Dear Mattel and Hasbro, You Failed!

Mother of God, I hate big business executives.  Too be fair, I hate the executives from companies that I used to work for.  One company completely destroyed a great story on one of the games that I worked on and had a hack of a Hollywood writer make a HORRIBLE story line.  Game did horrible, and after a few more bad executive decisions, the company filed for bankruptcy.

That is in the past and we are here to talk about action figures.  The point of this post is to highlight the failures of Mattel and Hasbro.  These two companies have the rights to make figures for two of the greatest comic book companies' characters ever.  I, for one, am tired of their bullshit excuses as to why we can't get the figures that the fans (aka the people who are providing the money that fill this morons pockets) want.

Hasbro:

Oh Hasbro, talk about being handed a genie bottle and throwing it away.  Toy Biz handed (metaphorically) you a great franchise and you just fumbled it.  I give Hasbro credit that they took a lot of slack from fans when they released the first Return of Marvel Legends (ROML) line.  This slack was really unfair in my mind as they added some of great new characters and they did it fairly cheaply by using a lot of old molds from Toy Biz.  Fans could see a continuation of improvement in each series that followed (rocker ankles, hell yeah!).

Failure comes in the sense of your business tactics.  I want to give you my money, but I can't find your damn product anywhere!  In store, online (I am not including the heavily inflated eBay prices), no where.  My business sense is I can't make money if I am not providing something to my customers.  I take it these execs must of missed that Econ class.

Now, as of 2013 SDCC, Hasbro has announced that the ROML is done and fans can only get characters in 6 inch form if there is a movie closely related to those characters.  What?!  For a fan such as myself, this will not really effect me.  Wolverine is my second favorite character and with the Wolverine movie and X-Men movies coming out in the future, that is two toy series that I will get.  Are you a Fantastic Four fan?  Good luck seeing any characters in the near future because there is NOTHING slated for them.  That has to hurt some of the profit margins for Hasbro as FF fans might not be a majority, they still buy figures.

Mattel:

Mattel, I saved you for last because you are the biggest offender.  You have almost 80 years of DC history.  Comic book characters change outfits almost as much as I change underwear.  On top of that, you have four to five generic body types that easily fit over 90% of the body types of the DC characters.  Yet fans have to pay to be part of a club and some of those costs go to tooling new body parts.  I didn't realize that new head sculpts and other little parts cost so much.  I honestly don't know the costs but they can't be so much that they can kill a whole line.

The funniest part is that you guys greatly use the Build A Figure (BAF) to near perfection in the past.  Take wave sixteen (http://www.itsalltrue.net/?page_id=8934) for example.  I am a modern Batman fan, meaning that I like the dark brooding asshole that he is.  I hate the idea of Robin (though I love that Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin evolved into respectable characters after leaving the side of Batman).  I hate the campy old silver age costumes.  I hate the Knightfall series because Bruce Wayne is the only person that I want to see in the Batman costume.  So what does this have to do with anything?  For starters, I hate every character that is in this wave and the voice in my head says that I should not buy a damn one of them.  But that Bane BAF is so effing amazing (even though he is too tall for scale) and I would buy every one of these figures just to get Bane.  Hasbro does the same thing and I feel it is a great strategy to get people to buy characters that they would normally ignore but Mattel, you are making BAFs of amazing characters and you still have A LOT of opportunities for more!  If it aint broke, don't fix it!

Mattel are also great offenders of the distribution.  Why can't I find your figures?!  I have lived in the Midwest and now on the East Coast and I still can't find your damn figures!  I live in the third biggest city in New York!  There are four TRUs, three Wal-Marts, three targets, and dozens of comic book stores within ten minutes of my house, so there is no excuse here.

Believe it or not, Mattel, you have a great advantage over DC Collectibles.  I love the style of your designs.  The Four Horsemen do such a great job of mixing up great aspects of DC artists and pump out beautiful generic characters.  I have every single Batman Hush figure from DCC (DC Direct at the time) because they are based on Jim Lee's (remember, my favorite artist) art.  Unfortunately, the figures lack articulation (a must for me) and I will not get other characters that can stand next to them because most lines are so artist based that they would look out of place next to my Hush figures.  Now DCC is adding a ton of articulation (finally!) and the Capullo Batman looks amazing.  Sooner or later (hopefully WAY later), Capullo will leave for another book and a new artist will come aboard.  I don't want to have to wait a year or two while the new artist's rendition of the figure is made.  I want to look at my generic (yet awesome) DCUC Batman that embodies all of the great Batman artists in one figure.  Okay, you already made that figure (see my first review) but there are other characters out there that I would love to see this with and I know I am not the only fan that sees that.

Closing Thoughts:

Hasbro and Mattel, stop failing us.  Yes, I realize that tooling costs and production fees are eating into your profits but something tells me that if you actually made more figures, had better distribution, and better quality assurance (I did not touch this topic as it is well documented on the net already and you will also seeing the same mistakes over all my reviews) you would make more money.  Yes, maybe you only make half of what you have made in the past but I guarantee you, if people can walk into any retailer or visit their favorite figure site, you guys would not be posting profit losses.

Econ lesson 101:  Supply and demand.  The demand is there (and it is overwhelming), now where is the supply!