| tomstroncollectible Wrote:If that’s true of just about any line of toys, then I feel sorry for today’s generation of kids and the toys they have to play with. When I was growing up, toys didn’t break right out of the package; we got our money’s worth out of them. The Star Wars items I have from my youth are still in good shape and they’re over 30 years old. |
My dad is a big collector of Star Wars stuff, and a lot of the loose stuff that he looked at picking up from rummage sales back in the early 80s (when I was tagging along) was broken. Maybe you were different, but kids play with toys -- hard. That's actually a huge theme from Toy Story 3, with all the broken toys from that.
I continue to disagree RE: the Flynn figures. The likenesses were horrible and I made note of that when I reviewed them last year.
Some of the die-cast vehicles looked ok. However, the quality control was largely absent as I showed when I reviewed them so looks can be deceiving. |
That's fine. You can disagree. I think they look fine for the type of toys they are. Like I said, they aren't Ghostbusters level stuff, but they also weren't nearly $30 per figure (when you factor in shipping, and with Matty Collector you *have* to factor in shipping, as you cannot buy those in stores.)
| The price slashing for Tron Legacy items started about 2 to 2 1/2 months after the debut of the product line if I remember correctly. That shows me that, with limited exceptions like the deluxe ID discs, the items did not sell and did not appeal to the mass collecting community. |
If you're just looking at Tron toys to see how quickly they drop and you think that everything else sticks around forever in stores without getting discounts, then it might seem fast. But it's today's market. The public is fickle, and the Tron toys were promoting a movie that was going to come out and then go away, not a cartoon line that was going to be regularly seen by people.
Look at other products, and you'll see that price slashing happens quickly often. Duke Nukem Forever came out last month, and has already been on sale for half off what it originally cost. Is that an indicator that it failed?
As for the hero/villain release ratio, honestly who cares? I collected strictly villains when Transformers were first released in the ‘80’s and there were plenty of heroes available to buy when they were for sale in stores.
Your line of reasoning, in my opinion, has no bearing on the lack of sales. Consumers want their money’s worth and they’re not going to pay for inferior products, especially in a bad world economy. They don’t care about nitpicky issues like good guys and bad guys in toy lines. |
If you were a kid and collecting only the bad guys, then you are the only one that I know that did that. With all of my friends from being a kid and playing with action figures, including myself, you wanted the good guys. If you're marketing toward a kid audience and not a collector audience, that's a HUGE issue.
And it even seems to be something for collectors. Of the Ghostbusters figures, the only one that didn't sell out of it's initial run within about a day of it's release was Walter Peck -- the only bad guy they've made so far.
It wouldn’t have been as hard of a sell if a more reputable toy company made a better product line. The overall failure of the product to move, in spite of the gimmicks, demonstrated that.
There were quite a few youngsters in the theater when I saw Tron Legacy. It was enough of an annoyance to remind me of why I choose not to see movies in the theater. |
You seem like an overly picky person, even based on your own statements. Maybe the line couldn't live up to your expectations, no matter what.
Regardless, you don't have either Disney's projections nor Spin Master's sales figures, so I don't know if anyone can rightfully say they are a success or a failure. Like I've said, I doubt they moved as much as Disney wanted, but Tron: Legacy didn't sell nearly as many tickets as what Disney was hoping for.
| I don’t know what Disney’s overall expectations were as I don’t work for the company but I think it’s a safe bet to say they were pretty high. The decorated monorails at the theme parks, two SDCC shows back to back coupled with the emphasis on the toys in 2010 showed that. I’m frankly surprised ElecTRONica is still going on at Disneyland but that’s a far cry from the all-out publicity campaign in the last two years. |
Three Comic Cons, actually -- ElecTRONica is continuing because it has been raking in the money with drink sales, specifically. You could debate all day if the people who go to that and spend money are doing so because it's Tron or just because (and I'd guess it's more of the latter than the former).
| I disagree with you again. A recent check of Amazon shows an overall lack of sales on the Tron toy products from NECA and the more recent Spin Master items. |
Amazon is a bad indicator of much of anything like that. To do a comparison, Tron Impulse Projection Sam is number 22,887 and Peter Venkman with Slimer is 96,876. MattyCollector just a couple days ago put another small run of Peter Venkman with Slimer on sale and they are already sold out.
