Ask Matty – December 1st Edition
DCClassics.Com Asks: We’re ecstatic about Starman’s alternate noggin’, but now we have to ask what about Jay Garrick… y’know, ol Flash 1? Will his value be kicked up a notch like Thom Kallor with old and young heads?
Although Jay Garrick will not include additional heads, fans will get to delight in a VUM helmet.
DCClassics.Com Asks: Will we see Miss Martian any time soon in the Young Justice 6″ line? DC/Mattel collectors already waited three years to get the JLA’s resident Martian and we’re all feeling a little weary about her being the one team meber to not receive a figure in the first five waves.
You’ll have to wait and see! In the interim, we do have Miss Martian in a Young Justice 2-pack to be released in Spring 2012.
MOTUClassics.Com: Are there any plans to make a white falcon to match the Temple of Darkness Sorceress? Vault wants one to go with his ever growing collection of Mattel birds.
We couldn’t afford to include a white bird with this release due to the orb stand, but can certainly look into this for future releases or weapon paks! What say you fans?
ItsAllTrue.Net Asks: Images of a more demon-like Vigo head sculpt are coming out of China. Is this head sculpt part of the Ghostbusters Classics line?
The Vigo figure does not come with another head and no demon-like version accessory or part exists.
Editor’s Note: You can see the pics here (via BehindtheToys.com). We’re still not sure what to make of it.
MOTUClassics.Com Asks: Has the schedule for MOTU reissues come more into focus since the announcement they were being discontinued? How far into 2012 are reissues planned? On that note, is Skeletor still slated to be available during the Demo-Man sale?
There will still be reissues every month in 2012, but all will be older figures from before Aug 2011. Figures after Aug 2011 will not go into a second run. Skeletor will indeed go back on sale during Demo-Man’s sale.
We need your questions for the next round!
Submit your suggestions on the ItsAllTrue.net Forums…
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the hell is a VUM helmet?
We assumed Vac-U Metal? Admittedly, an acronym of a short hand word is ill-advised…
When did that Vigo head pop up? I want one for Slimeblower Ray!!!!!!!!
I think that Vigor head is not going to happen, if you check the same page at the bottom there’s 2 Louis Tully’s heads also and they only released one.
No, the colander head did come with Vinz.
In the photo I saw was one normal head and another “possessed”, in the release it came the normal head, the head with the metallic thing and the dog head
Mattel, Lying!? Puh-Lease!
OK, um, boy are they spinning the Plastic Man thing as hard as they can!
Really? Plastic Man is a mass popular character? REALLY?
(keep in mind I’m not anti-Plaz, just learning the whole Flashpoint crap makes me really wonder where common sense has gone, ya know? Esp. given the whole “no new Brave and the Bold toys because that show is done” yet they’re going to spotlight an otherwise fairly obscure character from a very short comic book story arc as if he’s the new hotness? REALLY?)
I had a good laugh at all the canned answers to the Plastic Man “Whaa…?” questions. Reading all of these back-to-back, it first sounds defiant, and then a little like denial, and then it starts to sound a little apologetic. You can almost hear: ‘But we thought you’d LIKE a mass-murdering psychopath in Bright Primary Colours* (with no accessories)…’
That said, I liked when they turned the tables and chastised everyone for extrapolating trends from a single data point. “So we screwed up wave 1. Doesn’t *necessarily* mean we will in wave 2, as well! Math!”
*JLA #25
i think the plas thing has a lot to do w/ their unnatural relationship to geoff johns… remember when mattel tried to build him up by giving him credit for selling every dc comic book currently in print? right… he wanted a plas, so by god, they gave him a plas! i guess when you’re johns’ gimp, you do whatever he asks once he lets you out of the box.
i am reminded too, in the answer to the vigo head, that mattel doesn’t know/understand that we all have the internet now, and can find incontrovertible truth w/ relative ease. oh well… we saw the damned head, and it makes sense to have that… but they likely intend that for a “refresh” later on and don’t want to spoil things… even though we can clearly see the man behind the curtain.
