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 waits? Will it be great joy or intense dissatisfaction?

Anything can happen on a Toy Run…

Toys R Us. Yet again. We all have the stores we frequent. The ones where we know we can find stuff. The ones where we have a rough idea of when they put out new toys. I think it’s safe to say that, for a lot of us, none of those places are a Toys R Us. I don’t mean to pick on my former employer. I spent five good years helping to run one, but in the years since I left, I find that I very rarely need to go back. The main two toy lines that I collect are MOTU Classics, which isn’t in stores, and DC Classics, which don’t really show up at Toys R Us. Ironically though, it’s that DCUC vs. MOTUC 2pk that has got me making these repeat trips. They haven’t been completely in vain. I did find a TRU Exclusive Arcee that I decided to pick up. And, I found that swanky TRU Exclusive Batman.* Speaking of, it’s been two weeks and we’ve sold through half the case. I’ve heard that a lot of these are selling through. That’s good for the line, I suppose. Now, if TRU will just fill up those six pegs with some new figures.

* – Notice the only thing I’m buying there are TRU Exclusives? Yeah, it’s not the best place to find new stuff.

Anyway, on this particular visit, I wasn’t hoping to find the MOTU/DC 2pks. I knew they were there. Vault had called and let me know he’d found a set for himself and that I needed to get over there and snag the other two. Unfortunately, he had to be at work and couldn’t wait for me to get there. When I arrived, about twenty minutes later, I was greeted by this:

Yep. The empty peg. The sign that you were too late. I wasn’t happy. I stewed for a bit, I admit it. Ultimately, I hoped that they at least went to a fellow collector, or maybe someone that didn’t even know He-Man was back. (That’d be nice, but they didn’t. We have a small collecting community where we live and I ran into the lucky guy a couple days later at Target. He told me of his luck and of his success reselling them to another poor sap that paid double). I was so bummed that not even a cardboard cut-out Ford Explorer could cheer me up.

Isn’t that precious? You can buy a big expensive dinosaur and have your JP figures hope against hope to not die in a little cardboard SUV! Usually, that’s good for a chuckle, but after being dealt defeat I was a little too zombified to care. I walked the other aisles looking at what was new. Maybe a more naive part of me hoped to find my just missed toys misplaced in some other aisle. In reality, I was just trying not to leave empty-handed. It’s a ridiculous thing that I shouldn’t admit to, but I bet a lot of us do it. I’ve gotten better over the years. Sure, I’ll still walk around a bit while I’m annoyed and window shop, but rarely do I purchase anymore. This time, there were some nice options. TRU had reset their shiny, new Iron Man 2 section.

There’s a lot to like in this section if you haven’t checked it out yet. I don’t think I’ve made a big fuss about it on the blog, but I’m a huge War Machine fan. I love the look. I like Rhodey’s character. I like the whole concept. The War Machine Mighty Mugg caught my eye first, but I was good. I was impressed by the cleverness of “Tony Starch”, but I don’t buy Mr. Potato-Heads. Out of all the new items, perhaps the most impressive was the Red Vortex Racing Car… no, I’m kidding.* It’s the new 3 3/4″ figures for IM2. Hasbro looks to have gone to a lot more trouble to make these toys nice compared to the regular MU line. They also have mixed in concept armors and comic figures with the movie designs. That means there are a lot of nice pieces in the lineup right off the bat, including two really cool War Machines (one comic, one film). Again, I was good and I resisted, but don’t be surprised if you see a War Machine review here and there before the movie debuts!

* – Okay, some props for the Indy car, right? I mean there is one in the trailer… No? But Whiplash can attack it, right? Okay, okay…

In my wandering about the toy store, I discovered a strange aisle eleventy billions miles from the toy aisle (that’d be the one with the action figures) where there were all these DC figures and vehicles. I had found Imaginext.

Now, I’m familiar with Imaginext. They’ve got some pretty cool toys for the wee tots with castles, pirates, space aliens, dinosaurs, and Batman. Recently, with the demise of the Super Friends line, the rest of the DCU has been folded into Imaginext. Or, at least, that’s the plan. There still aren’t a lot of non-Batman items in the DC Imaginext line just yet. Even though I knew about the line, I’d never really taken the time to look at them. I’m a DCUC collector first and foremost and I’m just not interested in other scales when it comes to DC figures any more. I’m going to stick with DCUC until the end and then, I think that may mark the end of my DC toy buying. We’ll see. Anyway, even though I knew about Imaginext, I was shocked by the sheer number of vehicles.

