First of all, I'd just like to say thank you to Matt for asking all the important questions.  One of the main reasons why I prefer JD.com over the other sites is that everyone here has a "credit where credit is due" mentality with Hasbro, not being afraid to tell them when they're screwing up.  Every other site out there kisses Hasbro's ass to such a degree that it makes you wonder if they're getting a monthly kickback for toeing the company line.  So thanks to Matt and the JD.com staff for not being shills for the big H.

I still don't get Hasbro's approach where toy information is treated like national security intel.  They act like the world will end if someone finds out what their plans are for six months from now, and they avoid answering any specific question about anything not currently in release like the plague.  And don't get me started on their constant backpedalling.  Wasn't it less than a month ago now when they said the blue jumpsuit VOTC 12" Fett was a "prototype" and would not be a mass release?  Yeah, I really trust them to answer anything honestly.

Other comments:

-They wouldn't have such a defeated attitude with the 12" line if they didn't keep redoing the same things over and over again, and even then doing them shoddily.  Even if it is a minor character like Poggle the Lesser or Lama Su, it would sell a lot better than the 100th version of Tatooine Luke, in my opinion.  Then they release this last Obi-Wan and don't even give him pants, opting to just paint his legs brown.   "We don't understand why the 12 inch line isn't selling well.  People must not want them."  No, it's just that they don't want what you're giving them.  Do something unique for once, Hasbro.

-It sounds as if they're taking that "screw you" attitude with the VOTC Stormtrooper.  I think we all know by this point that it is going to be a bitch to find even one of those when they're released (and I'd be willing to bet Hasbro won't even make it that easy with their asinine case pack ratios), and now they're basically saying "it's not our fault if you can't camp out at Target or Wal-Mart for eight days straight."  That kind of snotty attitude, combined with the endless repacks and half-assed quality is going to cause a lot of people to leave this line completely if they don't watch it.  People are already at their limit with Hasbro and you'd think they'd do something to try and repair this breach; unfortunately, they don't seem to give a crap, but after 9 years of this, I wouldn't expect them to.

-I'm honestly surprised they didn't get up and walk off when you told them the Cantina sets were crap.  This is the same company that once said "we don't care what collectors think" in a Q&A a few years back (although I don't think any of those people are in charge of the line anymore, so caveat emptor).  If I have learned anything from other sites coughrebelscumcoughhack, it is that you should never question the Hasbro.  The Hasbro is our god.  We should worship at the Hasbro's feet.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Okay, that being said, I really liked the animated Grevious, and the Ceremonial Amidala looks amazing.  Cannot wait for those.  Will the animated figures once again be Target exclusives, or will they go to another outlet?  If you get a chance to ask them, please do Matt.

And again, thanks to the JD.com staff for being such great reporters and giving us all this news from SDCC.

I want to see and hear about figures that are coming out after the original 38 OTC figures.

I want to know about Hasbro's plans for the 1st quarter of next year (before Ep.3).

Sorry to derail the thread, but here's my best guess as to what they will answer this with and what they will actually wind up doing.

ANSWER THEY WILL GIVE YOU:  "We understand that the buzz will be building around Episode III, so we are going to offer products that tie the entire six film saga together with figures from both the Original and Prequel Trilogies.  We know that the fans are looking forward to getting new characters and although we cannot tell you what we will be releasing for the new film, we can tell you that we have a lot of amazing products coming up in 2005."

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THE REAL DIRT:  "Since we've already blown our creative load on Episode III stuff, which you will not even see until April, we're just going to shove out four figures or so, maybe a beast or some little overpriced speeder bike, from the first group of things we have done for Episode III about two months before the big launch of E3 stuff.  

As for the rest of the line, we're going to repackage some of the prequel stuff on OTC style cards just to keep stuff on the shelves, which will no doubt be clogged with OTC recards by the beginning of the year.  None of this will be our fault, however; retail just overordered.  We didn't do anything resembling marketing suicide, and you should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

We might put out that rumored Coruscant wave of figures, but if we do, we'll put it out at the very tail end of the pre-E3 stuff so it will only make it out in short supply, nobody will be able to find it and we'll refuse to rerelease them so we can put that Cantina Han on another card to milk the completists.  

We think we'll recard Bail Organa, and probably the Council version of Yoda, but not the SA Clone Trooper, since it would cost more money to remold since there are more parts.  We could have continued to keep that SA Clone in circulation in some form, but then we wouldn't have had the energy to devote to our superior newly sculpted figures like 2004's Hoth Trooper or AT-ST Han Solo!

