Ask Matty – December 1st Edition
We missed the deadline for this round, but her are the links to the sites that did submit their questions in on time…
| Ask Mattel Around the Web: Red Links Are Active | ||
We need your questions for the next round!
Submit your suggestions on the ItsAllTrue.net Forums…
nothing much this round, except hopes for future playsets in MOTU and even DC, and basically wait for the next round of news near NYTF.
Mattel just sucks….they really do…
Agreed
I’ll have the answers up for my site tomorrow. I almost never post anything on my site over the weekend, due to low internet traffic at that time. Hopefully those answers will provide something to the people.
And they’re up. Hope they provide some sort of insight.
Nice to see Nekron’s scythe might still be on the way someday. Mine is using the silver Scareglow halberd from the Weapons Rack. It looks pretty good, but getting the right one would be nice.
Nice. The only thing I have scythe-like is the scythe that comes with the NECA Dante from the game Dante’s Inferno. It’s wicked looking, so I thought it might be cool for Nekron to hold it. It’s not easy though.
Your site had some really good questions for Matty this month, so nice work there. It’s good to see that the whole Nekron Scythe “thing” is still a concern, and that Matty’s attempted Jedi mind-trick failed to make us all forget that we still need that accessory. They should just make the damn thing and package it with Larfleeze or Saint Walker. If you bought the sub, then I’m about 100% certain that you already own a Nekron. So how ’bout a little something for, y’know, the effort?
Also (and I know I can’t speak for everyone) but for me personally, unless the character is a scaled down, 1st appearance Swamp Thing, or maybe one of the Endless, you can just go ahead and keep your Vertigo characters out of my damn DC subscription. It’s bad enough I have to buy a Red Hood that appeared in, like, two storylines, and yet ANOTHER Flash figure. And now someone is actually requesting characters from “Fables”? Please, get a f’n life. The sub for the popular, more recognizable comic characters barely went through and we still have a list a mile long of integral pre-Crisis and 80’s/90’s figures to get to. You want Vertigo or Wildstorm or Milestone figures? Go lobby DC Collectibles, or whatever they’re called. Sorry to turn bitter, but these requests for fringe characters drive me nuts. It’s a waste of a question.
I wouldn’t mind a separate Sandman sub similar to the Watchmen sub so we can get some figures of the Endless.
No problem with that. And I think a lot of other people would be on board for that, too. I wouldn’t even fuss if Destiny, Dream, or Death showed up in the sub. Those characters are at least fairly popular and have some connection to the DC Universe proper. But “Fables”? Come on. That’s fringe. At best. Yeah, it might be a critical darling, and I know it has a loyal fan base, but those characters are just not well-known enough to merit action figures.
I read Fables too, but the only figure I’d want from that in a DC sub is Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf). Unfortunately, they’d probably just reuse Constantine’s body with a new head, tie, and hands (maybe not even the hands). So he would be an easy choice, but Vertigo should be separate.
There are still plenty of “relevant until 15 months ago” characters we haven’t gotten. No need to dig back a decade or two when you have the entire Birds of Prey still unaccounted for (yeah, Huntress, a figure we should have gotten back in DC Superheroes, is finally on the way, but no Oracle and that piss-poor Silver Age Black Canary means the team is far from complete).
Hey, I hear ya. I’m still praying for a Heckler/Ambush Bug two-pack, so that should tell you how many characters are on my wish list before I’m ready to even start thinking about Vertigo characters!
I’ll take Irwin. and Will Payton and Damage.
and FA Kyle. re-use the Red Lantern boots and all we really need is the new sculpting for forearm/hand gauntlets.
I’m not that familiar with Damage, but I’d be up for any of those guys! Especially Kyle and Ambush Bug.
Answers have been a little more upbeat this go around, maybe Scott is feeling the Christmas spirit.
I don’t think Scott is the only one who answers the questions. In fact, unless they’re directed specifically at him, it’s possible he’s not the one answering most of them.
Could be. I kinda get the sense he is and tells us its employees to have the deniability if people don’t like an answer.
He’s not even the head of every department though. He gets the questions and sends them off to the people who head the various brand departments. He’s not going to be able to answer WWE questions, for instance.
I gotcha, I just never ask anything but MOTUC questions so my responses always sound like they are coming from the same person. You are probably right about the other brands, I just don’t pay attention to them as much.
I still think the whole “We’ll never re-issue figures again” stance is horse-flop. Okay, I understand they don’t want warehouse space taken up by crates full of Cy-Chops, but if they polled the fans, say for example as to which 12 figures they would like to see re-released in the upcoming year, that would give them more use out of the moulds, allow fans to complete their collections, and get some more cash. As for never releasing CGM again, why not re-do him as a travelling convention exclusive?
grundy spends a lot of time at church doesn’t he?
on the one hand, i think the sorceress was a savvy move, having a little less product going in december (as there is still a HUGE cost getting the new stuff that month) but on the other hand, i think sneaking her in on black friday, unannounced, and selling through all the stock, after publicly declaring a different sale date for her was beyond assy. mattel puts themselves in these positions, don’t they? it’s not as if she wasn’t already tooled and shipped for the cons… when granamyr slipped sept, she should have been put up then, to fill his slot, and we all would have had budget for her and they could have announced her in june to give her some lead time. but no, they chose the assy route.
