I just don't get why so little of that wave got out. Just doesn't make sense. It's a great wave too.
Stock Response: Because it has a Stormtrooper in it, and if I have learned anything over the 10 years Hasbro's been doing the modern SW toys, it's that any assortment that has a really cool Imperial Clone/Stormtrooper in it will be the last assortment under a particular case assortment number and Hasbro will refuse to ever rerelease said figure ever again unless it is in a pricey Entertainment Earth exclusive four pack.
Serious response: I think that while I was being silly (?) in the stock response section, there is some truth to it being part of a "last assortment" so to speak. The Target nearest me never got any Unleashed past the Dooku/Vader/Mace wave and when it came time for post-Christmas clearance, all of their Unleashed went on that aisle. I asked one day if they had any more of the Unleashed in the back and the girl checked only to come back and say they had two more Dookus and that was it, and she put those out so they could be clearanced too. No Unleashed were put out until ROTS hit, and since then the only ones I've seen are the three current ROTS characters.
Wal-Mart was overrun (at least around here) with the Secura/Tusken/Bossk wave (they still are, believe it or not) and didn't get anything past the Dooku/Mace/Vader wave either. WM has an aversion to clearancing anything though, so why they haven't popped up there is beyond me. I found my IG-88 and Sing at a really out of the way (read: in a part of the country that Ned Beatty drives really fast through, if you get my meaning) WM and both of those were on heavily beaten up cards (didn't matter, as I opened them). No sign of any Stormtroopers at all, and to this day I've never seen one in a store, and I've only ever seen the one IG and the one Aurra on that day.
Again, I kept hoping that WM would start to clear out their backroom and cases of these would turn up, but thus far it doesn't seem to be happening. Stranger things have been turning up around me recently, with the closest WM to my home putting out a single Unleashed Chewbacca, the 12" Ewok two-pack from 2003, and the 12" Jawa two-pack from 2004 on random days (all of them disappeared before I had a chance to scan them to see what they cost, althoug knowing WM it was probably full price).
The thing that really gets me is that there seems to be a real shortage of the Sing and IG-88 along with the shortage of the Stormie. Normally I would expect to find 2 each of the "less interesting" characters hanging around, or to see a ****load more Stormie auctions on Ebay, but as far as I can see, that doesn't seem to be the case.
As for Hasbro's response to you, jadesfire, it doesn't surprise me at all that they would pull that. As I've said countless times before, I think that Hasbro is counting the minutes until they can be rid of Star Wars (license or not, if retail won't support it, it won't continue) and almost seems to have a "do we have to?" type of relationship with the fan community.
But back to the original point, if Hasbro is so interested in making things available so we don't have to sell our kidneys on Ebay to get some of these pieces, they need to start by getting that last wave with the Stormie in it out to retail, or at the very least make those figures available for retail price on SWS.com or their little direct sales website that will no doubt be a massive disaster when it finally sees the light of day.
