood choice. Think in a past q&a they said it would fit under the cowl.
I would like to know why my MattyCollector orders are traveling an additional 10,500 kilometers (6525 miles!) from Ontario California, to cross the Atlantic ocean twice (once to go to Malmo, Sweden, just to turn around, cross the Atlantic ocean again) and return to Ontario, Canada?
It is now taking an entire month or more to make this ridiculous trip. Does DR know that Canada is on the same continent as the United States, and while we may be “International”, they don’t need to send our orders to Sweden first?
this is where you’re wrong rich… canada has a long and rich history of making sure that all their freight is OKd by the swedes, dating all the way to the time when leif and thorvald erikson landed on nova scotia and set up the first ikea for the mi’kmaq. 🙂
It’s not just Canada. Some south American and Caribbean Customers have received “Swedish Packages” before. Matty already gave an answer:
so then why are my Sams and Constantines currently in INDIANA, several states EAST of me? ;/
(hoping for tomorrow!)
is it me, or is IAT missing more of these Q&As lately than they’ve hit? do i smell some matty fatigue setting in?
It’s not Matty fatigue. I’ve just got too much on my plate. I need to get caught up and quit missing the deadlines.
It’s just really tough to find something to ask that won’t get an ambiguous answer or hasn’t already been answered on their boards. At least that is my finding, I certainly wouldn’t speak for IAT.
I find asking hypotheticals sometimes leads to at least some thought out answers.
It is an art, isn’t it?
Speaking of things I’m behind on, I owe you an email, Jon! I’ll hit you back this weekend.
Wow that red hood question sucks. The person asking it did a great job but the answer makes me sad. That is by far the 2nd worst looking figure DCUC has done (the 1st being Flashpoint Plastic Man). I will collect anything that DCUC does that is not the new 52 crap, but this is pushing it for me. This is not my Red Hood and because they made this one there is no way they will make the leather jacket version that I would want. Maybe it is time to let DCUC die. I love getting their figures but if they are going to put crap like this in the sub then I don’t think I want to sign up for any more subs in the future.
The fact we had three people (mine was AFI’s “more delicately worded” half of their Q) complaining about this choice out of the current five sites listed, shows people are NOT happy with this. Throwing the blame off on the 4H isn’t cool, either. I hope the next time their contract gets renewed, they bring this up and try to use it as a bargaining tool, if only to get Matty to stop throwing them under the blame train.
We KNOW how this decision making works, and it’s already been made clear to us that DCUC was scuttled to push the nu52, hence the nu52 S/B and the rebranded All-Star line. Whoever writes these is either being extremely lazy, doesn’t care about their job or who they’re blaming, and/or doesn’t care what their fan base thinks. The fact someone else mentioned the lack of Mattel product in the action figure aisle and they blew it off, is proof of that. For example, I mentioned in the ML3 Doom review my local WMs cleared ML out after w2, and the Target is clogged on a mix of the previous waves (and MU), so I’m pretty SOL unless I go online and get charged more for the wave (and take my chances on the variants!). Except for Iron Man, as people are tired of seeing his variants in either scale, so he’s cheaper than retail. I don’t even expect to see the DC All-Stars at this point, as far as Matty is concerned. The “evergreen” Bat-lines aren’t moving, and the same TDKR MM Batmen haven’t moved since June, and I’m not talking about just my area, either. I was in Louisville in early August and the TDKR were already on clearance at several stores, barely a month after the movie came out.
It was never stated it would fit on the knife….lol
The only reason to even read these things is for the laughs, Iean really have they ever answered a question?
*should read I mean really not Iean really
Does one need to have a special log-in or something to actually read the stuff over at Kastor’s Korner? S**t’s always unreadable.
Regarding the Preternia site’s questions, what the swiven Hells does “Plus down” mean? SPEAK PLAIN ENGLISH, NOT CORPORATE BUZZWORDESE!!! Does that mean they will cut accessories and spare heads? THEN BLOODY WELL SAY SO!!!
