[trebleshot]

Rather than respond to all the vitriol in this forum, I will just provide a little insight to the situation by replying to this one post.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr Kain

Scott's explantion...

That...

that really doesn't make any sense. Why would they have wasted their time on mock up packaging and why would it have taken this long to show up on the internet?

If you know some of the business side of the industry, it makes perfect sense. It's part of the R&D process for any toy company (and most other manufacturers, really): Mattel, Hasbro, Playmates, Bandai, et. al. They all spend money on creating test shots, prototypes and packaging mock ups for various reasons. Sometimes it's to impress investors and stockholders with potential future products. Sometimes it's to see how well certain ideas translate from paper (or these days, CAD) to a physical object and if there are any issues with the design. Still other times, it's to work out QC errors with the factory (or factories) before the product hits retail.

Regardless of the reasons why, all those materials are considered proprietary and are never meant to be released to the public. Only when the corporation decides it will never continue development on the idea (and the release is cleared by their legal department) will the company release images/documents like this to the public on purpose.

I've seen it happen several times over the years with all kinds of toys from various manufacturers. If it was indeed an internal leak, someone will probably lose his/her job over this. And no, CMIII, it won't be Scott because he would know better than anyone else at Mattel not to do or say anything on behalf of the company without checking with upper management and Legal first.

I won't deny that maybe Mattel was still working on a way to finally move forward with DDU in spite of the failure of DCUC/CIE. Hasbro has done that in the past when a toy's development cycle had already reached the steel mold stage when the project or line has been cancelled.

I don't believe that is the case, since Mattel already stated they needed a certain level of pre-sales before they would have started that stage of development for DDU.

TL;DR
Mockups and prototypes are done all the time. Just look at all those independent toy companies and Kickstarter campaigns for numerous examples. The only difference is that we are usually the investors/shareholders in that scenario.

For larger corporations like Mattel, images and materials for unreleased or in-development projects are rarely shown to the public, if ever. Most likely, Mattel never meant for that image to be released.