Adam, I have a question for you:
Why only one pack this year? All of your past exclusives had 2 different deco packs. Was it a production capacity issue from Hasbro with the CW stuff coming or EE just scaling back with a soft economy to play it safe?
Just curious.
The nature of this set and the tooling used didn't really lend itself to a variant. (That and Battle Damage probably wouldn't have been too exciting for these figures.) There's also a good amount of new, character-specific tooling here. The Star Wars line in 2008-- well, after July-- will be anything BUT soft, as there's a lot of great stuff coming out for fans to buy in he mid- to high-end toy arena. Once you see what the exclusive is, if you like it, you'll probably immediately see why two different deco packs probably wouldn't have been too great for fans. I usually like to say "more is better" but in this case, what comes in the box will be a good selection.
If you look at the web site, we're doing a decent amount of exclusives this year-- Funko, Round 5, Diamond Select, Bif Bang Pow, Acme Archives, other stuff I'm not yet at liberty to announce, and so on. I think we're actually probably doing more exclusive products in 2008 than any previous year I've been at the company, it's just with a big range of stuff and not all Star Wars.