Wrapping up the recent flurry of posts about a toy line I never even collected, the final word on the trademark issue can be found in this video of a panel from C2E2 2011:

http://blip.tv/pixelstoplastic/c2e2-diamond-select-art-asylum-minimates-panel-3517759

Here’s what DST’s Zach Oat wrote in a comment on my earlier post:

If you go to the 28-minute mark, you can hear Chuck explain how we registered for the trademark after we discovered it had lapsed. (If I said “purchased” in this year’s panel, I misspoke, but we did have to pay to register the trademark. There was a check written.  ) He also explains why we waited — we were waiting to have room on our plates, for the economy to rebound and to have some sort of media tie-in lined up. Hence the IDW series.

So there you go.

As for me: I apologize for making a mountain out of this molehill. The answer was indeed out there. I didn’t know about this video, and so when I inquired about the trademark issue to my contacts a couple months ago and didn’t get an answer at the time, I ended up thinking there was more to it than there evidently was. I also didn’t put in a new inquiry to my contacts before my most recent post, which I should have done.

I realize my recent posts may have ginned up way more “controversy” about this then was at all warranted. For that I apologize to DST, Zach and everyone else. It was never my intention to cause controversy – if anything, I was trying to tamp it down a bit.

This does prove my utter impatience for watching online videos (sorry, Pixel Dan…) is something I need to work on. But it’s tough when you’re trying to find the answer to something and it’s only available in the middle of a video – I can’t get search results for that on the Web unless there’s a transcript available, and I don’t always have time to sit through hours of comic-con footage in the hopes of finding an answer.