It’s rambling time!!!

Every now and then, Shane Welin, a member of DioWarriors.com, holds a DW HANGOUT on google.com. It’s a chance for toy collectors from, in theory, all over to chat. However, most come from DioWarriors.com. At the last hangout, a topic was brought up about the state of toys in today’s world. In particular, the state of the plastic action figure. How will it survive? Will it survive? What will happen to the GI Joe brand since it’s the 50^th Anniversary and Hasbro is selling it only through Toys R Us? Death of GI Joe?!?!

This is how I see it. (there are a lot of thoughts going on here…)

To make a toyline successful:
-Support (the wave needs to be able to build on itself. Also primarily includes tv show and/or movie)
-Advertising
-Quality Product (includes good design>Sculpting>Colors>Paint Applications>Excution/Production)

-Overall Interest

-Character selection (Snake Eyes has 50+ versions, most starting from 2002)

-QUANTITY produced
-Price point

I’m gonna skip over most of those and just get to the point.

TOO MANY FIGURES ARE MADE!!!

I would love to point fingers and say a brand like He-Man rehashes the same characters too many times. GI Joe uses their Core to death. How many versions do we need of Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker figures?

I would love to say that wasting resources (like PLASTIC) on 5 Point Of Articulation figures will cause the death of the action figure and GI Joe.

I could say that lack of support is a great way to kill a series. Like what Sigma6 became (cartoon, but lack of new toys AND vice versa!). Or how GI Joe’s Pursuit of Cobra just fizzled out (even tho the movie was coming) with no love on small screen or big screen.

It’s tempting to point out that a single GI Joe figure in 80s was on average, $3 MSRP. It became $7 for the 2 packs from 2002-2005 (Could go back a couple years to RAH rehash packs just before the JvC theme). When Sigma 6 came out, an 8” basic figure was available for $8 MSRP. By 2007, a single 25^th Anniversary figure went for $6 MSRP. 2014, Retaliation figures were, on average, $10 for a single figure.

The way I see it, what will kill the action figure genre is not the plethora of competing toylines, but the amount of product created.

Being a fairly frequent TRU and Fred Meyer shopper (with a side of Target on occasion), all I see are masses amounts of plastic made by factories in China and companies trying hard to get the attention of a passer-by. Admittedly, I’ll check out Adventure Time or Regular Show product. But visiting the action figure section (which of course, is divided up by brand), is a sorry state of affairs. To this day, I can still find figures from the Avengers movie (2012), 1^st wave GI Joe Retaliation figures (Mar. 2013), even stuff like Green Lantern (2011), Captain America (2011), Dark Knight Rises (2012) and several others seem to still linger.

Fact is, the toy companies release the 1^st wave of movie toys one month before the movie release. They usually release the toys in very large numbers to saturate the market. A company like Hasbro will even back off on other lines to support whatever movie is being released. What I have found is that those wave1 toys clog the pegs to a choking point and the stores have a very hard time getting rid of them, even on clearance.  Successor waves, if produced, come in far smaller numbers to the point that they can be hard to find.

It is my opinion it’s that these 1^st waves of figures are going to kill the action figure toy genre. I’ll even spare the ‘kiddified’ versions if they were made in smaller number. But the fact is, these companies come up with certain numbers to produce what that they think will sell. Unfortunately, the inflated numbers for movie figures just kills the releases of successor waves.

And that’s my 2 cents.