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.
I’m a little ashamed to be mentioning this so late. I'm generally fairly observant, so when I miss something obvious, it annoys me. Luckily, no one here at IAT noticed it right away either. What I’m talking about is the Toy Fair coverage of the Mattel booth. Specifically, the Trigon C&C. Anyone else notice he has a cloth cape now? Trigon didn’t have a cloth cape when they originally showed us his sculpted figure. Originally, he had a nice plastic cape that fit in with all the other plastic capes in the line.
Another Toy Fair has come and gone, and Noisy was nice enough to compile all those different links and bits of information into a comprehensive post. I’m sure glad that’s not my job. He's given you the facts, now it's time for the opinions. Mr. Rant style.
I spend a disproportionate amount of my income on Mattel toys. As a result, many of my Rants are aimed at Mattel. I don’t like that. I want to spread it around, so to speak. Last night, Noisy gave me a revelation. I don’t have a lot to rant about on other companies because they’re not doing as good a job tempting me with their product as Mattel does. That, he said, is a rant unto itself...
I know that toy companies sure aren’t perfect, and I don’t expect them to be. But, what I do expect is for them to think and try. So here are a few pointers to help out those companies that are a little confused. If they’ll follow a few of these suggestions, they’re bound to get featured in my column more often than they do now.
I have to say that I was really excited for Toy Fair 2010. While I do look forward to the unveiling of the thousands of dollars of stuff that Mattel is going to have me buying this year, they aren’t the reason I was excited. I was rather enthusiastic over what Playmates was going to show us. Why Playmates you ask? Well, because Playmates has the Star Trek license.
Toy Guru recently announced his promotion to brand manager of the action figure line based on the upcoming Green Lantern movie. First, congratulations. Second, there’s an issue I wanted to address before it’s too late.
Mattel, Toy Guru, I want you to stop doing 5 inch Movie Masters.
“Why are Moss Man’s ears fuzzy,” was the cry of many a teary-eyed MOTU Fan on the .Org and at the Facebook page last week. Me? I don’t really care either way. I know how the industry works in regards to prototypes and my subscription was submitted months ago. Some version of Moss Man is coming no matter what and personally I don’t care if I can see his ears or not. I was surprised at how much flocking Mattel had been able to load him up with. This, as I recall, was what fans wanted when we first heard there would be problems. But instead of being grateful that Mattel was able to deliver an almost completely flocked (and very vintage) Mossy or reasonable that it would be an easy fix, the noisiest among us MOTU fans tore their clothes and gnashed their teeth because his ears had disappeared under a layer of flock. Always a classy bunch.
