1. What prompted Hasbro to stop making the 12" Collector Series figures (AKA, "dolls")? Was it the usual "It costs too much to make one," or that they decided to focus on smaller items, like the Black Series and 3.75" scale figures?
--Chris

Oh this gets long. Sorry Chris! The really short version is "eventually, a line that doesn't perform gets the axe." Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't - Hasbro axed the 3 3/4-inch Star Wars kid brand entirely after a couple of pretty lousy product years, too, only to make a return as 4-inch kid figures just last year. I don't think it served Hasbro's sales targets at the time, which had not embraced the price points of today. Hasbro would probably love to sell you a $250 doll right now.

If memory serves, the 12-inch figures with cloth outfits just didn't sell all that well. I remember getting a lot of them super-cheap on clearance, with some under five bucks, from the prequel-era stuff. The format tends to skew to an older, more affluent crowd and around the time Hasbro stopped making them (I believe the end of the format was around 2005) another 12-inch line was also struggling - G.I. Joe. They were having their 40th anniversary in 2004, and that line was one that was quoted by Hasbro employees as not selling particularly well, too. Other companies like Dragon Models were doing a high-quality product that really raised expectations, which a mass-market US line with safety tests and licensing fees may not have been able to meet. A few years later, Hasbro was sub-licensing 12-inch to Sideshow, and then the format was given to other firms. I am not precisely sure how the license is split up - perhaps it's "dolls" - because Hasbro continues to make 12-inch figures to this day, with a new assortment of their Titan Hero Series figures hitting stores in 2025. (It has some old molds in it, too.)

As a company, Hasbro has a lot of brands it needs to serve and they don't put all their eggs into any one basket. There were times where they could put everything into a single brand - but that can be dangerous if all of a sudden people don't show up for something, like the Rise of Cobra line or Young Jedi Adventures. By the time Star Wars dropped its Action Collection/Collector Series/doll format around 2006, they were also selling Revenge of the Sith and The Saga Collection 3 3/4-inch figures (and tin sets and battle packs and flame figures and so on). And Galactic Heroes kiddie figures, Force Action Battlers, Unleashed 7-inch figures and 2-inch figures, Titanium Series 3-inch vehicles and 6-inch vehicles, Titanium Series 3 3/4-inch action figures, Star Wars Transformers, those Customs motorcycles, plus a robust line of 3 3/4-inch vehicles. And lightsabers. Also blasters. Plus voice changers. I think there was some other stuff too - Hasbro was in a massive Star Wars business 20 years ago. They were also doing Baby Alive, My Little Pony, Transformers Cybertron, Transformers Universe, Nerf blasters, Play-Doh, G.I. Joe: Valor vs. Venom and their then-new DTC line, and the then-new early work on the Marvel license, their domination of the board game aisle with over 50% of the business in those days, just to name a few. Toys are a big business, and Hasbro had more brands then than they do today.

Eventually, you have to look at your entire business and cut segments that aren't working. Budgeting for product development means you usually will need to axe your low performers to make room for something new, because it's not just prototyping, sculpting, and packaging development. Those products also had a marketing budget, meaning you had to buy TV and other ads. The costs of developing an item and bringing it to market are huge, especially when you're competing with multiple divisions and hopes for the future. 2006 was also the era where Hasbro was positioning itself as more of a media player with the live-action Transformers and Battleship movies in development plus the gestation of The Hub, their cable channel, and a number of corporate acquisitions. In short, they were extraordinarily busy and distracted with everything, including integrating existing purchases into their greater portfolio.

I read stories of conversations with fans, where fans asked why Hasbro had ignored 12-inch Joes. Hasbro employees mentioned the fans were forgetting the 12-inch Joe lines Hasbro made that nobody bought for their 40th anniversary. Presumably, the Star Wars figures were in a similar place thus transitioning to higher-end fancy expensive collectibles. We're sort of seeing the same thing happen with 3 3/4-inch action figures, and the 6-inch format has generally been more geared to collectors. We saw it happen with comic books and trading cards, too. Eventually the cheap kid stuff you love gets shifted to "premium," because they want to sell more expensive things to a smaller, more affluent audience. I can only assume that's what is going on today, and will happen again in 20-30 years with Skylanders or whatever revival is to follow.

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2. When asking about reissues of items, Hasbro sometimes tells us that the dies are either worn out or lost/destroyed. But how exactly do these dies, made of metal, get "worn out" when they're used with soft plastics? Is it just the constant repetition of the process?
--T

I had an answer and then it hit me - others write about this stuff. For example, Zetar Mold runs down the need for proper storage, appropriate lubrication and maintenance, and so on. "The molds wore out" have been a common refrain from all kinds of manufacturers for as long as manufacturing has taken place because, sadly, nothing can stay perfect forever. It is very likely that after running tens (or hundreds) of thousands of a figure over multiple variations, repacks, and so on, that Hasbro looks at a mold and says "we got enough money out of this that we can junk it and make something new."

PlasticsEngineering.org has an article classifying how many cycles a mold might go through over time, because not every mold needs to last forever. If I ever get my indie toy dream project off the ground, I assume there won't be more than 3,000 run of any character mold across multiple colorways.

Other toymakers have told me that you can make a tool to make a production action figure out of different materials - some having a shorter lifespan at a lower cost. (I sadly did not ask for specific details as to the metals used.) If you're running a convention exclusive of 1500 pieces and you need a new head and new hands, you can use cheaper materials, get your 2000 heads or whatever, and you're not particularly concerned about it lasting forever. On the other end of things, Mattel's Hot Wheels cars have updated tooling and replaced parts over time, but I'm not sure if it's a cost thing, a safety thing, or a worn-out thing. (Some cars are effectively the same designs from the 1960s, sharing original and updated copyright markings but may have fewer metal and more plastic elements today.) Is it the same tool? Go ask Theseus.

If you listen to fans of toy lines over the years, they say the molds have worn out when the quality suffers after a toy is run, re-run, and run again. Star Wars fans made this comment about the 2005 Revenge of the Sith reissue of the Millennium Falcon, citing increasingly poor form fit issues, flimsy assembly, and so on. I remember hearing fans of Galoob's MicroMachines cars complain about older toys being crappy at school, and Transformers fans have also complained of toys reissued and repainted suffering over time about the product getting shoddier as time went on. In the 2000s-2010s, there were complaints about figure quality diminishing as they were re-re-rerun as exclusives, but Hasbro seems to be taking a lot better care of the molds - or maybe took precautions to keep them in better working order - in recent years. Lest you forget, there were some astonishingly terrible figures in exclusive Battle Packs around 2008.

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FIN

It's New York Toy Fair Week! From the sound of things there may not be a massive collector media presence - but word on the street has it that there will be new pre-orders and that some of them could be very exciting. As some new "toy" stuff is leaking, stay tuned to everything, everywhere, in case some media outlet makes you the mech of your dreams.

--Adam Pawlus

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