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Q&A For April 19, 2004
1. Would you say the Clone Wars series was a success for Hasbro (I know some
stores have CW Vehicles on clearance, but I thought the figures sold
extremely well or am I way off?)
--CB
Hasbro's attempts at exploring the Expanded Universe always seem a victim of timing. Hasbro insists that the first batch of EU figures sold poorly, but you known and I know that most fans never once saw them in stores. Clone Wars figures, the regular assortments, anyway, seemed to do pretty well at most stores. The ones that showed up at the non-traditional toy venues like Sam Goody or Suncoast didn't move, but on the whole these figures sold like crazy in my market at $4.99-$5.99.
From what I saw, the bulk of the line did pretty well, but that's based on what I saw. For all I know Hasbro has warehouses with Gunships and figures to blow through still, since the line was intended as a Fall/Winter type thing it seems stores didn't want to order more past the holidays, and Target even went as far to clear the figures out.
I would say that assuming Hasbro doesn't have thousands of unsold cases in their warehouses, the CW line was a big hit. Collectors seemed to like it, there were some neat new characters, and on the whole it was a very pleasant and small line except for the lack of availability of a few figures... namely the figures for which the line is named, the Clone Troopers.
2. Where is the Red Arc Trooper?? The thing I don't understand about Hasbro is,
why does nobody know? It should be simple from Hasbro's point to say, yes,
we are still shipping this figure, or yes, there will be figures on the
shelves for the second season of Clone Wars ... Instead, it is always that
big mistery.
--Criz
Either we've seen them all, or Hasbro has some unsold cases waiting to make it to circulation. (I've recently found out a few older cases are starting to be offered from the warehouses, so anything's possible.) There's also the possibility some store will pick it up as an exclusive, perhaps as part of a new army builder pack. If you want one on a CW card, though, my advice to you is to pony up the cash and get one when you see one that's fairly priced.
3. Do you know when the OTC line will end? Will it continue through E3, or will all new figures (including classic trilogy) be released on an E3 card? Do you know the last OTC figures to be released before the E3 assortments hit, or is that still to far in the future?
--Dave
The OTC line will end until Hasbro changes their mind. Most likely, it will go away at the start of the new movie. If Hasbro sees that fans are especially responsive to the new look, they might bring it around again or keep it alongside the new line. As of now, we don't know how much bigger the line will get prior to the new film.
4. If the Jedi were so smart and could see into the future more or less, how come they didn't realize they were going to get wiped out? There is talk about how Anakin is going to bring balance to the force. Well, if there were hundreds (or however many) of Jedi, and the Sith were all but extinct, wouldn't bringing balance to the force mean that either there would be a huge increase in the amount of Sith, or that the Jedi would get their asses handed to them? Or does bringing balance to the force mean something other than the quantity of jedi and sith? Good and evil? If I'm interpreting things correctly, then the Jedi were kind of stupid.
--Charlie
Well, as always, Lucas was smart enough to write himself an out for this one. In Attack of the Clones, there's a conversation between Mace Windu and Yoda regarding their diminished ability to use the Force. Obviously, we don't know what this means-- since their fighting sense seems pretty good, and their ability to communicate seems normal, it would make sense that the ability to see the future may be hindered. Also, you'll recall that the influence of the Sith is hard to sense from some dialogue from the end of Phantom Menace. Taken together, it seems that there is substantial reason to assume that they don't know the future.
Of course, you can take this a little further and look at Return of the Jedi where despite the fact that "Everthing is going as [the Emperor] has forseen," he was still thrown down a giant shaft and his apprentice was killed. Obviously, the ability to see the future through the Force isn't a perfect science.
Finally, there's the question of the Balance of the Force. What does this even mean? There was an amusing story in an early issue of Star Wars Tales that made light of the subject, and it stands to reason that it could mean a few different things. Is it like the whole Smith/Neo equation from The Matrix where if one was destroyed, the other must be destroyed as well? Or is a "balanced" Universe one without the abberation of the Sith, and only Jedi remain? I have no idea. The problem with the pseudo-mystical dialogue is that there's a lot of room for interpretation and even more room for people analyzing the films to go "hey, you forgot to address this!"