i also think that given who CGM is, and what’s coming in dec, it seems an absolute no-brainer to make a small additional run of the character to coincide w/ the sale of the castle itself. NO BRAINER!!! i don’t care if he’s “30th anniversary” or not, he’s the guardian of the castle, and he looks like the castle, and he sold out in 10 minutes which no character has done in better than a year… not doing an additional release is LITERALLY leaving money on the table. a small run, 1 figure for every castle made, would be great sense, great PR, and an easy sale… why, why do they make it so damned hard to be a motuc fan?
that dude that asked the question on the WWE diva buck, he asked that all wrong… a more generic buck would be nice, it doesn’t need to be any less muscular though and knowing mattel, they’ll read that as less articulated, which they don’t need to be either… the buck is fine as it for articulation because the girls are action oriented and need to be able to move. i’d actually like the torso ball to get a better range of motion, but what they have now is really minimal for a pro-wrestling girl… but the sculpt… again, these girls are in shape. the buck is actually inadequate for the buffer girls, eve torres, natalya, tamina, kaitlyn, the recently released beth phoenix… it’s about perfect for the slimmer girls, ala aj lee, layla, rosa mendez, alicia… that dude needs to take a closer look at the girls he’s buying toys of. the WWE does not accept soft girls, not anymore. in years past, sure, you could be stacy keibler and have tone but not definition: those days are gone, the girls are defined and lean these days. ‘cept for vickie guerrero. that said, they need two bucks, one a little more muscular, and one about like they have now, but both need to ditch the pre-sculpted costume elements so they can paint those details on (which they’re doing now, even over sculpted elements that don’t match up) again, generic bucks make buck lines work.
“grundy spends a lot of time at church doesn’t he?”
Not trying to be a jerk, but are you familiar with the nursery rhyme?
Sure… My comment was kind of dependent on it. :). It was supposed to funny, but I guess it missed the mark.
to be fair, TODS was already causing shipping delays in Black Friday sales. go read the Matty FB page, where people are complaining/whining about having to wait for their orders already. there’s no way she could have been moved up to Sept if they have trouble moving her up ONE month.
Their inability to ship is irrelevant. She was already produced and stateside months ago. There’s no reason besides incompetence that she couldn’t have been slotted in for September once they figured out that granamyr would slip.
Really? I had the impression orders were being held up because she had JUST come in?
and looking at the Matty FB page this morning, there are numerous rants from people whinging on about the Hoverboard pre-orders. Matty already claims there is an email being sent out with instructions how to confirm if you have problems, etc. It seems to me that most of the complaints are people who have had to adjust their billing/shipping info since pre-ordering.
and if this is happening with the Hoverboard, imagine what next year will bring? Neitlich will have to go into protective custody!
they’ve been selling her as the convention exclusive since about february… i doubt they were commissioning a separate run of production figs for each con she attended… so that would require that the run of the fig was produced and warehoused domestically as of around jan… i suppose it’s conceivable that they were being warehoused in hong kong, but honestly, given the social unrest going on there, and the unscrupulous nature of some of the business interests, that seems monumentally naive (so that’s likely what mattel did) and then just ordered shipments sent over a couple times over the year… though, if they attend a con w/ say 1000 units and they only sell 300, what are they doing w/ that 700 units between cons? that seems weird. if you were going to have to store them here potnetially between cons, why not have the whole run stored here?
Just one more question springs to mind after reading all those so-so MOTUC answers: Spin Whiz?! If they bring that guy out before Mantenna, Modulok, or Two-Bad, I will be . . . displeased. Displeased at the top of my lungs.
I gotta admit, this is probably the absolute most clear-cut round of answers yet.
Yeah, Spin-Whiz, the Great Black Wizard, Bandwidth, Gladiator, Tufos, Beast Lord– there are a LOT of newly-minted characters cropping up, which apparently have NOTHING to do with the 30th Anniversary Celebration (or Figure Sub).
The really sad (pathetic?) thing about this is: I want figures of all of them, TOO! [^)
But yeah. Priorities!
Who are Bandwidth and Tufos? Have you got links? The first sounds like a G.I. Joe character, the other sounds like an alien made out of bean-curd.
Bandwidth is (strangely?!) a New PREternian warrior. I think that the back of his head can be seen at He-Ro’s funeral in the first new “Powers of Grayskull” Mini-Comic. His existence was elaborated on by ToyGuru in a MattyCollector Forum shortly thereafter, otherwise I wouldn’t even be aware of is name!
Tufos is the new Lord of Avion, taking over the job following Stratos’ death in the most recent “Ultimate BattleGround”. There isn’t a picture (that I’m aware of), again, ToyuGuru name-dropped him in a recent “Ask Matty”.
Thanks for that. I tried doing some internet searches, and kept coming up blank.
Oop! I forgot Red Shadow on the list of newcomers. This one was also at He-Ro’s funeral, and also not seen very clearly there. I thought I had left someone out..