1. Just for fun, what are some of your most egregious examples of peg warmers you've seen in all your years?

In this holiday season, which Star Wars figures would be on the island of misfit toys?
--Derek

Specifically for Star Wars, I saw some Kenner 8D8 and Ugnaught figures from 1998 (Freeze Frame packaging) in a Rite-Aid around 2008. Tied, I saw a Finn (Jakku) 2015 The Black Series figure at a Walgreens a few months ago. I'm scratching my head to have seen anything older in a store for these action figures in particular. How they sold, I don't know, but they had since sold.

Currently the biggest pegwarmer problem may be The Vintage Collection 2021 Lando Calrissian, still available in bulk at numerous Phoenix and Scottsdale-area Walmart stores. It's an excellent figure, but it's been in stores for four whole years. 8-16 still are available for $20 at many stores, but there are two new contenders for biggest pegwarmer. Walmarts with the "collector island" are getting dozens and dozens of the current 501st Clone Trooper, as well as the Mandalorian with the Maul horns. Those are starting to be a real problem. I've seen an uptick in Jedi Legend Kenobi at both Walmart and Ross this week, which was a surprise.

I've found a lot of pegwarmers are frequently regional, sometimes by state, sometimes by neighborhood. I'd hear some figures being huge duds online, but they may not have been around to buy anywhere, at any price, in my neck of the woods. Also, some figures would pile up by the dozens in the Glendale and West Phoenix area, but be gone elsewhere. When I moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles in 2005, I noticed that first Original Trilogy Collection Vintage Lando was available all over LA toy shops - but was long gone from Phoenix. Also the "I Am Your Father's Day" Luke and Vader set was never shipped to Los Angeles Walmarts as far as I could tell, but I found them easily when visiting Phoenix a few months later.

Hasbro hasn't really done much for Star Wars this holiday season, and I would say the only really odd move was giving Target a lot of reissues of older figures as exclusives. The Gamorreans are long gone, but Bom Vimdin and Bib Fortuna are 50% off now. (Some of the Transformers reruns in a mishmash of packaging from the past five years were also sitting around until the post-X-mas clearance.) I'm very pro-rerun, but perception is everything. If you put an old guy in an assortment at 1-2 per case mixed with new guys, he could still appear scarce. If you send Target 8-16 of the same guy, that's just not possible. At current prices, a lot of collectors are fine to wait for a sale. In some cases, they forget about waiting for a sale, and just move on to something else.

I don't think there's an easy solution other than to redesign assortments to max a character out at two per case. Anything to get fans pounding the pavement and hunting is probably better for the line's health than by making too much of a fan character. (In short, pegwarming Darth Vader, Luke, Mando, Chewbacca? They could potentially interest new fans. Pegwarming Bom Vimdin? Unlikely appeal to fans with 0-100 figures at home.)

It's also worth noting that Hasbro hasn't had a good fan/collector line reboot in a while. The Vintage Collection has been running nonstop since 2018, 7 years, which is equal to Kenner's original run. The Black Series has been firing on all cylinders since 2013. Maybe give these a break and let something else take the spotlight for a little while, if for no reason other than to clear out the dead stock in stores so Target, Walmart, Amazon, and the rest can have a fresh start in a couple years. I'm not saying "kill the lines," but maybe try another package expression. Maybe try (heaven forbid) a play or display gimmick like connectible stands, or RFID-powered lights. Fans staying on board with reruns of reruns in the same format for this long is a rare sign of patience. Sort of like how Retro fans have been getting seven or so figures from the movies they want per year, and still come back for crumbs.

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2. We're between holidays and nobody is probably reading, so why don't you write something you want to write about? Oh, and it'll be The Retro Collection probably.
--Me

Back when we had a team on the site, I used to take off Q&A from Thanksgiving until the New Year because questions slowed down (and oh, have they.) Maybe fans aged out, Maybe fans are fat and happy after the Current Line kicked off in 1995, because 30 years is a long run for any series of toys. That's a blessing and a curse. If you want a Star Wars figure, you can go to a store and buy one. You can go to a closeout store and buy a cheap one. But after thousands of figures, there aren't many left you want that don't exist, leading to fans getting pickier and waiting for more sales - or just skipping out.

I don't blame them. I've done the same, with my relationship to The Black Series ending and I gambled on some Epic World of Action exclusives going on sale. But not Retro or Vintage, those I still pick up. I'm still excited to buy The Retro Collection figures - even the goofy prototypes - because it's a tight line. I'm not going to whine about a $30 board game with a figure, or a $15 unpainted figure made of Crayola colors if the entire line can fit in a box of hi-tops. Especially not now, there are so few Kenner guys per year that I'm actually pretty happy buying duplicates. And triplicates.

The Vintage Collection is increasingly exhausting, with gift sets and single carded overlap making it difficult to know which is the "good" version and some multipacks have exclusive accessories you can't get elsewhere. "Just different enough to make you mad" releases make it difficult to know if you have that guy at home, or if it's different enough to care, which has cooled my level of excitement. I still get excited about all-new characters and costumes, but now that we've got recent Emperor's Wrath Darth Vader in opaque black and partially clear black, I can't say I'm thrilled. Yet if Hasbro put out a Kenner Vader with shabby blue lightning painted on it, I'd run to the store to buy two. That old saying about "always leave them wanting more" is more true than any of us would care to admit. If The Black Series only had 2-3 waves of 4-6 figures each per year, I'd have bought that Skeleton Crew wave with a smile.

