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I'm glad they've finally figured out that people don't want a new figure scale, like 6-inch or something, and that for many people this is a nostalgia hobby.
#97498 Here we go again... Playmates is back in the Trek business!
Posted by
on 26 January 2022 - 12:47 PM
#97457 Eaglemoss Build the Enterprise D Partswork
Posted by
on 14 January 2022 - 07:35 PM
Dang that's cool. I hope it's designed to be sturdy as a single piece. Nice to see such detailed lighting in the windows in the drive section.
#97402 Star Trek Micro Machines
Posted by
on 12 November 2021 - 02:34 PM
Collector Set III recently sold for $116.50 + $15.95 shipping after 32 bids.
These have seen strong demand for the past 20 years, pretty much uninterrupted, and they're always landing in this price range. There's just no dip in demand at all, and somehow there are always more someone is selling.
Who has the Micro Machines license now, Hasbro? They should check out these prices FFS, and do another set now that there are so many Trek series on the air.
#97363 Playset and Vehicle Values
Posted by
on 09 September 2021 - 07:55 AM
It probably wouldn't have been feasible at the time but I would have loved it if they did an Akira or any of the other new fed ships seen in the movie.
They needed to do an Enterprise-A first, hah! They kinda missed out on some painfully obvious crowd pleasers, that in retrospect seems like merchandising malpractice
Would love some large federation ships like the Akira, Nebula, Ambassador, Miranda, Oberth.
#97357 Playset and Vehicle Values
Posted by
on 29 August 2021 - 08:24 AM
USS Defiant recently sold for $76.00 + $20.00 shipping after 8 bids.
One of the lowest results for a boxed Defiant in recent years, and for you only have to look a some of the posts above. Demand for these remains high, just like with Voyager, and is showing no signs of dissipating.
Well bought.
#97285 Playset and Vehicle Values
Posted by
on 12 July 2021 - 03:35 PM
USS Voyager recently sold for $193.50 + $18.55 shipping after 18 bids.
This is where these have been regularly trading for the past decade or so. Still, the supply of MIB Voyagers is not really drying up after all that. Every month a couple or more go for $150-$220 pretty reliably.
Pretty average result these days really.
This one is numbered around 51000, so think about that volume, who bought these, where they went, and the remaining demand 25 years later. Also, this is a much greater span of time than from the original Star Wars vehicles to the market clamor for them in the late 1990s, for perspective.
#97270 Playset and Vehicle Values
Posted by
on 04 July 2021 - 12:05 PM
It appears that someone paid ::sigh:: an absolute modern record for an MIB Borg Cube, with this example selling for $100.99 + $11.75 shipping after 4 bids.
Eagle-eyed readers may note that this example was numbered 000348, a fact which was hyped by the seller in the listing. Now, I'm a fan of low numbers and everything, but this is a lot of dough for an MIB item that probably will not be opened for like another 40 years. Low numbers among big ships rarely commanded a premium back in the day, and it's odd that they sometimes do today.
Perhaps this is the effect of the Picard show we're seeing.
Well sold, as they say.
By the way: is it weird that the cube was not released for FC with just an updated box? Seems like it would have been a fish in a barrel, esp if the outside panels were updated with the FC cube design.
#96899 Magazine advertisements
Posted by
on 10 July 2020 - 06:42 AM
Yeah, it was hard to make the figures stand up properly -- they should have just done Galoob-style stand bases for the minifigures.
And they didn't do small ships that were closer to scale like half a dozen different Starfleet shuttles, or the Romulan shuttle, Spacedock shuttle, Vulcan shuttle. Bajoran fighter, etc. There was a ton of small ships they could have done instead of stuff that was obviously not to scale. They were afraid to do obscure ships.
#96885 Toy Show Displays
Posted by
on 03 July 2020 - 04:35 PM
Toy Fair 1999
Note the Art Asylum Borg and Klingon on the far right. At this point in time Art Asylum was working with Playmates on some sculpts as a sub-contractor at first, before it acquired the license to produce its own lineup. These are the early days of Art Asylum here.
#96870 Magazine advertisements
Posted by
on 27 June 2020 - 03:02 PM
TOS lineup from the TRU set. Production heads on these, as opposed to the prototypes shown earlier in 1993 (in the prototypes thread here).
#96829 Prototypes
Posted by
on 29 May 2020 - 01:50 PM
Borg Drone, 1999
At Toy Fair 1999 Playmates showed a Borg Drone figure created by Art Asylum, as a subcontractor, one that was eventually released later in a different package and with some differently painted details. Note the Akira, Ent-E and a Galaxy class on this mockup package, which already features the assortment numbers. This package concept was scrapped in favor of a slightly more sedate silver theme with Borg alcove decoration inside the box for production. Note that the cube is of the TNG era, and that there are two of them on the box.
Also, note that the paint details of the head are different on the figure in the box and in the detail shot. The paint details were changed again a little for the production versions.
I think this figure shows the influence of McFarlane during this time: the scale, detail and the comic-book style artistic direction. These were not the stiff zombie Borg of TNG and FC, needless to say, but some kind of cyborg wrestlers. It's almost surprising that the arm attachment is not some kind of gasoline-powered chainsaw. Still, this would have been something that would have been nice to have on the shelves around the time FC actually came out, even though collectors were not greatly enthused about the new size format. Remember how unpopular the Space Talk figures really were in retail? This Borg Drone effort in 1999 smells of desperation and of chasing trends of the time.
