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1. From the sounds of it, it looks like the owners of the Toys-R-Us brand will open up a very Kay-Bee Toys like set of mall stores. Is this just the Holloween Express of Christmas toys? Or, is this something more substantial? Thoughts?
--Dan
Once again, we're told Toys R Us is coming back. I am expecting them to be seasonal until we get to January 1 and see a reset with new stuff. Nobody has said anything on the record as far as I know.
We don't have any locations yet, but we do know a couple of things. One, the square footage will not be as large as the stores you patronized when you were much smaller. Two, it's run by Go! Calendars' parent corporation, which probably means pricing will be similar to the stores you've seen in malls off and on in the past few years. (But not Macy's, that's a different deal. Macy's licensed the brand for its toy department shelves. Go Calendars licensed the brand for stand-alone or mall stores.) I will say this - they pick up neat stuff and I sometimes saw Hasbro, Mattel, Playmobil, and other product at Go! Calendars that other big box stores didn't stock. So that's probably going to make it worth a look, so parents have another place to try.
As these stores haven't opened and there's no real listing of where we can expect them yet, reports from a lot of the recently opened stores indicate that a lot of the old staples weren't there - bikes, video games, and the big stuff which you can still find at Walmart, Target, Costco, or elsewhere. For our needs, that doesn't matter much - but we also don't know how permanent these stores will be (as opposed to seasonal) and how often we'll see replenishment yet. It's good that they're expanding, and it'll be really fantastic to see toy stores stay open. I do not anticipate a wide swath of exclusives just yet, and since the buzz seems to be "adult fans are the future!" there could be a reason to hope stores might be a "thing" again. Even if it's just the Spirit Halloween of toys for Christmas, this is still a step in the right direction. And honestly, pop-up toy stores are also still a step in the right direction for this business. Toys need to be in more places.
The old Toys R Us is gone, the name exists as a brand licensed to stores which will carry the spirit and iconography, but pretty much all of the people and pre-existing business ties were severed when the stores closed in 2018. It's not terribly hard to make new ones, toy companies want to sell toys and stores want product to sell. What can they get? We'll find out!Toy stores have lost so much real estate that I have got to believe that any new locations opening up will be additive to the business. Not everybody shops online, not everybody knows what to look for, and a lot of people still just buy stuff because it's in front of them. I don't know how many kids are able to convince their parents to buy a toy online for them as opposed to picking it up and grabbing it, but maybe you guys know.
If this is seasonal and it works, maybe we'll see more permanent stores. If it's a new permanent installation, let's see how it goes. The fact that articles don't say "seasonal" or "permanent" makes me think it's going to be seasonal, but I don't believe good things happen to me and a new toy store would just make my day.
2. What does the inside of Entertainment Earth look like? Just a warehouse of boxes? Is it a feel haven where a bunch of the staff have stashes of product going back years and years?
And are you kind of the big man on campus there that everyone looks at as the Internet celebrity?
--Derek
If you've ever been in a warehouse, it's a warehouse.
Entertainment Earth has had a few buildings over the years, and the office part looks a lot like an office with the kind of posters and toys strewn about that anyone with a toy collection would probably go "Oh, I remember that/have that/read about that." I'd love to go into more detail, but I do not wish to run afoul of anything that probably shouldn't be shared to the public. It seems glib to say "if you've seen one warehouse, you've seen them all" but there's some truth to that. I've seen my fair share of shipping warehouses and aside from the occasional technological new-to-you thing, what you generally experience is a sea of brown boxes coming and going, and as many of them are shipped sealed you probably wouldn't necessarily know what would be in there. Once in a while you can get a glimpse of it on the social media pages, and because I respect everybody's privacy I'd have to say you can see more there. (Heck, I might have to delete this question before it goes up.)
To paraphrase one of my favorite songs, "I'm sorry but I'm not special." My audience is very selective. The collector fanbase is so big, so broad, and in some cases, so retired from it that it's unusual to meet anyone who goes "Oh, I've heard of you." I don't qualify as a celebrityeven in the world of extremely online toy people unless you were around in 1996 and I was one of very few individuals doing this sort of thing. From what I can tell, most of the people from back then aren't hanging out in the toy aisles much anymore. Also, if you work in the toy business, you have access to a lot more insight than you might find from a feature like this. At all. Would you want to read this after a hard shift in the toy mines? Probably not.
Well, that was kind of depressing. Don't get old, kids!
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FIN
We live in an era where fans of things seem to really, really love long videos. I've not got the time, if I have 90 minutes I need to write you a review or open the toys I've already bought. Hasbro put up a monster of a 90-minute video last week for 12 new figure reveals from The Vintage Collection and The Black Series that spent some real time digging into details and packaging in ways that, frankly, I would not have expected. I had to skip through it because of other things I needed to do, but seeing telescoping limbs on troopers and some advancements in droids has me looking forward to next year. (No public showing of Retro yet.)
I've noticed everybody does it differently. I have to wonder if Hasbro is judged by "minutes watched" rather than "total views/viewers" of these things because holy moly 90 minutes is a long time to show off new toys. Comparing them to what Mattel's recent Jurassic World videos are doing, Hasbro seems to have nailed what the kids want - I think we of the MTV generation just have a dead attention span.
If you didn't see the video, you can click that link up there for a quick list of the 12 figures. The stuff looks good, but there's little that I think you can call definitively new. That's what's tricky with nostalgia lines running forever - you have to redo guys eventually, and I don't know if the economy and prices and fan tastes will all work together next year. Also, many new media moments with two movie releases (one new), at least two seasons of TV shows (both seasons two), and who knows what else.
36,000 people tuned in to the very long special on Friday (and more since). I'm curious how that'll go. I'm a big fan of a few podcasts, but even some of those are running a bit long for my tastes. I enjoy This Week in Tech but also, why is it three hours? Indie movies are keeping it tighter with a lot more very good 90ish minute films this year, while the franchise joints on hamburger row seem to be scraping three hours. It's weird. Time is something we all have less of, as more things compete for our eyeballs, so obviously I'm hoping every bit of pop culture and marketing are faster, and more intense.
I found the reveals to be sensible. We have some version (in a different size or style) of all 12 revealed figures, which is certainly going to be a struggle as fans want to feel like they're kids again getting something brand new and manufacturers want to sell something to the normies that they may recognize... yet increasingly, I don't know if there's much going on in the world of fairweather fans. I just assume everybody is crazy like me.
--Adam Pawlus
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