On January 15th, I anxiously awaited 11am CST. I was ready to order Battle Armor He-Man and reissue Beast Man. The time came and the RSOD started up, but I kept on trucking. I got the items in my cart. I checked out. I paid. I was done! In the excitement, I somehow failed to notice that a Harvey Dent had found his way into my cart. Had I put it there? Had Digital River's server gotten befuddled and added one for me? I'll never know.
The first He-Man toy I remember getting was the Road Ripper. And packaged with that Road Ripper was my very first He-Man figure. Now, I knew that, in the cartoon, He-Man wore a harness. I didn't care. Once I opened him and got some play out of his action feature, I was sold. No, as a kid, I didn't have a standard He-Man figure. I had Battle Armor He-Man and he was much, much cooler. Even now, so many years later, when I think of those old figures, when I think of He-Man, I remember Battle Armor He-Man first.
Sometimes as toy collectors, we can look across our displays and, no matter how many toys we have, only see the ones that aren’t there. They are the missing figures. The characters toy companies never got around to, never thought were important enough, or worse – the figures companies felt the need to show us at comic-con in the “We’re Never Gonna Make These” case…
We're going to try something a little different today. Well, it's not really different then what we normally do, but we don't usually take pictures. You know the drill. You get up and you think you could get lucky today. You get ready and put on some nice clothes so you can at least feel presentable if you happen to get checked out. You hop in the car and travel to whichever place you've deemed best to satisfy your desires. You arrive with giddy anticipation. It's now or never, you tell yourself as you round that last corner. What awaits? Will it be great joy or intense dissatisfaction?
That's right, you're on a Toy Run!
Today on Facebook, Mattel posted images of the April Club Eternia figure, Evil Lyn:
Last month, the IAT staff sat down and beat out our Jan 15th Mattel questions. We bounced around a few ideas and, like we always do, we got off track. This time talking about Masters of the Universe Classics and the future of the line. Vault had done a little spreadsheet work and came up with a rough estimate of how many figures Mattel would be putting into the line if they fulfilled their 2016 goal including monthlies, quarterly bonuses, convention exclusives, and subscription exclusives. Then he made a list of all the previously released MOTU toys and added in some likely non-Filmation candidates that didn’t get a toy but could be done now. Vault was surprised to find that the numbers turned out to be about the same.
