Phew! Lots of Mattel-related news and information this past week.
The big news, of course, is Mattel is finally opening a collector-friendly website (like HasbroToyShop.com). This website will be the exclusive home of the Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC) line, with a new figure being available every month. SOTA had plans to attempt something similar with their Street Fighter line a few years back, but that never got off the ground. We’ll have to wait and see whether Mattel can succeed with this sort of business model.
I’m curious as to what is motivating Mattel to try to cater to a smaller market like this. How much of a profit Mattel will clear with MOTUC? I suppose producing and directly selling figures based on an in-house license could maximize profits. While I question how successful MOTUC will turn out, Mattel deserves credit for both attempting the project at all, and for recognizing that there may be value in catering to niche markets instead of the mass market.
Of course, the other good news for collectors is that the Mattel website will offer a limited number of the SDCC exclusives (starting at 8am Eastern Time on July 28) and will apparently be offering numerous DC-related exclusives in the near future. So–if we’re lucky–Lobo might just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to awesome DC Universe Classics (DCUC) exclusive fare.
Meanwhile, however, DCUC wave three still has yet to show. In a Q&A last week, Mattel stated, “In order to improve product quality we recently changed vendors over seas and this put us a little behind schedule. We are rapidly catching up and the product announced for 2008 should still be shipping before the year is up!” While this doesn’t really give us a timetable for DCUC3, it does explain the delay. But judging from a confluence of hints over the last few months–from the mysterious “withdrawal” to the continuing scarcity of DCUC2–I think it could be another month or two before we finally see DCUC3. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a flood of DCUC by the end of December, including waves three, four, Wal-Mart, and six.
On a related note, a prototype of the DCUC3 Deathstroke has popped up on eBay. Love those Daisy Dukes.
In even more Mattel news, it seems wave two of the Movie Masters line, featuring a Batman Begins version of Batman (including a Fear Toxin-induced demon-head variant) and the Scarecrow have started showing up at Wal-Marts. Head on over to AFTimes for pics. As PGPoA reader Chris noted to me in an email, the Batman’s gauntlets are backward; the grids should be on the inside, not the outside. However, this can probably be easily fixed by boiling the arms, popping off the arms at the biceps and the hands at the wrists, and then swapping them.
Esbat
HasbroToyShop was so good to me over the years. I picked up almost all the McQuarrie Concept Star Wars figures for my Dad's collection. He totally lit up when I gave him the concept Luke, Droids, and Obi/Yoda figures in their star cases.
I super hope to be able to use the site to nab up non-scalperized priced figures in a timely manner. I'd hunt that bitch like a shark daily for restocks and new releases.
Rich
As an adult collector, I'm very excited about this. I'm looking forward to Mattel modeling the Hasbro website to get exclusives and collector-oriented product to the fans that want it. The goodwill will encourage me to shop Mattel for my kids too! Instead of shipping product all over the country where it gets overly plundered in some areas and collects dust in other areas, they can use this one-stop shop to guage demand and calibrate production. Yeah for Hasbro for getting Stan "the man" Lee to the fans via this model and sparing us having to run the barren-shelves-at-TRU gauntlet and yeah for Mattel for taking the same approach. They've done right getting Pixar Cars out in the right numbers to stay ahead of the scalper jerks and this is one more mechanism to beat that and satisfy the real fans- you know who you are.