Retro action petition

[samurainoir]

motu and the early RAH kids are still in the dip with us (albeit on the upward swing)

Looks like the peak was for Spawn kids and Potf2. Perhaps those lines will pick up in a few years after all.

My brother's a RAH and MotU kid, about ten years younger and born in the eighties. All the toy shows around here are all pretty much 80's dominated now. If I were to bank on something, it would be Power Rangers... those kids are just exiting college. In about five years they will have large amounts of disposable income.

[MIB41]

I hate to bring it up, but it could very well be a format fail when it came to the Retros on mattycollector.

Look around at all the Green Lantern figures out there that have been selling incredibly well in the 6" format. The DCU Classics and movie related green lanterns that quickly sold out last month on Matty. Whatever failings of the Green Lantern movie, there was a ridiculously expensive campaign out there that made Green Lantern awareness incredibly high across mass culture that seeped into the collectors when it came to other GL lines aimed at the collectors market.

In comic shops, Green Lantern/Blackest Night action figures might very well have been DC directs most successful action figure line in it's history given the amount of waves of lantern related action figures we've gotten in the past year or so. I can't think of any other DCD line that has ever gone this deep in terms of character selection, and number of waves released on this aggressive a schedule. Particularly when you take into account DCU Classics mining the same pool of characters at the same time.

In the past year, lantern related figures have been Golden. Kyle, Guy and John Stewart have been at the centre of Blackest night, it's lead up and it's aftermath.

So why didn't the Retro Gl's move like their more obscure 6" counterparts... The fricken' Cauliflower/fish headed Lantern sold out for goodness sake! Sodam Yat! How many of us here even know who that is without google?

Perhaps the problem was marketing these as "Retros" to begin with might be limiting your potential consumer right off the bat to a certain demographic? A demographic that tragically is a trough between the two peaks of the post war baby boomers (12" military GI Joe) and the Echo Boom kids (currently represented by former 80's kids buying up the Masters of the Universe and transformers).

Good points. But unlike Retros, the DCU figures are available everywhere. You can find them in Target's, Meijers, Walmarts, and online. This all ties back to familiarity with line. How many years have the six inch format been out there? A long time. The Retro action line was coming into the marketplace as a whole new format. So awareness was crucial to this line's survival. And with the six inch scale being so popular, it makes sense that related tie-ins at Matty would sell out. For example, my good friend, EmeraldKnight, knew all about the six inch figures. All he had to do was slide through any boy toy isle in town and there they hung. But he didn't have a clue that Mattel had already pumped out four waves of the Retro figures. He had only seen a couple at TRU and wondered what those were. So awareness and distribution meant everything.

Your comments offer some tremendous insight though. Mattel likely worked from a false premise that the eight inch format would tap into that six inch market and find similar success. The only problem is, the kids collecting the six inch line were already hard wired to collect that product line. And with Mattel putting out so many Lantern characters, it didn't make a lot of sense for kids (more so than collectors) to pick up duplicates of a character like Kyle or Hal when they already had them in the six inch format and needed to collect the rest of the Lantern Corps line. So for the kids that knew about the Retro's, it likely came down to a choice and they went with the line they knew with more variety. The other segment never knew about the line and thus starved off it's ability to continue.

[SecretSquirrel_4]

509 signatures ... and very very very very slowly still going !

[Figuremod73]

personally i think good advertising for toys went away when saturday morning cartoons went down the toilet. i didnt grow up with the megos and like most they werent even something i would think of buying until i saw a retro superman and there was something about the toy that appealed to my old fashioned taste in toys. ( i grew up with the original heman and super powers) now i absolutely adore them and think there one of the best formats a toy could possible have. toys with endless customization, how appealing! i think it comes down to just people not really being exposed to them.

[bp1701a]

Relly,, if Mattel nwanted to sell the RA toy line,, there would have been a commercial to say to customers,"Hey,look at what we are offering ,just like you or when your dad was young"but nooooooooooo, not a word, not a peep,,,, but its just buisness, they will cancel it and move onto something else thats overpriced, Im suprised i havent seen and GLEE toys yet, thats when you will know we are doomed.

[GoldBlade6]

Mattel recently asked its JLU fans if they would be willing to pay more to get certain unreleased figures, but why weren't Retro-Action DC fans even ever offered this option? I'd like some more Retro figures or at least some news. I might not pay $30 for just any RADC character, but I really want a Joker and Robin, at least!