The numbers on Amazon only matter when you are comparing apples to apples -- you could use them to figure out which of the Tron: Legacy items did the best *on Amazon*, but you can't extrapolate that much further.
| Regarding the pinball machines selling out, that very well could possibly be a retail shell game. Produce a limited quantity of units, employ some fuzzy mathematical tactics on the accounting/publicity books and you magically have “record sales”. |
Uhm, okay? You produce a limited number of units more than they have done for any other limited edition pinball machine lately, and they all move and that's fuzzy math? The same company did a limited edition version of their Avatar game, with 100 machines less than the Tron game, and they didn't sell out that quickly. Each machine is individually numbered, so people know the numbers they are getting.
| Keep in mind that collectibles are only worth what consumers are willing to pay for them. That applies to all facets of the market, whether it’s toys, cars, jewelry etc. Sure, a collector’s guide can say XYZ product is worth this amount of money but it’s easy to write absolutes in a book. |
Right. But I don't get what you're saying here. If you're talking about the pinball machines, yeah -- at least 350 people immediately thought that $6500 was a fair price for that particular collectible.
That's a HELL of a big price to spend on a collectible, and they had 350 people ready *that day* to purchase.
To me, that says something.
| Admittedly, I don’t know what first-generation arcade games sell for nowadays but speaking from personal experience, big game cabinets are a hassle to ship and pick up. That’s what I think generates interest in computer emulators like MAME and KEM. The accompanying arcade game ROM sets run on many older computers and are easy to locate and download for free. |
Right, but what does that have to do with a pinball machine or the fact the arcade machine is worth a ton more than other similarly aged machines? If anything, MAME has made the original games worth less, but Tron as an arcade machine is still worth at least $1000 minimally. There is one listed on eBay right now for $2400, although it hasn't sold.
I have some arcade machines, and to give you a baseline, Ms. Pac-Man (traditionally, the most popular "classic" arcade machine) can be had for around $500ish. I have a Galaxian I bought at a show for $200. So, for all the reasons that you said -- it's hard to transport them, they are large and take up space, and you can play it on MAME -- why then is Tron worth SO much more than the other popular titles?
I’m not surprised that T:L did poorly. Yes, it’s an attractive movie from a visual standpoint but it takes more than eye-candy to make a movie successful.
What you don’t seem to want to accept is that Disney gambled on Tron and Spin Master rolled out an inferior product. They both rolled snake-eyes and lost. |
I don't understand why you think that I don't want to accept something here. Yeah, Disney gambled on Tron: Legacy. I really liked Tron: Legacy as a movie, but I said far before you said any of this that it was a huge disappointment for Disney. So I don't know why you think that I am trying to cover that up -- I'll gladly say it again if you like, Tron: Legacy did not live up to Disney's projections.
On the flip side, you haven't proved anything about why you think that Spin Master rolled out an inferior product. Pointing at your own reviews as proof that the product wasn't a high enough quality is like saying that all Fords suck because you had one that was a lemon.
| I can only conclude that it would appear that we are only going agree to disagree on this topic so I don’t see the need for further discussion. Your defenses of it may be admirable to the more hardcore fans that are out there but like it or not, the overall sales numbers that T:L and the accompanying product line generated clearly show that they were ultimately not well received by the general public. That’s not opinion, that’s cold hard fact. |
The sales numbers? Which sales numbers are on your side? If you have the internal memos and stuff, I'd love to see them. But since you don't have sales numbers, I don't know how you can call that cold hard fact.
I'm guessing you are done with the conversation though, since you don't have numbers that you can use to back up your points. You can argue that I am looking out for the hardcore fans, but I've followed stuff like this for my life, and it is nearly impossible to tell what a company is thinking about something without knowing what they expected from the beginning.
As I've said and I'll say again, I think that Disney is disappointed by the entire thing. I think that the toy line's sales were disappointing to Disney, because I think that Disney wanted this thing to go crazy and sell a billion dollars in tickets and a ton of toys.
I think that based on the fact that everywhere that I've looked, there are only bad guys on the shelf at least gives me some evidence that the mix of heroes versus villains should have been different, as the villains at least in my city sold no where near as well as the heroes.
I think that you can't use Amazon or how fast something got discounted as the only way to tell if it did well in sales or not. By the way, Tron Legacy is #59 on Amazon's instant video today. On the flip side, the Godfather is 1,662. What does that say?
Anyway, since apparently this is it, here's my last few comments:
You don't like that toys. That's totally fine.
I like the toys. In particular, I really liked the Die Cast line, and also found the Deluxe Identity Discs to be pretty darn cool. I decided to collect them because I liked them.
Your mileage may vary, and that's great. But I don't think that you can base my like of them or your hate of them as proof that the figures did wonderfully or horribly.