Oh, and we're going to do a TRU exclusive box set with six Stormtroopers!  The thing is though that they will all be POTF2 version Stormtroopers, since like we said, the more parts, the more costly it is for us to do them.  We think we'll throw a grey suited Imperial Controller in there, just to get the collectors to buy it so when they complain later, we can just say that we released that figure and it's not our faults if you didn't want to buy six crappy Stormtroopers to get it!

We're also going to do something to pacify you fanboys and finally release an AOTC three pack of Owen, Beru and Cliegg Lars!  It will be exclusive to a Texaco convenient store on the coast of Maine that my brother-in-law works in the deli of, and you can only buy one if you buy 40 gallons of gas on one visit.  It will be 50 dollars, since it is a small market item, but our contracts prevent us from selling it online through SWS.com or any other etailer, so I guess you can make friends in Maine or suck it up and go to Ebay, losers.

As for the Episode III stuff, we're going to release 50 figures on the first release, and another 50 by the end of the year.  After all, we've been working our asses off since January of 2004 on this crap, and even though most of the later stuff will never show up, we're going to keep shoving the initial waves into the later cases since those kids just go apesh!t over stuff that has been hanging on the pegs for six months and has a fine layer of dust on the packaging.  Look how well the Spider-Man stuff is selling these days!  Stores will be clogged with Episode III stuff by the end of 2005, but it will be all their faults since they didn't order enough of the products we offered them.  

Oh, and tell that DoctorPadawan fellow on JD.com that he can eat my ass.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go run the Transformers line into the ground.  Live long and prosper!"
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So...um...yeah....ask them if they are ever going to make the rest of the Padme/Amidala gown figures from either of the first two prequels.  I'm going to go put my tin foil hat on and pretend I never posted this.  

The thing about K-Mart (at least the ones that I have been to) is that when a line starts, they actually get the stuff fairly quickly.  After the initial wave, however, things start to really go downhill.  The first batch of Episode I stuff and the first wave of Saga stuff was at K-Mart on the day of release in great abundance (and in some cases, even before they were supposed to be there); after that, for the most part, they didn't get a whole lot else.  

I honestly think that will probably happen again with the OTC, since I've seen the first waves of the VOTC, Galactic Heroes, and 12" VOTC in the K-Mart toy department (the latter of the three was still in a sealed case and buried at the bottom of a stack of boxes).  If K-Mart gets any OTC carded figures at all (which I am doubtful of), it will be of the Dagobah wave and nothing past that, and we'll be seeing either 50 X-Wing Lukes or empty pegs until the Episode III stuff hits in the spring.  Come to think of it, with all the endless repacks, I don't know if this is such a bad thing.  

My main complaint with K-Mart stores in general is that they're so horribly maintained.  I have yet to be in a KM that doesn't feel as if it is in a constant state of disrepair and disorganization.  It doesn't piss me off nearly as much as going into a Wal-Mart, since the aisles aren't three feet wide like the Church O'Sam's, but it's close.

As for the Cantina three pack, I would venture a guess that it will be around 25 bucks.  K-Mart typically (not always) charges a little more than WM and Target and TRU, so while 20 would be nice, 25 seems more likely to me.

Oh, and given the current state of things, if they do another Cantina three pack, it'll probably have Cantina Han (again), Cantina Greedo (again), and it wouldn't surprise me to see them throw the Obi-Wan figure from the Cantina Showdown three pack in 1997 in there just to save a buck.  Either that or it would be a straight rebox of the three WM Cantina sets from 2002 that nearly everyone who wanted one (I was not one of those who wanted them to begin with) was able to find on clearance for as low as 25 cents in some areas.

Well, the general negative opinions of the POTF2 repacks in the FF era didn't start until the recarded figures themselves started to come out in such abundance and just sat around.  I know I made a fairly lengthy post a few months back (it is in one of the threads about repacks in this very forum, I think) about what it was like at the time, but long story short, there were more new figures released during that year, but Hasbro was still in their "one figure is considered a wave" mentality (as in 8D8 and the Ugnaughts) with the remainder of the case being recards, and this caused a lot of problems.

The negativity didn't start until the constant recarded pegwarmers were outnumbering the new figures by a margin of at least 10:1.  The best way I can explain this to someone who recently began collecting is to tell you to imagine going into a Wal-Mart, finding a half aisle display of SW figures consisting completely of about 100 each of the Hoth Rebel Soldier, HOF Han Solo, HOF Chewbacca, HOF Obi-Wan, and HOF Anakin, with maybe one or two of the more recent figures hanging around as well.  Of course, back in those days, we didn't even have main characters hanging around; it was about 100 Rancor Keepers, Hoth Rebel Soliders, and Nien Nunbs on the pegs.

