1. I just finished the first season on Maul: Shadow Lord. I was not a great fan of the other Star Wars cartoons if I may be honest. But, this one really pulled me in after the 3rd episode. Why is there not greater love for this show out there? Seems like it deserves a couple more figures. Thoughts?
--Dan

Disney really seemed to be excited about this one until it came time to promote it - and then you didn't hear a peep. Early reviews were brief and positive, but that's sort of what was interesting - sites like Rotten Tomatoes aggregated surprisingly few reviews. There was very little promotion or publicity here, which is so odd given how popular/marketable the title character has been. I think there may be a problem with Disney relying on Star Wars the brand to sell things rather than spending any time in promoting the story part, but that's just me. I thought it was a little slow for the first few episodes, mostly because there was a lot of backstory on characters that it felt telegraphed may not be around very long. (I don't even consider it a spoiler, so much as a surprise, as a lot of characters lasted a lot longer than the show seemed to be telegraphing.)

I think the main problem is the same as it ever was - the old people didn't watch it. Maybe the kids did - we won't know for a while. "Traditional" fans hated the 2008 The Clone Wars movie and TV series, and ignored the toys. As the kids got interested, we saw high secondary market prices on Ahsoka Tano figures and, over time, much of the show's toys got expensive because collectors didn't buy it. It was a good show, with good stuff, but a lot of stuffed-shirt old people just shrugged it off. It's much easier to do when a show has minimal merchandising, right now all you can really buy are a few kid Darth Maul figures and a couple of collector figures in each line. Toys promote the show as much as the show promotes the toys, and I think Star Wars fans over the past 30 years (starting with Shadows of the Empire) learn about new Lucasfilm stories by seeing product on the shelves. It doesn't matter how many fan sites you have doing free marketing on your behalf - even industry people don't read them all. Or in some cases, any.

One of the reasons I made mention of the season finale guest star was because I don't get that anybody is watching it, and if nobody is watching something you can't really pretend it's a "spoiler" so much as a "reason to watch the show you skipped." Fans are being a little too careful about spoiler talk while the media has decided to ignore the show, plus Star Wars seems to feel like - and please note my choice of words there - incredibly uncool to the masses. Not as uncool as Harry Potter, but it really doesn't feel that there's a lot of cultural cachet right now in a galaxy far, far away. Maybe that'll change with the new movie, and people will want to watch more Star Wars - but it's also possible people are still rolling their eyes over "somehow, Maul has survived" while the rest of us have been very much aware of that for over a decade now.

I'd love to see Hasbro expand the line with more offerings - goodness knows, there were many great candidates. But if you look at The Bad Batch and most streaming shows, you'll see that Hasbro doesn't seem to want to support a show for the long haul and that means you're not going to foster long-term collectors, either. Each new "show wave" is more like a souvenir and then people just move on. Without any sort of ongoing commitment, there's no new adherents to the plastic hoarding lifestyle, and this is probably just going to be the way it goes until Hasbro shrugs and lets someone else play with the license after a merger with Mattel in the year 2043.

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2. Hi Adam. I recently spent a week at Walt Disney World, and was struck by the steady but continual reduction of the presence of Star Wars within the parks, mostly from a retail perspective.

Since covid, slices of Star Wars have been chipped away with no replacement. The Launch Bay Cargo store, which sold Hot Toys figures and several other high-end collectibles, shuttered for good. The second Star Wars-themed store at Disney Springs closed in Fall 2024. The Secrets of the Empire VR experience was lost forever after covid. And the shops in all the parks, like Keystone Clothiers recently eliminated the entirety of its Star Wars and Marvel sections. What merchandise remains in various shops are those rubbery 8-packs of figures, plenty of Black Series helmets, a handful of Black Series figures and almost no TVC products of any kind. This is a huge change from just a few years ago. The post-covid reductions don't even account for pop-up places like Darth's Mall, which used to be a staple of Star Wars Weekends.

Why do you think Disney has reduced its Star Wars retail offerings so aggressively in the past few years at the parks? The feeling I got was Disney was putting as little money and retail space possible into Star Wars merchandise in the parks, and as a result, it all sits unsold for months. This just seems like such bad strategy from the company that owns the Star Wars IP.
--Brad

Well, two things could be happening. I should note, this is all speculation.

One, Star Wars has been on something of a downturn. We didn't see massive capitalization on The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett, and it seemed like Obi-Wan Kenobi and some later shows didn't quite live up to expectations. Without a movie, it's possible Disney decided to give it all a trim and let their other brands flourish while Star Wars rests up for the next big launch. (Or you can see the money that went into Wish and that maybe wasn't the right move.) At this point, I assume it's going to be next year with the one-two (possibly three-four) punch of the anniversary, new movie, and new streaming series. There should be enough going on in 2027 to make things really, really big and it's not atypical to want to flush the system of old stuff before a big, big push. But there really should be abundant new stuff this week, and there isn't.

