PM heading your way

As promised, here's a play-by-play of my post-HTS.com order goings-on (a lot of this is in retrospect, since I was out of town for a few days).

Monday Night: I place the order and it goes through.  My account is created and all is well.

Tuesday Morning: Before leaving for a trip, I notice that the receipt I printed out is missing part of my address and I call the fine people at HTS.com on their 800 number to let them know of the mistake (the part of my address that was missing from the receipt and my order on the site was still present in the actual account section).  The woman I spoke to said (and I'm not making this up) that they could not access any of the orders from the previous night until Wednesday and therefore I would need to call back then to straighten it out.  Try as I might, I couldn't think of a legitimate reason to ask why they couldn't access their own information, so I just decided I would call back the following day.

Tuesday Afternoon: Hasbro placed a temporary authorization on the card I used for the full price of the Battle Arena I ordered the previous night.  How they did this without access to the order information is beyond me, although I'm sure that voodoo and my third grade spelling teacher are involved.

Also, Hasbro sends me the order confirmation email (again, how they did this without having access to any of it is something I don't understand).

Wednesday Morning: I call HTS.com's 800 number again and the woman who I speak to is very helpful and is able to make the necessary addition to the address on file for that order, which HTS.com is now apparently able to access.  I am happy, since this means that my order can be shipped out.

Thursday Afternoon (10 minutes ago):  I check my order status at HTS.com.  The Battle Arena, listed as "In Stock-Ships Within 24 Hours" when I ordered it and when I double-checked the day afterwards, is now scheduled to ship on May 12th.  Yep, over a week later (I guess the "usually ships" comment is put there so they can say, "Oops, we're sorry" but then again, how can they even judge when something "usually" ships until they've been open a few weeks and have actually shipped anything at all?).

So now I'm playing the waiting game on two fronts: the first is to see whether or not the Battle Arena will ship earlier than the May 12th (in other words, closer to what they originally stated it would), and the second to see if they actually charge my card before they ship the toy. 

Further updates will come as this story develops.  And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Just a couple of predictions (I still haven't gone to look at the site myself, so some of this may have already come to pass):

1.  Within the month, Hasbro will stop selling individual figures because everyone will be buying the Clones by themselves, leaving Hasbro (in poetic justice) drowning in a sea of Obi-Wans and R2-D2s that they can't get rid of at the inflated price.  To remedy this, they will only sell Clones in sets of two: one Clone and one Obi-Wan/Yoda/R2/Anakin/Tarfful/Chewbacca/etc.

2.  The site will completely crash at least 12 times between now and the end of the month, numerous orders will be lost, and Hasbro will find some way to blame it on retailers not supporting the line by pointing their customers to the Hasbro website.

3.  Nothing will ever ship on time (12-14 days from the actual company?  Shouldn't they, of all people, have stacks of this stuff sitting around in warehouses?), people will wind up with only parts of orders, and Hasbro will shut down the site completely.

Pessimism?  Sure, it is.  But after 10 years of this, I would expect nothing less from Hasbro.  I'm hoping I'm wrong, but honestly, would any of those three things I mentioned surprise you at this point?

I am so sorry to hear about your dogs, Chewie.  At this point in my life, I am more fond of animals than I am most people, and they truly do become just like another family member.  I'm a cat person, but losing an animal is like losing your best friend, be they feline or canine.

Just remember that as long as they stay in your mind and in your heart, they will always be alive.  As Hobbes once told Calvin, "I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can play together all night!"

So, I guess what I'm saying is that you should never stop dreaming, and Kirby and Puckett will never be far away from you.   

Good to hear you got one HE.  Now, if only Hasbro would get the hint that hardly anyone got one of these and make them available SOMEHOW again, as it is a really nice figure.  I'm not too fond of the cost-cutting they're doing on the bases (the Stormie's is really lightweight and IG-88's was warped due to the use of that famous "Hasbro Cheap Ass Rubber"), but the Stormie itself is a really nice piece once you get it assembled.

I actually splurged back when they first came out (this being relative, as "coming out" implies you could actually find one at retail) and just got one on Ebay for a cheap BIN price.  I think I ended up paying 25 bucks for it with Priority Mail shipping and DC and the whole transaction took less than a week.  So while I feel kind of dirty for having to resort to Ebay, at the same time I feel that it was worth it, especially given the fact that I've never seen one in a store period.  They should have just put a sticker on the front that said "Ebay Exclusive!" and be done with it.   

All the talk of reissuing older UL figures got me thinking about who was genuinely difficult to find at retail and who most deserves to be rereleased.  I'm not one of these people who gets upset when something is reissued (unless it's pointless, like Cantina Han in the POTF2/Saga/OTC/etc stuff) because "it devalues my original" of that thing, so here's the list of who I would think needs to be reissued (some of these are me hoping, naturally, and new artwork wouldn't have to be done for any of them, save the RH Vader):

-Darth Vader with Removable Helmet
-Princess Leia
-Han Solo
-Boba Fett
-Yoda
-Aurra Sing
-IG-88
-Stormtrooper

Strangely enough, weren't all of those "case buddies" with other figures on the list at one time or another?  IIRC, Vader and Leia were their own assortment, and I definitely know that Fett/Solo/Yoda and Sing/IG/Stormie were their own assortments.  If anything proves that Hasbro's case assortment system needs a major overhaul, this is it.

They could just do a straight case reissue of the latter two (or do a Solo/Yoda/Leia case, a Fett/IG-88/Sing case, at 2 per figure, with the third case being 3 Vaders and 3 Stormies) and I think it would work well, but knowing Hasbro, this will never happen, and they will decide to reissue the Bossk/Secura/Tusken wave, which is practically nonexistent.   

I'm going to be the voice of dissent (or the exception to the rule) here and say that my ROTS Battle Droid stands just fine on his base.  The plastic is crappy and his right leg is warped, but I'm able to put his left foot on the peg completely and kind of "bend" his right leg a little to the left and a small piece of the terrain holds is more or less in place (not securely, mind you).  He looks pretty cool standing like that, so I'm happy with it.

This is not to say that the quality of the figure overall is not pure crap though.  If a figure it more or less a skeleton, you'd think you'd want to use the highest quality plastic you could to make sure the figure wouldn't deteriorate over time.  Unfortunately, as usual, "If something's hard to do, it's not worth doing" seems to be Hasbro's mantra these days.

I still say the POTJ Security and Boomer Damage BDs are my favorites that have been made.  They have the film accuracy as far as the thin legs and arms, but also have a higher grade of plastic than the bendy crap that Hasbro's using on them these days.  I've actually had more problems with my TPM BDs bending in their lower legs than the POTJ versions.

And, for the record, RELEASE THE TROPHY EDITION OOM-9 ALREADY!  You don't have to do it as a Trophy Edition as it was originally conceived, but jeez, Hasbro, the TPM version sucked and now is pretty much your last chance to do it and hope that it will sell more than three figures nationwide.

After thinking about it today, I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up empty handed on the Clone Trooper.  My conspiracy theory brain has been going off today about how the clerk probably asked someone about it and they said, "Don't sell them and I'll cut you in on the Ebay profits." 

Oh well, it's not the end of the world.