Hasbro had to do their "$2 off coupon" promotion to try and clear out the older figures, but even that didn't work as the only figures left were the aforementioned Rancor Keepers that nobody really wanted another one of.  And there was such a backlog of figures as it was that even if they sold 100 figures at the 2 dollar off price, they still had a crapload of stuff hanging around.

In the end, Hasbro ended up having to take back a lot of these unsold figures from the various retailers (in a move that actually preceded the Episode I buyback by about six to eight months), and a lot of the later figures from 1998 became insanely difficult to find (RY/DST and any of the EU figures come to mind).  

So yeah, while the negative reaction to those repacks occurred after they had been released (as opposed to the pre-release negativity with the OTC recards), it was just as bad as the mood nowadays.  What makes it worse is that the 1998 fiasco seriously killed a lot of the line's momentum at that time, and Hasbro swore they learned their lesson about repacks and would never do it again.  And, as the bard Wayne of Campbell once said, "and monkeys might fly out of my butt."

I found the remains of the Dagobah wave at a local SWM yesterday afternoon.  Two Dagobah Lukes (both standing), two R2's, a single Spirit Obi-Wan, and one each of the X-Wing and Jedi Luke recards.  

I picked up one of each of the Dagobah wave (Obi-Wan's card looked like it had a run-in with a weed eater; thank Jebus I'm a loose collector) and got them home, only to find that Luke had two right arms for the handstand version.  Thankfully, the SWM allowed me to exchange it for the other Dagobah Luke which was still hanging about an hour or so later, and that one was fine.  So it looks like this SWM just got one case and that was it.

Another local SWM restocked with figures, but it was eight pegs worth of the Jedi Luke wave of Saga figures from earlier this year.  Needless to say I will not be checking that WM for OTC figures anytime soon.  And K-Mart had an old POTJ figure (Saesee Tiin on a severely damaged card) on their pegs alongside about four Dexter Jettsters) and that was it.  No VOTC, no Galactic Heroes, nothing else.

I figure Target will be getting stuff in in a few weeks for their fall reset and maybe then it will be easier to find things.

Here's my best attempt at listing 25 favorites, and they're certainly not in any particular order, but these are films that I enjoy a great deal, and you should too.  

01.  Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
02.  Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
03.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
04.  Scarface (Brian DePalma, 1983)
05.  Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
06.  Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997)
07.  A.I.-Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
08.  To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)
09.  Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
10.  Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1986)
11.  Se7en (David Fincher, 1996)
12.  Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
13.  Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
14.  Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)
15.  Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
16.  Summer School (Carl Reiner, 1987)-very guilty pleasure
17.  Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1979)
18.  Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)
19.  The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999)
20.  Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1996)
21.  Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999)
22.  The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995)
23.  The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
24.  The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
25.  Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)

You can probably tell who my favorite director is by looking at this list.  

First of all, on the Theater Luke front, part of the reason for the bubble drops or whatever probably has something to do with the quality of the packaging as a whole.  Mine (and I don't know if everyone else's is like this) came on a card that is about half as thick as a regular POTF2 card of that time period, and is about a third as glossy (at least on the back).  I would wager this is why it is so difficult to find one of these in perfect condition (out of the five that my friends and I got on opening night of the ROTJ: SE, and yes there were five of us, so it was only one each, only one had no creases in the cardback).  If Hasbro/Kenner put that little effort into the card, then it only stands to reason they cheaped out on the glue as well.

Okay, now on to the fun stuff...  

When I read that thread yesterday (linked to from the now locked RS thread), I nearly fell off my chair laughing.  If it were possible to be funny and serious at the same time, you certainly achieved that, Matt.  The thing I found most surprising was that one of the RS forum mods even pretty much agreed with you about Greg(g)'s lack of thinking.  I'm curious to know if Wise-ass has already written to reprimand you or ban you for speaking the truth about his beloved GNT.

I wish I were banned at RS.   It'd be like a badge of honor for me at this point.

Also, if Greg(g) actually bought vintage Stormtroopers by the truckload when they were being clearanced out in 1986, then he would be the most powerful sperm in the universe.  Much stronger than Superman's "Krypton Super Sperm" that could completely destroy Lois Lane's fallopian tubes and uterus.