Q&A: Sooprsized with Vehicle Questions
Monday, June 16, 2008
Luke was a little short for a Stormtrooper, and this week's entry is a little short for a Q&A column. Due to a variety of factors, including an influx of a lot of the same question, this week's column is shorter, but it has questions on new guns, small vehicles, and of course, cardboard. Because everybody loves cardboard. Read on!
1. Hi Adam, given Clone Wars is to be another big media push similar to the past movie years, do you know if Hasbro has any intention of reintroducing the Battle Vehicles assortment (which, if I recall correctly, was last seen during the Revenge of the Sith line)? Of course, Hasbro is generally bound by what characters and vehicles actually appear in the Clone Wars movie and subsequent television series, but it would seem to be the perfect time to repack low-cost vehicles like the AT-RT and Clone Wars-era speeder bikes (with new CW Clone Troopers). Or have the Battle Packs replaced the Battle Vehicle assortment?
Personally, I would *love* to see Hasbro try their hand at creating "off-screen" toys for Republic and Seperatist vehicles at this low price point, based upon unused concepts or even their own design ideas.
--FFN
Hasbro's love for smaller vehicles has apparently waned, as for the future the only known plans for them are in Battle Packs. It seems the $10-$15 price point is more or less dead.
2. I've been looking around but haven't managed to find out exactly which droid parts will come with which figures in Hasbro's new TLC BAF line (I'm talking about the basic figures here, not the WalMart Droid Factory 2-packs). Have you caught any word about, or do you happen to be able to dig up via your sources, what we can expect to find packed in with each figure in the first assortments of the TLC line please? I'm not a completist collector, but I do like the look of some of those new BAF astromechs, so I am curious to know who I will have to pick up to get the parts I need and what I'll have to be swapping for – eg: which part of which droid do I get when I buy Yarna for instance? Does that kind of info exist for the first wave or two of TLC yet?
--Daniel
Well, I've got bad news and worse news for you. The bad news is that there is no list yet. The worse news is that it's going to get complicated. Hasbro confirmed that the pieces a figure comes with may change from wave to wave, so if you were to buy a case, that case would have enough pieces to build a (or more than a) figure. So when wave 1 ships, they have two droids. When wave 2 ships, this may change.
The packaging is designed so that the droid part can be easily changed out-- the droid description on the cardbacks I've seen so far are stickers, meaning either I saw something weird and/or special, or the bits and pieces will rotate. This means a checklist isn't going to be enough, we're going to need more of a chart. I'll be happy to maintain said chart as soon as I start seeing stuff up close and personal, but that could be a few weeks.
3. I just remembered that in the Hasbro Q&A, they mentioned that for the Clone gear lockers they would be using the spare weapons from the Battlefront 2 Clone pack, though not all of them. This is an odd statement to make, because as far as I can tell, there were only three new weapons introduced with that set anyway, the chaingun that they've already reused on one of the Order 66 packs, the EMP launcher with the jet trooper and the PLX rocket launcher. Not counting the Droid blaster that came with the Clone engineer, the rest of the weapons would be the two types of DC-15 rifles that all Clone Troopers already be carrying.
Am I right or have I gone insane?
--CP
You do indeed seem to be right-- so it's possible they will just include two of the three new guns. Sadly, nobody has cracked open a weapons locker yet so the precise contents are still unknown.
4. 7/26 Is a Saturday - Is the Clone Wars Launch going to be Friday at midnight like they did for ROTS & AOTC? I recall them saying at the ROTS midnight launch at one of the local area Wal-Mart's that they were not going to put out all of the merchandise. In your opinion which store would be the best of "the big three" to obtain the most stuff minus the specific exclusives?
--Chad
Hasbro's plans do not call for a big midnight roll-out, but there very well may be one-- it's going to be up to local stores and the chains. My guess is that the way various products leak these days, you might be best served to start hunting in the coming weeks and not wait for the end of July. Stuff gets out, you may as well be vigilant and forget this whole launch thing, except for exclusives, which we don't even know for sure what they are yet.
5. Since the price of oil is going up why doesn't HASBRO revisit the idea of cardboard or chip-board play sets? They would be cheaper than a plastic play set AND they could make it a mail-away for collectors?
--Jon
Hasbro has been asked. Repeatedly. By me. They just don't want to do it right now, for whatever reason, and my guess it has something to do with sales projections. I would personally be very pleased to see 3-4 cardboard playsets over a year or two, but I don't know how many other fans would jump at the chance. Probably enough to make it worthwhile for your average smaller toy company, but Hasbro deals more in volume, and it can be tough to satisfy stockholders when you have a product that doesn't sell in the kajillions of pieces.
FIN
That's all for now! Yes, it's down to 5 questions. Why 5? That's how many weren't duplicates of questions asked in the past month, and the number I wanted to cut it down to. The plan for future columns is still to do 5 questions a week-- this is, of course, depending on what you send in-- and I'll do "bonus" columns depending on what else comes in. If I get 20 good questions, you're going to see more installments-- but if there's 5, that's going to be it. I want to start putting more time into other features I can write, plus Figure of the Day is actually surprisingly time- and will-to-live-consuming. So yeah, less is less, but for me, less is more.
After the first Millennium Falcon found in Canada, it seems like there's a very good chance that it won't be Hasbro, but the fan community at large who assembles the "release list" for July 26-- which, I might add, is the most frequently asked question. Every week, no less than 4 people write in asking if a list for the big July launch has been generated yet, and the answer is still no. With all the packaged samples surfacing around the web, it's unclear if these will all be 7/26 items,
Got questions? I bet you do. Email me with "Q&A" somewhere in the subject line and hopefully I'll get to yours in the next column!
Posted byAdam16bit at 12:00 AM
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