5. While watching the second season I noticed that there was not even a single
Hasbro commercial on TV promoting the Figures/Vehicles for the Clone Wars
series ... how come?
--Christian
Toy commercials are a funny thing. Companies complain a line fails, yet don't promote it-- look at He-Man. I don't think I saw many/any ads for the barely two-year run of this Dreamcast of the action figure world. Star Wars ads are usually far and few between, and I think the toons themselves were meant to act as ads for toys. But as far as season 2 goes, how easy is it to find Clone Wars figures as of March/April 2004? If I wanted to buy CW tos, it'd be quite difficult to find any aside from Target's eight toon figures, and those are selling prety well as it is. Since Hasbro Star Wars product is pretty tough to find these days, advertising it seems like a bad idea in the Spring. Why advertise what people are buying to the point where they can't be found in stores?
Part of me, though, thinks the Spring round of toons was meant to clear out old stock from the first round of episodes. But that's me.
6. Everyone talks about how the S.A. Clonetrooper and Ephant Mon are impossible to find, and I don't disagree as I never saw the S.A. Clonetrooper except for the ones a friend from another state got for me, and Ephant Mon which I only saw because I happened to be working at a KB at the time on the day we got the cases, but what about the Fan's Choice Concept Stormtrooper? I have never seen these in the store. Again, the only reason I have one is because of my friend. Although it's kind of dinged up and I would like to get a better one (yes, being anal is annoying). Are these going to show up again, or since we're already on to the Antilles/Dodonna fan choice figures, have we seen all we're going to see? There was talk about how Hasbro is cutting back on the production of fan's choice figures due to the glut of Duros/Amanaman (might have been this site, or another), but geez, why not try to find some middle ground. It just seems they are going from one extreme to the other: glut of figures to no figures at all.
--INXS87
As I've mentioned previously, the only Fan's Choice figures that were really easy to get were the first two. I saw the Stormtrooper for a couple of weeks, and so far I've seen the Captain Antilles figure a handfull of times, and I've never seen an Ephant Mon on a peg. Others have shared your concerns, and it seems to me that these figures are really tough to get. The fact that the Concept Stormtrooper was an army builder for some fans didn't help.
No more are known to be coming but as always, a large enough fan outcry could result in a reissue in OTC or beyond. My main worry now is that the line seems to be moving along so quickly that few figures are given time to ship when it's obvious that demand has not been met, like that Super Articulated Clone Trooper or any of a number of 2003 figures. The market for Imperial Officers is still there, for example. Hopefully Hasbro will exploit the OTC and spend the first half of 2005 reissuing older, popular figures instead of releasing new product. I know some of you are probably throwing your arms up in the air and screaming at that comment, but there's a lot of figures that just plain never really made it to market, plus it would be a great way to ramp up interest in Episode III by allowing collectors and kids to buy their favorites and plug some holes in their collection. Plus I don't know about you, but I would love a few months just to get my collection in order to make room for the new stuff.
7. Was Ki Adi, Shaak Ti, and Aayla Secura killed in the last CW cartoon
episode. It would appear that Yodi felt the deaths of them through the
force. Which brings up a few ?'s from recent publishing's. In the new
insider in the section for star wars women they state Amy Allen(Aayla) as
being in episode 3. In comic Republic #61 when Bail and Mon Mothma are
talking to the jedi council the two seats next to yoda, where ki adi and
Shaak ti sit, there are 2 different jedi's in them, one being the same race
as the late Jedi Master Yarael Poof. Though the other has a mark on her
forehead I don't believe it could be Depa Bilaba because of what we learned
in the book Shatterpoint.
--Rich
One of the biggest problems about stories beyond the films is that there's a lot of them to keep straight and they're all being told at once. Right now, I'd say that anyone you didn't see dismembered is a safe bet for return, and obviously, we know there are a lot of characters returning for the final film just from the casting lists. The Jedi Council isn't an appointment for life, either-- keep in mind people come and go from it, so someone could be on assignment or vacation, too. Plus there's just the fact that mistakes could be made in the process of storytelling, and all we can do is hope that the movies are consistant and then worry about the other stuff later.
