The Action Figure and Toy Collecting and Discussion Thread!

[Commander Kor] It would have been glorious. [/Kor]

 

Black Series (6-inch) Wave 2 has arrived locally. I went to Target today hoping to find the Black Series Han Solo and Boba Fett (not really interested in Greedo or Slave Leia), and while there was no Fett, I got to bring home Han Solo. The only other Wave 2 figure there was a Greedo.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing Wave 2 of the 6" figures. So far my local stores haven't stocked them and the only ones I've seen the past couple of weeks have been X-Wing Luke and the Artoo, but they'll probably be on shelves by Thanksgiving because the stores will want to get as much of their product in their back rooms onto the sales floors in time for the insane retail rush at the end of next week.

 

And here we go..

Well, tomorrow is my usual toy-hunting day so I guess I know what I'm looking for.

 

Wait until the plain white 6" Stormtrooper hits in Wave 3. That's gonna be a scavenger hunt to track down in most stores.

 

The Target I went to still has a Luke and an R2 available as well. It also had 2 Mauls when I went last week, though there was only one today.

And I haven't seen a Sandtrooper since I bought mine.

 

I've seen one or two since my first Sandtrooper, but that's been it. Which I guess is all for the best since it gets pretty expensive to army build a figure that costs at least $20 a pop and that's before you factor in the respective sales tax wherever you live. The Sandtrooper is great but a couple of them is plenty for now.

Besides, it's not as if they're all over the place every time you walk into a store.

 

Want to order new figures through Amazon? Do you care about packaging quality?

You might want to reconsider.

 

That's funny considering Amazon usually puts smaller objects into boxes way larger then needed. In fact their are a few websites dedicated to this.

 

i open all my toys anyway. but yeah, whenever i order a Figuarts or Robot Damashii from Amazon the box is always crushed and mangled.

 

At least the Amazon-exclusive Droid Factory figures aren't mangled and mashed in transit because they're sold as a set and Hasbro supplies a white, pretty sturdy box to slide the six carded figures into. I have yet to hear of anybody who ordered the exclusive Droid Factory characters getting damaged packaging. But that's probably and only because Hasbro ships them to Amazon in those white protective boxes to begin with.

I can only imagine how mashed and flattened those Droid Factory figures might be if were they shipped individually. And it'd be an even bigger complaint and insult since they're not available anywhere else except probably eBay and were produced in far more limited numbers than regular retail characters.

 

I guess I've been super lucky. I've bought plenty of action figures from Amazon over the years, and have never had any packaging problems. I feel awful for the collectors that got those. That crap is just unacceptable!

 

And some of those figures like Mara Jade or the upcoming Darth Plagueis aren't exactly super cheap on the secondary market thanks to the current demand. If you order a Mara or Plagueis to keep mint-on-card (or as close to it as possible) and this happens you're going to spend twice as much if not moreso to replace that damaged figure or figures.

Even if you're strictly a loose collector and toss packaging in the garbage right after you open it I have to say it's the principle of the thing. You shouldn't get something you paid good money for and had to wait to get delivered from some remote location in that kind of condition. It's a matter of simple care and consideration for your customers.

 

The Kirk/Khan figure I ordered came in the mail yesterday. The fact that part of the scenery (control panel) is just a piece of cardboard was somewhat disappointing, thought the rest of it is nice. But the cardboard with Kirk/Khan makes me like the Spock/Horta a bit better, all the extras with that were plastic, not cardboard. Of course, the Spock one also only had one real figure (no offense to the Horta), so I shouldn't complain too much.

I've decided I need to buy more of the 8"-12" figures. I just got an 8" Q. I now have another shelf dedicated to these.

Yeah, when I still lived with my parents, my dad used to constantly joke about me buying microwaves all the time, because I'd buy small things like action figures and the box was big enough to ship a microwave in. =\ I also recall buying a package of scratch art knife tips, the item itself was the size of a book of matches, and they sent it in a giant box.

I haven't had any problems with their packaging besides the fact that there is usually too much of it, though.

 

It's cardboard? Not even flimsy, cheap plastic? That sucks. That doesn't affect how I feel about the figures themselves because they look amazing, but I was hoping that everything included in the Kirk/Khan set was plastic even if wasn't the highest-quality plastic.

 

Yeah, those were my hopes, as well. I was opening it up yesterday (because I open everything) and still hoping what I was seeing were decals or something to put on cheap plastic. But no, the very back wall is just thin crappy cardboard.

Photos I've seen of it elsewhere were VERY misleading, and the back looked like it was 3d. Here it is, though (I put Spock's extra tricorder on Khan so I don't lose it):

The other part of the controls, which Khan is falling down against, are pretty nice as far as these things go (in this price range), and the figures are nice, so I'm still glad I bought it. But I'm considering just removing the cardboard part. It just slides into notches on the back of the plastic bit.

I mean, that is really not a big deal, but I still felt somewhat disappointed and like the cheapness of the cardboard brings down the niceness of the rest of the stuff.

 

At least it looks like the 1967 engineering consoles and not some loose interpretation of the TOS sets. The original Trek Bridge Playset from the Mego era of the seventies looked almost nothing like the Enterprise bridge, but then a few of the classic alien Mego figures didn't look much like the aliens from the original series, neither.

I like the tricorder Khan's wearing.

 

Well, I had to do something with the extra tricorder. And now I have all these extra hands and legs, too. ^_^

But yeah, I think my disappointment has to do with the fact that, if you google for this set, there are pictures that look VERY different from that (I know this happens with this sort of thing, but it doesn't stop me from being disappointed). One looks like the back is 3-dimensional, or at the very least, that the image has shadows on the buttons rather than just circles.

But anyway, I'll stop complaining because I do like the figures.

 

There've been some Star Wars figure multipacks over the years that give you some tremendous, well-sculpted characters and accessories and even a nice, sturdy plastic platform to stand them on that mimics part of an environment from one of the films, but the backdrop would be artwork or a fuzzy photographic image on pretty thin cardboard stock that you'd have to cut out of the package and slide into a narrow slot along the back of the stand.

 

^I have one of those. The Force Ghosts pack from way back in POTF2. It annoyed me how shoddy the background is compared to the rest of the set.