Action Figure Resource Magazine December 2014 | Page 4

December 2014

This month I want to feature an article by Ryan Bradley,
who writes a weekly column for the Action Figure Fury
website, which struck a chord with me as I am sure it will
with many of you, in fact a wrote a fairly similar article a
couple of years ago and feel that perhaps it was time so
repeat the message, especially with reference to some of
the current lines of figures being produced by the likes of
Hasbro and Mattel.

into double packs, it would be because they
overproduced and are now trying to sell them in pairings
with figures they know they can sell.

So, on that note I’ll hand you over to Ryan:
If you’re an action figure collector, you’ve had this
experience. You walk into a retail store—Toys “R” Us,
Target, Walmart—get to the toy section and there’s a wall
of repeats of the most popular characters from your
favorite line (for me, it’s Captain America, Wolverine, Iron
Man, and Spiderman in the Marvel Universe line) and the
cast-offs you’ve already bought and no one else wants.
Not only is the figure you came looking for not there, but
there isn’t a single figure you’d even consider buying.
And the double packs are even worse. Hasbro (and I’ll
mostly be addressing the Marvel Universe line because
that’s the one I’m most familiar with) are filled with the
characters I couldn’t possibly want another of. (Check out
the photo of every Wolverine I’ve had to buy to get the
figures I actually wanted in sets in my column from last
week.)

This is a problem because of all the figures that we, the
fans and collectors, want that aren’t getting made. Off the
top of my head, there hasn’t been a 3 and ¾ inch Gamora
(who was one of the main characters in the
highest-grossing movie of the year), Arcade, Scorpion, any
of the Marauders outside of Sabretooth, and the list goes
on and on.

This is all anecdotal, but let’s look at the numbers. Out of
the 169 Marvel Universe figures (variants included)
released while the line ran, there were 28 Steve
Rogers/Captain America, Tony Stark/Iron Man, Peter
Parker/Spiderman, and James Howlett/Wolverine. That’s
about 16.5 percent, which is a lot, but not terrible. It’s
when it comes to double packs that it gets awful. Out of
the 40 released, 22 featured one of the characters I just
listed. That’s 55 percent, a little more than one out of every
two.
I guess they have fought once or twice.
And as much as all of these repeated irk me, I suspect it’s
because these are the figures people are buying. (I’m not
going to touch the chicken and egg question of “Are
people buying them because Hasbro makes so many or is
Hasbro making so many because people are buying
them?”) I also think that if someone from Hasbro was to
explain why there were so many of those figures made it

Black Panther's greatest foe with...Captain America?
Klaw, Black Panther’s greatest foe, with…Captain
America?

To be fair, some of the pairings did make sense.
It also creates insane pricing disparity. I can get an Iron
Man cheaper than I could in a retail store on Amazon, but
I can’t find a Vision for under $150. I’d love to have a Vision,
but who can afford it?
We might not be in the boardroom, but without our
money, neither is anyone else. We, the collectors, make this
industry go. We can stop Hasbro from making more of
these figures we don’t want by not buying them. They’d
have to be insane to keep making these figures if we all
stop buying them. And that goes for other figure lines as
well. Every figure you buy, you’re sending a message to the
company: I want more figures like this.
This concept, voting with your wallet, works for
everything. We live in a society where the profit margin
determines what companies make. They make more
movies like the ones that sell the most tickets. How many
movies since The Dark Knight have tried to imitate its
gritty atmosphere? They’re more McDonald’s than
anything else because they make the most money. How
we spend our money shapes our world. Let’s shape one
where the action figures we want get made.