No, I’m not dead. Moving on...
I’ve been thinking about toy prices lately. Price is something important to all of us, but it’s not something we all agree on. I’ve been looking over some of the IAT crew’s recent purchases in regards to this season’s newest movie toys and wondering why they spend good money on some of the things they buy. I thought I’d get back on my soapbox for today and talk about my problems with action figure pricing.
On Tuesday, I reviewed one of the first Lego sets from the upcoming Toy Story 3. And, as I mentioned then, I wasn’t able to escape with just that one piece of movie merchandise. Lego and Mattel both had TS3 product on the shelf that day. I naively thought I could just look through the characters Mattel was offering. After all, I wasn’t planning on buying any. But that’s how they get you. Minutes later, I was handing over the cash for my new Seek ‘N’ Destroy Sparks.
This weekend, the Four Horsemen announced the acquisition of their first license, The Outer Space Men. The 4H provided some images of the figures in the line and, as usual, amazed us with their work. While we were looking at all the pretty pictures though, we realized we weren’t quite sure what we were looking at. Who were The Outer Space Men? We didn’t have much more than a passing awareness of them, so we hit the books. And what we found out only made the 4H versions more awesome.
Forty-two years ago the space race between the United States and Russia was in full swing, and a full wave of action figures known as “The Outer Space Men” was released that caught the imagination of a generation. Although the initial salvo of characters was well received, the characters that were to be part of the second wave, collectively referred to as “The World of Tomorrow”, never made it into production and currently only exist as elaborate prototypes / production samples in the homes of a couple of fortunate collectors.
Ask Matty
May 1st, 2010
Last year, we featured eighteen Most Requested articles asking for figures from all over the toy kingdom. The requests ranged from cancelled lines to current lines, from 2" Minimates to 8" Hellboy figures, and we even threw in a juice drink for good measure. At the end of the year, we started our first annual tradition, a runoff between those requests to see which one was really the Most Requested Figure of 2009. Our readers chose Mera (DC Comics) for that honor. This year (with a little help from Geoff Johns) Mera is getting her first action figure from DC Direct.
This year, we've broken the voting into three semi-final rounds and over the last seven days votes have been pouring to choose which four of our first twelve requests will go on to the Final Round this December. With over 1500 votes cast and counted, it's time for the results.
Last night on Facebook, Matty gave us our first look at Count Marzo in package.
