Posted by Chuck | August 10, 2009 at 05:10 PM ET
Don't forget, you can submit questions in our forums and we'll try to get as many as possible submitted to Hasbro. We can send only three questions per week, so make sure they are good ones! Now, on to this weeks Questions and Answers directly from Hasbro.
Q.
Just saw the figure two-packs for the Clone Wars. Could we ever see something like this for the Legacy? Maybe an Imperial Officer (named) and a trooper? Same idea with the Rebels: named officer and basic trooper. Or, maybe just Troop builders.
A.
It's certainly possible. We have experimented with several different 2-pack configurations in Legacy in recent years, mostly as exclusives (Order 66, the continuing Wal-Mart exclusive Droid Factory packs , and the upcoming Target-exclusive Geonosis Arena). We would like to keep these "themed" pack ideas going as they are fun to do, can create a great program for our retailer partners, and allow us to get to some interesting characters we might not otherwise get to for a long time. One of the key things with these two-packs is to make sure we are delivering some core heroes to keep the segment interesting for kids as well. Whether we will get to what you suggested remains to be seen, but such an idea has been on our list of possibilities. We'd like to do it, but only time will tell if we can get to it.
Q.
In a recent Q&A you stated that from now on, battlepacks will be straight repacks. Does this mean main characters or could secondary/background characters be packed in as well? If secondary characters (i.e. troopers) are repacked, will they be straight re-releases or could they be modified? For example, lets say a Echo Base/Battle of Hoth battlepack is to be released. We get a General Rieekan, Major Derlin, Han and Echo Baste Trooper. Would the Trooper be one of the two versions that are currently in the Legacy collection or could it possible have a new head sculpt?
A.
The mainline battle packs will be taking a turn away from the beast and occasional collector-targeted set and will be focused on figure-based, kid-targeted sets effective for 2010, with a return to the original packaging depth next Fall. Since these are often holiday or special-occasion (reward or birthday) purchases, we want to make sure that we are providing as much value as we can and as a result we can't keep put significant tooling into these sets right now. We'll be concentrating on either pure re-packs (as we have been doing each of the past several years) or sets that all have something new to all the characters with minor changes (such as the upcoming Resurgance of the Jedi, which does hit a duel kid/collector audience). It's unlikely that in the mainline we'll be doing collector-targeted sets like you suggest. We don't rule out the possibility that exclusive battle packs could have a composition like that, but we were responding to a question about the mainline battle packs when we answered that.
Q. We got our first look at the new package artwork around Toy Fair, and that has prompted some questions that seem to arise any time we see a transition between package art looks.
-First, will we see a hard street date for the new look as we did in 2008? If so, what is that date? -Will provisions be made to get decent ammounts of the last waves of the current collection to retail? There's been historical evidence that suggests that the last wave(s) before the transition sometimes get shortchanged.
A.
There is no hard shelf-date for the line this year. As a result, each of the ongoing assortments will "change" to the new look when the new look is ready to ship from our warehouse to fill orders (i.e. when retailers are selling down on blue/white and need fresh inventory). This will vary by item, with Saga Legends and Clone Wars already out at retail as this is written, and some other assortments trailing a little further behind. As for the latest waves of Legacy, one of the reasons why the red/white line look is slower to get in to retail is because still have a decent amount of blue/white inventory that we are trying to get out there, but with the slowdown in a few figures it makes it tougher to control. At a certain point we need to go with red/white and this may mean that the last wave - based Attack of the Clones - will likely see shorter distribution at brick and mortar stores than previous waves. However, with retailers like Entertainment Earth and Brian's Toys as a solution, collectors have a way of getting complete waves even though they may be short at retail. We recommend going this route if there is any uncertainty in finding the Epi I wave - or even the EpV wave that preceded it - at your local retailers.
Check back in a few weeks and we'll post the next round of Questions (and answers) as soon as Hasbro offers them.
-Click HERE to return to the home page-