Guys and their gadgets by Poe Ghostal
Poe’s note: I’d love to read some reader captions for this pic. Here’s the one I came up with:
Skeletor: “So, you say you can get the Sox game on this thing anywhere in the universe?”
Darkseid: “Yep. And I can watch episodes of The Office too.”
This will be my third review of a Skeletor action figure. I never reviewed the 1980s original, primarily because I barely knew how to read when I first owned him.
And I did own him. Need photographic proof? That’s me around age four, with my grandfather, who is about the same age my father is now and looks shockingly like him. I can make out Skeletor and Man-at-Arms in the photo, though I have no idea what’s in my grandpa’s left hand…perhaps an Attak Trak sans treads? I cropped out the chair on the left of the photo, but the Talon Fighter is on it. What I find most shocking about this photo is the lack of armor on Skeletor and Man-at-Arms. That seems so unlike me…did I actually lose accessories when I was a kid? Nowadays I wouldn’t be able to rest until I had a fully armored and armed Skeletor.
I’ve written about both the history of MOTU and MOTUC more than enough by now, so you can revisit those reviews if you need the background information. On to the review! (more…)
If you haven’t voted in my MOTUC poll there in the sidebar, please do so. As of this writing, I’m only six votes away from 100! That’d be a first for PGPoA.
But don’t vote twice. That’s fraud, and is generally frowned upon.
Coming soon…
Some of the folks at He-Man.org came up with an interesting idea: everyone posts how many Skeletors they bought and then they sum them up. So far they’re up to 516, which adds up to $10,320 in sales.
It’s a simple way to get some immediate insight into how well these toys sell.
Wow. Mattel had no fewer than nine ten Q&As yesterday. Here’s a list for reference:
About 50% of the questions had something to do with quality control or distribution, but there were still some good questions and answers in there. Here are a few highlights. (more…)
Time for our latest round of Ask Mattel with Mattel’s Toy Guru!
1.) How soon can we expect the MOTUC character selection to branch out beyond the 1982-1983 waves?
2010 will feature both POP and New Adventures characters. We just could not fit these figures into the first 12 due to time limitation! We do have plans to get to them in early 2010.
2.) Will Faker’s chest emblem be a sticker, or tampo?
It is a tampo. We looked at doing a sticker but it just wasn’t working out and honestly, was making the figure look cheap.
3.) At the SDCC DC panel, it was mentioned Mattel had changed vendors (i.e., factories) due to quality control problems around the time DCUC wave 4 was being produced. However, there have been a greater-than-average number of reports of QC problems with the Walmart wave and the two-packs, which were, I think, produced after the vendor switch. Wave 1 and the initial shipments of wave 2 were very good QC-wise. What are the challenges facing Mattel in solving these QC issues? (more…)
There’s been some mildly heated discussion regarding Mattel’s decision to pull Beast Man and He-Man off Mattycollector prior to Skeletor‘s release on Thursday. For the record, here’s what Mattel had to say about it:
As visitors may have seen, both He-Man and Beastman are now sold out on Mattycollector.com. We knew a few days ago we were running low and with only a few hundred units left, we wanted to close down sales so we can have just handful for NYCC and SDCC to help spread the word on this amazing toy line at the summer conventions. (after all, the more fans we can get, the more units we can sell and the more tooling dollars we can get to tool bigger and better figures!)
We won’t have every 2009 MOTU figure available at the shows, but we actually produced more of these two figures in particular to help gauge sales. And now that we have a good idea now of how many MOTU fans are out there we can adjust future figure production accordingly.
Skeletor goes on sale at 12:00 Eastern this Thursday. (as does the DCUC Adam Strange and Starfire 2 pack and the Infinite Heroes stands). We are also working hard to get a monthly subscription service up and running for MOTUC to take us through December. (at which point the subscription for 2010 will cover Jan- Dec figures of that year).
I’m not naïve–I know Mattel hasn’t exactly won the people’s trust with their issues with DCUC and so forth. But I don’t quite get why this has made some people so suspicious. Mattel has been warning the figures would sell out for weeks. (more…)