[Serious Lee]

Collecting of course is different than a parent or relative buying for a child. We know the difference in costumes etc and may pick and choose which Cap's or Spidey's we buy from the different lines, but I'm not sure if this article is based more on speculation than anything else.

TF4 toys will sell once the movie gets some more steam as said above, once it hits theatres, and frankly it really doesn't matter if the quality of them meets that of the past lines. Kids are ferocious naggers when they want something, am I right dad's?

I prefer comic based toys, but movie based toys as said above also have a few gems. Up here it took 2 months before I noticed Electro warming amidst all the Spidey's, so maybe case packs are the problem? I don't have those facts on a spreadsheet so I can't say, but in any line movie or otherwise there will be more popular figures and less popular that sit on store shelves longer.

Isn't it fair to say that toys in general are a little less popular? I think last year for Xmas, my 7 year old niece and 5 year old nephew got iPods and some sort of game boy system. Yes, they have many toys, but some days it's all digital instead of physical toy imagination. I'm not knocking the age we live in, but at the same time my nephew doesn't have 2 Cap's etc, well not from me anyway. So, yes it's tricky for big toy companies to find the balance of how much to make of what figure or game and maybe that's the way it should be. Do we really want a single company to know exactly how much money is available per household and where the exact percentage of said dollars are going?

Any company won't stop trying to make more money, sometimes it takes longer to figure out the market. So, as a collector I think if figures ship in cases of 6 or 8 or whatever, make them all different, make them all sought after. Or in other words, don't make a warehouse full of figures that will never sell, when time after time we can see in a retail setting what isn't and hasn't been working. What a company saves in wasted plastic they could use the resources to make new and more sought after products.

This is just my temporary point of view until there are more facts for me to add up, but with all the free information out there nowadays, I wonder about the board meetings at big toy companies, like where are they getting the data for certain age groups? Because let's face it, advertising on Saturday mornings accounts for some of the desires of children, but other major media must have their hands in it too.

Right now I feel like we're being gauged on our spending amounts, not necessarily habits.