The other, less fun possibility could be the one I've been expecting - we're all old now. In 1997, the average Star Wars fans were adults in their 20s-30s plus a bonus group of VHS-era kids who missed out on toys (and indeed, all of the hype.) In 2027, those same fans are going to be much older, with more aches and pains, and also a massive collection of stuff from the previous few decades. New fans seem to be much quieter, even the lauded prequel/Clone Wars kids don't seem to be buying stuff with aplomb (and their "vintage" stuff isn't always worth a lot. Well, the cartoon stuff seems to be, as are some vehicles, but less so the movie figures.) And they like popcorn buckets, because they lack taste. Be a real man/woman/enby/other: buy a toy.

It's very possible that Disney is trying to figure out what to do with its Lucasfilm investment, given its firehose approach to "content" and relative trickle of merchandise for each new strain of fandom. You can't please everybody - seriously, you can't - if every new figure is seen as an affront to fans of older figures who aren't being served. By resting stuff at the parks a bit, maybe they'll have a big surge down the road. Disney should be smart enough to chase the money, so a lack of product now might mean they're seeking greener pastures as they start to realize that they haven't been chasing a new generation of fans in a way that's going to get them to want to buy decades of toys. Honestly if I were coming in to Star Wars today and an entire year's kid line were under 10 figures and maybe 3 vehicles, I don't know that I'd be tempted to chase down anything I missed later. But that's me, I'm one of the old people now.

We could also be suffering from spoilerphobia. We're seeing some odd choices in the merch - Disney picked BDX Droids for their park/store exclusive and they're minor background ephemera at best. There are much bigger, cooler, and more action-packed droids in this movie and they don't have toys. Perhaps they're going for a cuddly/mom souvenir, but I honestly wouldn't have registered these as figures I would ask to own if I didn't see them before the movie. They look harmless, they don't do anything, but they do look like something that would be in Star Traders 30 years ago.

I don't know that the current slate of programming is able to result in a range of park product that appeals to all ages. In theory, everybody loves Grogu - but I've got Grogu at home, and all I want is something else. I don't know that there is a big overarching strategy for Star Wars merchandise anymore, and there probably won't be one ever again unless the company can pick a topic and focus for 6-9 months before shifting gears to the next thing. Until then, expect a big pile of whatever got approved and made in whatever order at the parks.

...after that, who can say?

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FIN

I'm out of questions, so Email me with Q&A in the subject line if you like.

I was going to put my impressions of The Mandalorian and Grogu here, but I decided just to post them overnight Thursday/Friday before the cultural attention span moved on. Hopefully you saw it, and if you didn't and you have today off? Go see it at the cheaper theater in your area. You'll have a great time, and it's the same movie I saw for $12.50.

It's interesting to watch the reaction on this one. I always saw the toys as a way to promote the movie, and if you make a big line with a big splash people get curious and go see the movie. (That's not happening this time.) Usually fans make their own weather around a new movie. (That's not happening either.) The critics saying that it looks just like the TV show aren't really wrong, either... but have you ever watched the original six movies in chunks (or heard the radio dramas)? The original Star Wars also easily slices up into different episodes within each film, introducing new situations, planets, and characters as we go. That's part of what makes them so compelling - you're never in one place so long that you got bored by it. In Return of the Jedi, the entirety of Jabba the Hutt's time on screen from his introduction to his death is about a half hour. There's an internal serialization at work - even in The Rise of Skywalker, the death of Chewbacca fake-out feels like a commercial break or a season finale. It's something these movies have always done rather well, and this is no different.

I doubt it'll go down in history as the best of these movies, but it's certainly my favorite of the new era and the one I'm the most interested in rewatching. You can see a lot of places where they cut a couple of corners, but I'm not disappointed in this one like I was The Rise of Skywalker. It's nice to see the Rotten Tomatoes fan rating go up compared to the critic rating, which also more or less says what kind of movie this is. Do you want to see more Grogu? You get it here. It puts butts in seats to have the business part of show business, and there's so much other stuff in the movie that makes it a good time. I would also be very happy if The Mandalorian's next season was more like its first - more new stuff, fewer allusions. But I won't deny being pandered to was a lot of fun.

--Adam Pawlus

Got questions? Email me with Q&A in the subject line now! I'll answer your questions as soon as time (or facts) permit.

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