Any questions for Mattel?

thanks p-man!

i try man, i try not to be a negative nelly, i tuly do, but w/ that company especially… man, that can be a chore sometimes.

@dayraven: I don't feel like I'm being criticized by you guys, at all. And I've learned to deal with the bitching–my threat of pulling the Q&As because of the bitching wasn't serious. Again, I get too many hits to do that.

What I was responding to was that so many people wanted me to ask Cythagen's question, and I knew I wasn't going to and wanted to preemptively explain why.

I just need you all to understand that I have absolutely no pull with Mattel. Zip. Zilch. Zero. They don't even send me review samples. And any leverage I might have had is probably canceled out by my occasional negative reviews of their products–i.e., the two-raven PE Batman review.

So I really can't go to them and vent my frustration with these Q&As–besides which, I'm not actually that frustrated with them. They're never any less than I expect, and I stopped personally investing anything in the answers a long time ago.

Sending an email to them complaining about the rote corporate answers will accomplish nothing, except maybe being given even more rote corporate answers in the Q&As as a subtle punishment for bothering them about it. If I want to get them to divulge any kernels or truth or a cool future product hint, I have to play relatively nice.

Anyway, that's enough from you, Dayraven. I'm asking your plastics question, so you just pipe down mister. 😛

@Poe: sorry about the negative response posts poe… it's difficult to offer mattel respect when they clearly don't respect us, who take as much time trying to think of questions they will actually answer, as they do thinking of ways of dodge our honest questions. i know you being the messenger in all this, can get shafted and i'm sorry about that. you're right, it's not worth the page hits if all we do is gripe about every answer. however, we're not griping at you… just near you.

but i wonder if you vented these emotions back at mattel, what they'd say. you know we care about your state of mind, and will tone things down if we're bothering you… would they in turn try harder to answer your questions honestly? cuz while i get PR and legal and all that jazz as excuses for some of the answers we get, they don't justify ALL the answers we get.

example: when you asked my question about some retooling for KG's eventual re-release (an event they've already copped will happen) we got "we can't discuss that" that's not an honest answer. they CAN discuss it, cuz it's fixing issues w/ an internal figure that they own, no licensor in the way, that they distribute, no middle man to answer for, for a toy we KNOW is coming. they jerked me around. and you, by extension. if we're getting on your nerves, that's fine, i'll own my part in that. but i do take a bit of exception to the seeming implication that our bad attitude is making this less than fun for you. our attitude in here is half the equation… but there's another half that will never hear your thoughts on the matter.

i'll do better to curb my attitude… but if you aren't going to vent some of that back at mattel, i think the least you can do is relax and let us vent. it's not personally an attack on you poe, and i don't think i've ever seen it be that. but you're reaction reads like you take our criticisms of THEM as if we're criticizing you… which we aren't.

you're like sam malone poe… we come here to gripe about work, and gripe about our wives and get a beer… you have to kind of learn to tune us out a bit, at least as it pertains to matty.

BBQ17

i like his question about what time in the the toy cycle can fan input actually make a difference