[DerStahlhelm]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean C

What He-Man/MOTU lines have been popular with kids? The last really kid-aimed line was in 2002 or so, fizzled out after a couple of years, faring worse than Hasbro 2000 GI JOE relaunches (movie tie-ins aside). All these vinyls and stuff aren't kid aimed, the closest thing is the Mega-Brands stuff. Next year we'll see if MOTU figures can make it in mass retail.

MOTU has supported more fan aimed lines in the last 10 years, and yes, there's a lot of MOTU international fans, but that's also in part due to Hasbro's we-don't-give-crap attitude toward GI JOE, letting it fizzle out after a few so-so Toys R Us exclusives, and letting some incompetent fan club make overpriced 4" figures until their license ended.

Scale is important to ARAH fans, which is why jumbo 12" 80's GI JOE figures weren't a success. At that size they immediately lost interest of an already limited number of die hard 80's Joe fans. There's a basic joke in the GI JOE collecting community, "they'll make anything but what we actually want."

I'm probably arguing minutiae...but I don't see MOTU as any more viable than GI JOE, as in a retro GI JOE line. A modern realistic line probably wouldn't go anywhere. If there were a market for that, then BBI's Elite Force stuff would get more mass releases.

Was the modern incarnation of GI Joe really so unsuccessful? It ran at retail for almost 10 years (almost as long as the 80s ARAH line) starting in 2007 with the 25th anniversary line and ending with the final TRU wave in 2016. If anything killed the line it was Hasbro dropping the 25th/POC/30th lines in support of those terrible movies.