last note i’d like to touch on… the mega cheap looking painted WWE belts… firstly, it’s not just the paint that makes those belts look jank, they are made of cheaper plastic and they look like the belts that come w/ unlicensed wrestler knockoff figures you buy from the dollar tree like “zombie behatted wrestler” or “large public performance wrestler” or “jort marine wrestler in ballcap” the second problem is, there’s only so many belts, so they get to re-release each belt like a dozen times a year w/ ZERO redeco required to the belt… and the base figure is often little more than a head swap, so the only new expense for the elites figs is entrance gear IF they change entrance gear. show, for example, pretty much has been in the same gear since the guerrero era. again i say, there’s no excuse for cheaping out on 18 dollar figures.
The irony is that Plastic Man wasn’t even important in Flashpoint. He’s completely removed from what Geoff Johns was doing. He showed in an exceptionally poorly written (even for comics) mini-series that didn’t connect to the event at all. He just shows up in three issues, maybe appears in 20 pages total, and murders a few people in a disgusting manner. But maybe Fangirl just loved the FP: Legion of Doom mini?
And never mind that BatB Plastic Man is a consistent dud. I bought mine for $1 and now there’s a repackaged one hanging out on the very same pegs…
When relaunching a line that has seemingly stalled at retail, you “spice it up” with a character from a “hot” mini-series that affects the whole base of product. Who do you choose?
Main character and antagonist? Already in the works and announced.
Popular new look of a sure-fire seller? nope!
Hand-picked favorite of someone involved in the mini, yet (should have) no say in the toy releases? HOT DAMN!
You KNOW the Bat-Thomas would have sold, regardless of who was really under that mask. All kids would have seen is “Batman with new look” and moms would have bought it without much arguing.
I guess having a “Basic Plas” means any chance of Ralph coming are moot and forget about any “stretch” accessories.
My two points of complaint this round, Flashpoint Plastic Man aside, are the Fan Poll & the Watermarked images.
Does anyone think that MOTU Fan’s Choice (as clarified at ElkkThunder) sounds like anything but a raw deal? The Org picks ONE, the German equivalent of the Org picks ONE, and Mattel adds SIX? Six!? Why can’t the poll just have three or four choices? Why is Mattel adding six? And they’ve promised they won’t “stack the deck” with a ringer, but they also said similar things about the DC Fan Polls and all but one of them had results that could be predicted properly on day one.
The second part of Mattel choosing six is that’s eight total. If we apply some of the lessons learned from FanEx (and the first week of any Stat class) that means that a figure can win the vote with a whopping 13%. Leaving Mattel in the position of trying to sell a figure that up to 87% of subscribers didn’t even vote for. Duh.
Poe asked a question I kept forgetting to ask, about Mattel’s use of tiny little watermarked images. When Hasbro is trying to promote new figures, they send out (or send info on where to retrieve) GIANT images to all the folks on their media list. These photos have no watermark and I have continually poked fun at the sites that watermark the publically available images. Then, there’s Mattel who posts tiny thumbnails, with watermarks bigger than the product pictured, and only posts them in one place. They do this because it’s more important to promote their site (which may not even sell what’s pictured) than the product itself.
The answer Poe received, that the various sites are free to repost the watermarked pictures made me laugh. I know of more than a few sites (myself & Poe included) that don’t post the watermarked images, so that’s one more way Mattel is limiting their success.
You made a comment at Poe’s site about professional marketing people being responsible for these images, and I have to agree with you how ridiculous it is.
I’m pretty sure that pictures sell product better than any other method of marketing.
Here’s a great Matty example. There’s a link on their site today to a “Woody’s Roundup sale”. It links to one item. I had to search their news archive to find one mention of it (back in August) to find out what this actually is. There’s no follow-up in the news feed this week to mention that’s he’s on sale, either. He just is. Surprise.
There are two images provided by Matty to help sell this:
http://drh.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/Storefront/Site/matty/pb/images/1TSD23_fullsizeimage.jpg
&
http://drh2.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/Storefront/Company/matty/images/image/TSD23_fullsizeimage.jpg
Both are tiny. Neither give you any solid idea of what you’re buying. No out-of-package views. No zoom. No turnaround. There’s no scale mentioned in the description; clearly he’s a black and white repaint, but of what? There were multiple scales in the Toy Story 3 line. You must be 18 to purchase, but do you have to be 18+ to play with it?