And if Whiplash was a “one-off” Extra 200X Head event, what was Fisto, then? Or Kronis? Or Moss Man? Or Stinkor? Or the upcoming Ram-Man?
I believe I have made my point. The varlets open their mouths, and balderdash spews out.
They make it sound like Whiplash’s alternate head was still needing to be modified to be more “classicized.” I’m guessing like merging the vintage head with the Millennium features. I prefer Millennium over Vintage 100%, but even I can admit the head looks off on the Classics purely vintage update body.
If the 4H chose that Red Hood, for shame on them. They should have kicked him off the plan and put in a different character if they weren’t going to put in a more recognizable look.
Right on. When the only distinguishing feature of a character is a helmet that most are used to seeing on a completely different body and a large chunk of your basically PREPAID* buying audience is asking “WTF?” then you might want to rethink some of your decisions.
*(I only say prepaid, as there is no allowance for late comers to “buy in” to the sub, but they’ll drop you if your payment doesn’t go through! Close enough to “prepaid” for me.)
Context clues, my friend. They meant that if they reissued the figures for retail, they would indeed remove some accessories.
except that doesn’t make much sense… so the zos, dak and dac, go completely accessory-less, and stratos what, loses the back pack? you can “plus down” grizzlor and logically still have a figure in the package, but how does one “plus down” tytus?
besides which, didn’t they just answer in the last Q&A that if a movie line got produced, it wouldn’t be motuc anyways? i seem to recall reading that just recently. so the whole thing is moot anyways. they’re not plus downing motuc, the movie line would be an entirely separate endeavor… or at least, they vary answers enough to say that no one answer is correct.
found the quote:
AFi:You often been quoted as saying that we most likely wouldn’t get a Castle Grayskull playset unless it was a “movie year.” Since tooling is SO expensive and it looks like a MOTU feature film is getting a bit closer (director named and new writers) are you looking at elements from the playset that could be swapped out or reused if it would fit the movie design?
TG: Not at all. While I could see Classics ( as a line) being part of a hypothetical mainstream relaunch in a small way during a movie year, the movie is and always has been its own thing. This classics castle is designed for nostalgia and fans. If a movie happens it will likely not use “classics” parts. We don’t want to restrict the imagination of filmmakers or other future creators by forcing them to use an existing toy in their design (if you will).
And yet, isn’t the REASON that a new MOTU film would get made is because of the iconic nature of the property? No matter how you cut it, the basic concept is ‘tech barbarians fight magic’, right?
Then again, the GI Joe movie had very little GI Joe in it, the Transformers movies have not so much Transformers and let us not forget the magic of Battleship… 🙂
(For the record, I thought the ’80s MOTU film had pretty darn nifty art direction and design and they did manage to work in some small ‘shout outs’ to the toys here and there. It always seemed to me that the Space He-Man cartoon owed a lot to that movie. )
i actually thought we were supposed to forget battleship…
i just think it’s really odd that he implies that classics might not ve involved in a re-release if/when a movie year comes around, as i thought that had been the mantra for some years “you’ll get more stuff offered in the line if we get a movie.” but if the movie is it’s own thing, then we might not get a damned thing offered for classics in a mainstream relaunch. and classics is in no way imposing on the imagination of the movie makers, every previous iteration of motu is already doing that. motuc has added NOTHING design wise to the mythos or offered inspiration. at best, it’s introduced a couple new characters, only half of whom would any respectible motu fan actually use in a movie.
but it’s also funny that beedo’s commentary on the uselessness of their verbiage is so right on… apparently, the accessory pieces that we buy separately from the toys, and insist that the figures themselves come with of we balk at the purchase, that we clearly consider essential to getting a character correct… mattel regards those as bonuses. those are not “value-added items” those are essential to releasing the piece. it would be like GE considering a power plug a “plus up” for a blender.
To be fair, remember the days when you bought a computer accessory and cables were not included? Yeesh, I recall buying my external CD-Rom drive for my Apple Mac Performa 476 and shelling out like an extra $50 for the SCSI cable and a SCSI terminator plug.
