Odds ‘n Ends > Black Friday news, New DC Unlimited, Toy Feeder, Rom

–I’m going to stop posting these as lists, because I want a little more room to work, add some images and whatnot.

–Mattel will be having another of their Black Friday sales. This one actually begins today at 12pm ET and will continue for six days, ending next Tuesday at noon ET. There will be savings of up to 30% off and Monday apparently will have flash sales and “special pricing.”

–Speaking of Mattycollector, BigBadToyStore has a “warehouse find” of some Mattycollector items, including the Wonder Twins and the Adam Strange/Starfire 2-pack. It’s unclear to me whether this was a warehouse find by BBTS or Mattel, but given the fact it’s a pre-order, I would assume Mattel. Not sure why they’re not just selling them at the Black Friday sale. Weird. There’s also an Infinite Heroes 4-pack if you’ve grown tired of throwing cash into open flames and want some variety in how you waste it.

–Speaking of BBTS, yesterday they and other retailers revealed the line-up for DC Unlimited Series 3: Superman and the Joker from the upcoming Injustice: Gods Among Us game, plus the New 52 Aquaman and Darkseid. I’m guessing the Darkseid won’t be quite as large as the new DC Collectibles version. No photos yet. You can pre-order them all here. Not being a big fan of fighting games, I can’t say I’m very excited for the Injustice figures, plus I think the already-revealed Injustice Batman is a pretty ugly design.

–Nathan Newell of Dork Dimension has created the Toy Feeder, a blog that automatically updates with reviews from many different sites (including this one). I had something similar (using Yahoo Pipes) in the sidebar a while back, but I could never get it to work right. Anyway, this gets us a step closer to the Rotten Tomatoes-esque database of toy reviews I’ve always envisioned.

–Apparently Hasbro filed for the trademark to Rom, the 1970s novelty-toy-turned-comic-book who left a lasting impact on the Marvel Universe. If the rumors about Disney acquiring Hasbro are ever borne out, we could finally see Rom enter the Marvel Universe proper, which means Marvel Universe and Marvel Legend Rom figures. In the meantime, why has Hasbro filed for the trademark? No idea. Maybe they’re going to add him to the Transformers universe or something. (Toyark via Battlegrip)

While sadly not real, the above pic is part of a series of digitally-painted action figures of scientists. It’s worth posting just for the obvious joke about whether to leave Schrödinger in his packaging, but frankly I’d buy the heck out of a number of these figures. As the creator Datazoid writes, “Unfortunately, the figures aren’t real. I wish they were.” I suspect the Kickstarter campaign is imminent. (via io9)

–Phil Reed of Battlegrip noticed that Google Trends shows interest in searching “action figures” has gone steadily down since 2004. He interprets this as evidence of a shrinking action figure market and speculates this could be due to rising prices, or maybe people aren’t searching for action figures online and going to physical stores. I’m of the mind that there are many potential reasons for this sort of thing, but one thing I’m pretty certain of is that it’s not us diehard collectors doing generic searches for “action figures.” If I was forced at gunpoint to speculate, I’d guess that most people doing searches for “action figures” are parents looking for toys for their kids, and since we all know kids increasingly prefer videogames and Ipads and whatnot over physical toys, this trend makes perfect sense to me.

If my theory is right, then you should see relative stability for specific brands of action figures, since diehard collectors will still be searching for them regularly. And a few checks of various brands like G.I. Joe, Star Wars, etc. showed that was  mostly the case. And then there’s this – if you check the trends for “teenage mutant ninja turtles figures” there is a huge spike over the last few months.

–I want to try a new “mailbag” feature like the one Bill Simmons of Grantland hardly ever writes anymore. So email me questions about anything (preferably toy-related, but I’ll consider answering anything) or just post the question as a comment below, and I’ll reply in a future post.