These later efforts to cash in on FC took place during the decline of the property for the toy company. The main FC figure lineup did not fly off shelves, and collectors felt uneasy toward the larger format of the FC figures.
By 1999 the ship on FC had largely sailed -- Insurrection came out a year prior -- so it's difficult to view this as something other than a very belated effort to squeeze some money out of the FC lineup after largely whiffing the FC lineup itself in a new size format and without items like the Borg Queen or the Borg cube itself. (Yes, remember there was a Borg cube in that film). The cube could have warranted a re-release around the time of FC, playing a slightly more important role than the sphere which was on screen for less than a minute before being blown up.
Also, recall that Pmates went back to the 4.5-inch format after Insurrection came out, producing the bridge crew in FC uniforms, but had found that the villains in Insurrection were really too unpopular to create in 4.5-inch format. But somehow not the 9-inch format. This is what prompted this "second look" at FC, which ended up being a tremendously more popular film at the time, but one which Pmates did not really exploit to its full potential. In hindsight, I think they would have stayed with the 4.5-inch format and had done a few other things differently for the main FC lineup, if they had the chance to do it over.
#96730 McFarlane Toys Gets Entire Star Trek Licence!
Posted by
on 16 April 2020 - 08:27 AM
Tbh, I don't see why this couldn't be replicated for some long-needed figures and vehicles, like the TOS Movies figures or the Ent-C. The big box retailers are kind of done as a toy delivery mechanism, especially in/after 2020.
The McFarlane audience is a very McFarlane audience, but there are far more trekkers out there than Spawn fans.
#96444 Prototypes
Posted by
on 28 November 2019 - 06:41 PM
TOS Enterprise Bridge Playset Prototype, 1996
At Toy Fair 1996 Playmates showed this Original Series bridge playset, which did not lead to a production version. The bridge was designed to open like a suitcase, with the two sides pivoting upward and closing at the top, giving it a semi-circular appearance when closed.
A few things we can note: the bridge is far wider than the TNG bridge playset, and it's relatively faithfully laid out, even if there are some gaps that help playability. More importantly, there are plenty of chairs and railings, and overall the bridge is very spacious compared to the TNG bridge which turned out to be a little too claustrophic, had a bouncy floor, and workstations that snapped off too easily.
The departures from the screen-seen bridge aren't all that significant: there are some issues one could raise with the stations and some of the spacing, especially front to back, but overall it's pretty well designed. I think this is, retail-wise, as good as it could have been done at the time without costing like a hundred bucks and without being to the exact scale, which could make it the size of a car tire or something. It doesn't feel scaled down, and it's not a deep and narrow well like the TNG bridge -- there is room to stick your hand in from the side and touch the stations and figures from the vantage point of the "camera" without losing too much realism.
Trek line manager Chris Overley indicated on a couple of occasions that it was simply too expensive for the company to do a TOS bridge on a level that they wanted to achieve, and that the concepts they constructed were turning out to be more costly than the TNG bridge. Those are fair statements, and despite the fact that the TNG bridge flew off the shelves (and promptly became $125 in the price guides by like 1994), the retailers could have had some reservations about pricing and size. But, with 80% of the figures going to collectors anyway, as Overley noted, that was kind of moot. As long as it wasn't like $80 at retail (but remember the AT-AT though), and as long as Playmates didn't lose money producing it in a production run that they needed to break even, I think it could have worked out financially. This wasn't a money-no-object playset, and it was made to fold up and stow nicely to hide its size.
Playmates managers Chris Overley and Jim Garber said on a number of occasions that the company had been looking at ways to do the TOS bridge for some time, but to do it in a way that the company wouldn't lose money while being appealing to retailers. But ultimately, we got the cardboard TRU special with the figures, at the very least, for $30. Playmates had hung on to the concept of a TOS bridge playset a little past 1996, but after 1996 the door was really closing on something like this, as the hype had abated. The company was now focused on the First Contact lineup in the autumn of 1996, and a wider run of TOS characters on the 1996 cards, Voyager, and Warp Factor cards. It doesn't appear that retailer demand would have been easy to capture after the publicity highs of 1996 and all the 30th anniversary events, not to mention First Contact in theaters, so if a TOS bridge would have happened it had to happen in 1996 and not at some other point in time.
#96442 New Star Trek Series starring Patrick Stewart
Posted by
on 27 November 2019 - 06:55 PM
The latest on the Picard series, including some news about Geordi La Forge's new job via the comic book Star Trek: Picard -- Countdown #1. Spoiler: He's not the Captain of the USS Challenger, but... I don't know what year that was in the VOY timeline, so it doesn't preclude it per se. But anyway.
https://www.digitals...ext-generation/
More importantly, the name of the ship Picard is commanding has been revealed by the same comic book: https://comicbook.co...y-enterprise-f/
I have, ahem, some thoughts on this design, but whatevs -- there's an actual LOTR elf in the series -- so what are you gonna do. Am I right, guise?
#96422 Terminator: Dark Fate
Posted by
on 10 November 2019 - 06:05 PM
Yeah, that's why I'm more excited to see this one than the others -- reviewers say that it's a sequel to T2 and it ignores the rest. I had seen T3, which felt meh, but the rest looked like hot garbage in movie trailers.
As for the franchise, it was mismanaged for quite some time so I'm not paying too much attention to the larger picture. One could make some parallels to old and new Star Wars and Star Trek films there.
One thing about Cameron/Ahnuld films: T2 was an epic, epic hit and was not followed up on during the whole decade of the 1990s. Same with "True Lies," which was another major hit and once again left to sit with no sequels. That was a Cameron film too.