Butttt yeah, it’s not like Mattel makes the accessories available in some kind of add-on or ‘power UP!’ pack. I’d suggest that as a good revenue stream for the online store but Matty would probably do the Bandai thing and make a second head or weapon cost as much as the figure…PLUS shipping. :/
Oh, I was able to infer what they meant about cutting “extras,” John, but my point remains: why don’t they just say that instead of making up nonsense phrases like “plus down”?
Seriously, how does that work semantically or syntactically? Surely plus is up, minus is down? We’ve already established their spell-checking and punctuation is slipshod, now they’re just stringing words together in random patterns: perpetuation of obfuscation through neologistic flimflammery.*
* See, now even if you don’t recognise any of the sesquipedalian grandiloquence in that last sentence (or this one, come to that), you can easily look up the words, and glean a meaning, because each word means something specific by itself and complements the other words around it. Okay, it’s smug, showy, pompous, and self-important, but it means exactly what it says. “Plus down” is just the infuriating idiom of little boys in suits trying to make themselves sound big and clever in front of the grown-ups: a phrase that implies addition and reduction at the same time, making it meaningless.
Or to put it simply, it’s a load of horse-flop.
plus down is the new “tool’d”
oh, they’re tools alright…
I really dislike when they say it was a choice by 4H. It seems like a cop-out to me. I am sure 4H gives their input when it comes to figure and design choices, but I am pretty sure Mattel can step in and say, “We want the Red Hood too, but we want the jacketed version” and i doubt 4H will say “No, this version or we walk”. I would much rather hear them say “It was a new 52 costume, we like the design, etc” rather than say it was a 4h decision.
especially since we hear, periodically, about a design alteration from the in-house team, or see work that they credit to their design guy… and of course, no brand manager fails to pass a figure before it goes to production, that’s kind of his job.
plus licensor approval having to sign off on ANY design. in this case, DC.
“We have reached out to corp affairs to get an answer to this question. Sorry we do not have one at this time.”
Critical Mess needs to ask that same question next month. 30 days is more than enough time for corp affairs to come up with an answer. (which will likely be BS)
You said it. How many times have we seen “We are investigating this,” or “we are looking into this,” and we never hear anything more about it? I think at least one or two months a year all these sites should dedicate their time with the Matty team to follow-up questions. Hold their feet to the fire a little bit.
Seconded!
J-Legs Unlimited, anyone?
They need to make the figures appealing to new AND OLD consumers. If retail accessories are cut, then throw a weapons pack for customers make their “complete” versions(make these Weapon packs evergreen items on matty to drive more business to the site.)
Let’s Take He-Man, Beastman, Skeletor, Stratos, Trap Jaw and MAA as sample figures.
He-Man: New pieces 2 (new symmetrical Forearms that can use the NA He-Man hands) Everything else is plain old he-man except that He can hold his sword aloft now.
Skeletor: Here they can go many ways about the figure: True vintage toy (basically the DBS Skeletor buck on the normal head painted like BA Skeletor), Filmation (New head, new bare forearms, Stratos sock feet) 200X Style, New head, new forearms, Demo-Man feet.
Man-at-Arms: All he needs is a new back piece without the slots for his weapons, repainted Mustache head, and Palace Guard Right side armor on a palace guard buck with reddish boots.
Beastman: Carnivus right hand and maybe new removable shinguards to make a more “200X” Beastman.
Stratos: We can go 2 ways about him: Filmation version which is same old stratos, but with carnivus shins, hands and Keldor boots. 200X Stratos, which would have Carnivus hands and shins, Flipshot boots and Beastman feet. (New jetpack with handles based on the Beastman whip design…) Both versions could have a Staff of Avion and make Stratos Own an actual weapon.
Trap Jaw: Well we have the mini comics green (Only the mech arm would be new) Filmation, which is a repaint of normal trap jaw but white eyes, or 200X which would be same old Trap Jaw with painted teeth, MEF crotch and a clip-on “Shieldpiece” for his mech arm.