Nick not to pick nits but the Toy Biz stuff was 6" not 8"
But I agree...they really really kicked it up a notch starting with TTT...I remember that the FOTR figures were good but not great likenesses...some of the ROTK and Trilogy figures are almost lifelike in their likeness
I honestly wasn't sure if it was 6" or 8" scale. But I agree: the quality really picked up when they went to the more slimmed down basic figure packaging. On the packaging front alone, the original crescent shaped packages were HUGE and ate up a ton of peg space at retail. And when you do compare some of those original FOTR figures to the later trilogy figures the difference in likenesses was like night and day. But there were some absolutely great figures in the line overall.
For instance: the Trolls! Without going into movie spoiler territory (for a book that's been out for half a century
) , we know there are going to be some Trolls in the movie. Toy Biz made some pretty awesome trolls in the form of the cave troll and the battle troll. And they managed to do so in that 6" figure scale. Now a 3.75" scale would make the trolls considerably easier to do, but they wouldn't be anywhere near as impressive.
And on a similar note, could they manage to do horses as well in this scale, too?
We know how long it's taken Hasbro to get on board with ball jointed hips so that we could get a Sandtrooper that could ride a Dewback without looking perpetually bowlegged. Imagine a 3.75" scale Hobbit or Dwarf and the challenges those would pose to ball jointed hips so that they could ride horses as we've seen them do in the trailer from the other day.