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.