8. Do you know if the necks on the heads for the new GI Joe figures are molded
the same as Star Wars figures? I'm thinking of customizing some generic
rebel figures by switching their heads using the boil-and-pop method. Since
GI Joes have a number of normal looking guys, it seems like a good idea. I'm
guessing they would be the same, since they're the same size and they're
both made by Hasbro.
--Jack
With a little work, you can make one head fit in the other's body, but the structure of the figures are fundamentally different. You might want to pick up a Joe figure just to unscrew it and see the make-up of the figure, but the figures have a ball at the bottom of their neck which fits into a socket. These don't fit in a SW neck socket and I don't believe boil-and-pop would let you take them out, although like I said, the figures are assembled with screws and you could probably get a better idea of what you're dealing with through some "plastic surgery," as it were. Well, maybe it's more of a "plastic vivisection," but you get the idea.
9. A few years back a fan produced a limited run of a poster featuring the
vintage 96 cardback fronts. Do you remeber this, and if so who it was?
--Ben
I sure as heck don't... I know a poster was made with all the loose figures, but this doesn't ring a bell. Especially given that there were way more than 96 different cardback fronts with all the logo and photo variations. Does anybody out there know what Ben might be looking for?
10. I had been hearing for some time that Tanus Spijek was a short packed
figure and therefore difficult to come by. However, while I have seen
Tanus on the pegs on 2 or 3 occasions, I have had no luck tracking down
his shared-body counterpart, J'Quille. Was he short packed as well?
--Daniel
I'm finding assortments that I thought stopped shipping are still shipping to some stores, so keep looking. J'Quille was packed two pieces in my case, which hardly qualifies as shortpacking but since he doesn't appear in many assortments, he's not exactly common. Then again, no 2004 figures really seem all that easy to get just yet, so keep checking Target, K-Mart, and Kay-Bee stores for those slightly-older figures.
FIN
OK, now I need some help from you guys. Spam is really taking its toll on my inbox so I would love it if you could put "Q&A" in the subject line, so it's easier for me to filter out my email and your question will not be as likely to be lost in the shuffle. A lot of Spam and related subject lines are things like "question" and "help needed" or "your response is appreciated," so "Q&A" plus anything else you'd like to add would be greatly beneficial to your message being whitelisted.
I've been hitting the GameBoy pretty hard lately. Problem is, good games are really hard to find. It seems that getting a legit copy of CastleVania: Harmony of Dissonance is a royal pain (still looking), and Bubble Bobble Old & New was released in the UK, in Japan, and not in the USA. As the GameBoy Advance has no regional lockouts, it should be fun to see what I can look up from across the oceans... after all, the Japanese Legend of Zelda I got is a true marvel. A marvel which is coming out in English, but hey, we don't always know these things when we make a purchase, right?
For the curious, a NES edition GameBoy Advance SP is coming to the USA this summer with eight games. It looks a lot like an old NES controller and the eight separately sold games are straight NES ports. It looks pretty slick, really, and a neat counterpart to the Japanese Famicom GameBoy Advance SP. In Japan, they've released 10 older Famicom games (or NES games to us Ugly Americans) with another 10 to follow shortly, many of which are good with some stinkers tossed into the bunch. The important thing is that Zelda and Super Mario are coming (or are out) in the USA and Japan with the original Metroid as an unlockable extra in the recently released (and wonderful) Metroid Zero Mission.
The question now is, where are the Famicom and NES Star Wars games? There are at least three, including a Japan-only Star Wars title for the Famicom from Namcot (or Namco, depending on who you ask.) Apparently Darth Vader turns into a crab at the end. If this isn't gaming gold, I don't know what is.
Currently playing through Aria of Sorrow, another Metroid-influenced Castlevania title that's shaping up to be shorter than I'd have liked but quite excellent all the same. If you have the means, you should totally get it.
That's all for this week. So get those questions in for next week. Just email me with your inquiry, and we'll see what we can do.
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