I've noticed this with other lines too - Transformers is big, but they've been gradually shrinking the collector line (while growing the entire brand) so it feels engaging. There are still many things I would be happy to get in a 3 3/4-inch format, mega-articulated or not. Jaxxon, Vlix, Tzizvvt, and others I don't need to go on at length about. We've had an incredible run and it would be fun to continue to see things go. I'd also even go as far as to say I'd like Hasbro to adopt Retro's current plan - which seems to be about six new figures per year - to Vintage.

I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. How many all-new original trilogy figures did we get for The Vintage Collection in 2025 that never existed as toys before from the pre-prequel era? Last year we got Pallaeon, Joruus C'baoth, Brea Tonnika, Senni Tonnika, and some really high-quality updates of guys we have at home. (And of course, new media characters - many of which are top-notch.) But we didn't get six new guys from across the original trilogy, unless you include characters who are on their fourth or fifth remake.

So here's hoping 2027 gets us some new guys for the 50th. I wasn't here for the 1st, and I probably won't be here for the 100th, and it would be nice to see something out of this world to excite the old, the cranky, the lifers. I assume there must be at least 57 of us left. And if there isn't a good fit for that, I'll be happy with my six mostly-new Kenner The Retro Collection guys per year. For my needs, it's still the most satisfying format out there. But if Hasbro wants to put some effort updating figures that haven't got a new guy since 2000, The Vintage Collection might feel a little fresher.

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FIN

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So what's up? We should be seeing The Mandalorian and Grogu movie, a second season of Ahsoka, and what I assume will be a perfectly fine Darth Maul: Shadow Lord in the coming months. That's a lot of Star Wars - too much, really. The Clone Wars TV show made me start to say "with over 20 cartoons a year maybe I don't need to keep buying comics." I've only got so much money and an a short attention span when I can find shows like MTV's Downtown exist online and are basically free to watch.

Target marked down a lot of its holiday toys. We've been out of Gamorreans for months here in AZ, but plenty of other Star Wars items remain unsold including the head-scratching reruns of Bib Fortuna and Bom Vindim, so go get those if you want them. The bulk of the surplus stuff is from new-era Star Wars so you know... maybe focus on the older stuff. Could be fun.

Remember how I said no toy company ever announces the end of a toy license? Well, I've been proven wrong as Playmates actually announced the end of its partnership with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the end of 2026. This is a big deal, as they'e bee running almost nonstop since the late 1980s. Star Wars was dead for a decade, but Playmates kept churning out reruns and reboots of TMNT on a fairly regular basis. As licensed properties go it's also one of the longest-running partmerships in the biz, with Kenner/Star Wars morphing into Hasbro/Star Wars being the only other thing that likely comes close. For boy's toys, anyway.

When it comes to toys, I think a "less is more" approach would be nice for Star Wars. I know fans want more paint, more articulation, and more releases. If you really take a big step back and look at all the brand new characters we got in 2025, it's a pretty short list in The Vintage Collection. There were a fair amount of new-enough-to-be-interesting repaints and updates, sure, but I'm finding that I have a hard time naming a dozen figures that left me excited. We got 0 carded dudes from Return of the Jedi, new or old. (We did get the Jedi Spirits 3-pack and a 3-pack Biker Scout.) We got a new Snowtrooper (and officer) from The Empire Strikes Back. And we got over a dozen figures from the original Star Wars, but the only new characters were the Tonnika sisters and whatever latitude you grant to the Kenner-style Cantina guys.

I'm not the kind of fan who demands 'Original Trilogy or Death!", but when I ask why I'm feeling very disengaged, it's obvious. The tie-ins to the new TV shows are far and few between, and frequently late enough that they lose momentum. I don't have access to Hasbro's sales figures, but going to stores I don't see a lot of leftover guys from the first three films (except 2021 Lando figures) in abundance, preventing stores from ordering new product.) Maybe Target or Walmart could have sold that awesome new Landspeeder, but I never saw evidence they stocked it.

I don't think what we're getting is bad, it just seems like there's a disconnect between customer, shelf, and product. For better or worse, most of the best stuff is an online exclusive - which probably slows engagement from lapsed fans or newbies.

I assume 2026 will be more coherent with an emphasis on The Mandalorian and Grogu in the two collector lines. We'll see soon. Similarly, if The Bad Batch and The Clone Wars and Rebels and especially Resistance were any indication you should probably lower those hopes for Darth Maul: Shadow Lord collectibles out of Hasbro. We know we're getting a 3 3/4-inch Maul, and given how Lucasfilm seems to be holding everything back from its partners I would not anticipate a lot else in the near term. May I be proven wrong.

Perhaps this is why the idea of bringing back themed waves resonates so much with me. If we can't get one figure from Return of the Jedi in the assortments, a whole wave of 3-4 sure sounds like a step up doesn't it?

--Adam Pawlus

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