That we're in this state doesn't surprise me at all. Hasbro's buying agreements with retailers have been leading to this for years in terms of early wave oversaturation. Actually what amazes me is that they actually managed to make it work this long without running into a problem. I'm not just talking about movie lines but series lines as well.Originally Posted by Zippo
Movie lines you tend to be able to get away with flooding the market with core characters. Most of the line has no screen time and therefore isn't a personified icon of a celluloid mythological figure- yet even then you can only do so many versions of characters before even completists have enough.
However the moment you get into series territory and therefore ensemble territory, you run into the tyranny of the toy cartoon. As Flint Dille said, their mandate even back as far as G1, was to portray the toys in the best possible light.
The upshot of that is that because the kids are individuals, the characters they're drawn to as their favorites will vary from child to child.
The moment you're in that territory and you're shooting yourself in the foot in a market that say, might favour Bulkhead over Prime. The thing is that when you start going into voyager territory or larger, you're talking about parents and children's favorite characters, and so it can backfire- especially when characters like Bulkhead have been written on the screen to be the big brother every kid would love to have.
At some point, Hasbro needs to understand how effective the toy cartoon is and start marketing based on characterisation in media, or visa-verse.
Also Hasbro Aust needs to recognise where things went to hell in a hand-basket since they separated from Hasbro UK and re-institute approaches which worked back then.
This will make me sound old, but I remember calling up the product manager for Hasbro in Rydalmere as a kid to ask about upcoming lines (man that was awesome looking back) and that was one of the things which went out the window early on when things changed over.
Things haven't been quite right with Hasbro for a while now, including gutting their customer service dept, and this is where it finally starts to bite them in the butt.
I only hope that they take this as a wakeup call and start addressing issues which should have been adressed a long time ago.
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