Just at the one store, I’m seeing a Batmobile, a Batcopter, the Batwing, a Bat-Humvee?, Jokermobile, Jokercycle, a Joker van, and Penguin Sub. I think it was the Penguin sub that really got me (And I know it’s just a repaint of the regular Imaginext sub, but still, it’s cool). So why did all this annoy me? Because I’m looking at these vehicles, and each one may offer some incompatibility, but they’re roughly the size Infinite Heroes vehicles would need to be. I had wanted to find Green Lantern and his jet for this article, because I know that that particular piece is a great demonstration of what I’m talking about. I’ve got Mattel’s promo picture below, and although I’ve yet to find it, look closely at the picture. Notice the couple extra inches of clearance in the nose? That cockpit will hold Infinite Heroes. Now, I don’t know if Batman will fit in the Batmobile or if Joker can take the van for a spin. Frankly, I need to do a little more research on that front, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the real promise of 3 3/4″ figures, in my mind, is vehicles and maybe a playset or two. G.I. Joe has been proving that for over twenty-five years. Dark Knight and Avatar movie toys both offered large-scale items in their 3 ¾” lines. But DCIH has yet to fulfill that promise. Maybe the retailers just aren’t interested or the figures don’t move fast enough for Mattel to even ask retailers, but that’s somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy in my eyes. If there were vehicles, at least a few to test the waters, it would help the figures sell.

Even I would be tempted by the line given the opportunity for vehicles and playsets. And I don’t have a very high opinion of DCIH. I don’t mean to take a shot at the line or its fans. I just don’t think the execution is as good as it should be at that scale. I know that Hasbro has had years to perfect the scale and MU is not without problems, so I don’t expect Mattel to figure it out over night. I see potential there, but Mattel needs to work a little harder on making the figures nice. The thing that DCIH does have going for it, though, is variety.

DCIH already has figures in the works that I can only hope will eventually see release in DCUC (Bloodwynd! Kylax!). And variety of characters is the one thing that Imaginext is lacking. In stores now, I can only find Batman, Robin, and a handful of their rogues. Superman and Hal Jordan have been added to that roster, but it’s a far cry from being expansive enough to be worth the time of a collector.

What it boils down to is that Mattel’s just not thinking about it. I think that’s typical of most large toy companies too. They’re running two lines to two different audiences and the weakness of one is the strength of the other and vice versa. If Mattel’s two hands would look at what they were doing, they might see it how I do. As a giant waste of resources.

If there was some way to hybridize these two lines, or at the very least, to think about those vehicles serving two masters while they’re being designed… well, just think of the possibilities. What if they had sculpted that Joker Van to be able to hold the Imaginext figures and Infinite Heroes? Even if they didn’t try to repackage it in DCIH style and put it in the boy’s action figure aisle, the compatibility would get noticed. It would increase sales on Imaginext items for sure. I know that it would – I’ve missed that Green Lantern Jet three times already. Why is it so popular? I’m sure we could brainstorm a lot of reasons, but I imagine the fact that it’s got cross-line compatibility ranks somewhere on the list.

Which brings me back around to why I went to Toys R Us in the first place. Mattel isn’t going to think ahead and create dual-purpose vehicles that work for their pre-school lines, kid’s lines, or collector’s lines. They won’t even realize the potential of creating some dual-purpose accessories that are sized just right to work with JLU and DCUC. They show flares for this with the cutting-room floor DCUC Kandor ending up in JLU or the annoying eagle accessory that is pulling double-duty in DC Classics and MOTU Classics, but when asked, they seem to think the concept is ridiculous.

Yet, I went to TRU in the first place looking for their latest mash-up. They’re using Superman and Lex Luthor to test the markets for the return of He-Man and Skeletor to the shelves. They took two of their hottest lines and literally shoved them together. I know that’s not the same thing as coordinating tooling across lines, but it does show that they’re willing to let their lines help one another out. But can the false walls and “red tape” ever really come down to benefit both the businesses and the buyers? As much as I hope for it, I doubt it. The large companies are dinosaurs in an industry where they have most of the power. On the surface, there’s not much reason for them to change how they’ve been doing business. But toy prices keep going up, so I do hold out hope that someone will have a fit of inspiration and realize that using tools across multiple lines wouldn’t mean the end of the world.