For $20, you’re left in the dark, and that’s inexcusable in the Internet age.
Let’s compare to another company trying to clear out TS3 merchandise, with a toy called “Jessie’s Roundup”: http://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Jessie-s-Round-Up-5657
5 images; in package, and out. You can click or pan to zoom. Dimensions are provided in both Metric and Imperial (“Jessie figure measures over 2” (5 cm) tall”). There’s a recommended age guide for parents. And product reviews!! Links to similar products! (The “Related Products” link for Woody takes you to the MOTUC page. Brilliant.)
Lego has recently re-done their shop@home site, and there’s a sickening amount of flash now, too many stylized product avatars, instead of minifigs you can actually buy, oh, and their images are disgustingly hard to redistribute now that they’re all buried in flash. So they’re not fan-site friendly, either. But I bet that doesn’t hurt their sales in the least.
If you could ever blame poor web presence for a lack of sales, I think Matty’s site is the perfect case study.
Considering the lead time it takes to make a figure clearly Mattel thought FP Plastic Man might be a break out character from the mini and/or he was a familiar one that DCD wasnt doing already. But for some of the sites, you get five questions and you spend 3 of them harping on FP Plastic Man? Really? REALLY?
Agreed…that was ridiculous. You’d think they would screen the questions a little better as to garner more info from these guys. I also wish the sites could some how coordinate the questions too…lots of redundancy this round.
I still think that refusing to reissue any MOTUC figure made after a certain date is horse-flop. You’ve got the freaking moulds, why not use them?
Agreed, and that’s how you build the customer base. Given that there’s no real place to constantly pimp the line (saraba, Toyfare), they need to have that option for those getting in on the line late.
I mean, it’s kind of discouraging to go to Matty, see a cool figure and see that “never gonna be made again ever” tag. And ‘impulse buy’ doesn’t mean “go to ebay and overpay”
Double-agreed. That “gone for good” tag really helped make the decision of whether to start collecting MOTUC (as a later-entrant to the line) a no-brainer. There was no point for me to invest in collecting these when i would never see those key figures I had missed. (I’ve never considered ebay scalpers as an option for a hobby, btw)
See, the odd vibe I get from Mattel, it feels like they believe they’re PRIMARY market is the scalpers. The people who have no love for the line other than being able to buy and ‘flip’ for ‘big’ money. It seems the feeling is if the secondary market cools down that’s death, DEATH to Mattel.
I feel this is the completely wrong mentality to have. The scalpers are fickle and they generally KNOW that getting stuck with product that nobody will overpay for is a bad thing, and it’s time to shift to other things to swipe from normal collectors.
I think catering to the secondary market has been a driving force since day one of the line. I think many of the choices for figures are driven by this. Think about the ‘giants’. There’s no real heat for them among normal (um, sorry, you know, normal as far as fans and collectors go 🙂 ) folk but there’s an INTENSE amount of heat for the obsessive value-driven collector. “Gotta have those RARE European He-Man toys!!”.
But me, and I suspect many here, would probably been just as happy if not more so had that development and slot gone to Ram-Man or the Wind Raider.
For example, I have no connection with the ‘giants’. I don’t recall them in the cartoon (primary interest focus) and I had no idea they were from a canceled line (secondary interest, “collect them all”) because back then there wasn’t really ANY info on that, not that a 27 year old casual collector (deep into the anime madness) would have access to. Praise the internet! 🙂 So, for me, I don’t really have that much interest in those figures. I would probably buy them anyway just because they were released, but I sure wouldn’t have been excited by it.
Ahh, blah blah blah. Mattycollector is a force unto itself and isn’t interested in actually thinking, listening to us, the regular folk.
“Skeletor will indeed go back on sale during Demo-Man’s sale.”
Not according to the mattycollector sale announcement made a few days later. Slow clap for you, mattel.