But how come there's such a vast difference between the two? They don't even look like they're made by the same company, hence my comment about it looking like a Chinese knock-off like this:to be fair, they did two scales. the one i posted was the smaller scale, here's the larger one:
it's better. but these toys are worse than the ones playmates released a decade before.
they were different companies.
I was talking more specifically about the two scales of '09 figures, but you made me think of a good point. Why did they give the license to a company who didn't seem to care about designing quality figures?
oh yeah, it's embarrassing how badly the license has been handled over the years. and the fact that we just got two high quality action figures from star trek into darkness in the last couple months is baffling.
Money, pure and simple. Licensing costs money, production costs money, and Star Trek is highly niche.
there's a lot of dubious talk on youtube about paramount and CBS' battle over merchandising and how that adversely affected the kelvin films' value as a new, viable franchise.
but the truth is, very few companies even produced desirable merchandise for the 2009 film. QMX came out with badges and the phaser but those appeared well after the movie hit theaters. ANOVOS took years to actually get their uniform line up and running. eaglemoss was still a few years off from their collection. that left burger king, kellogg's, and playmates.
i think if playmates hadn't shit the bed with their action figures, the franchise might have been ok. i know that's a huge claim to make, but star trek 2009 was as toy friendly as movies come. and they still couldn't make product that appealed to kids and collectors. really wasn't about the fact that there were TOS kirks on pegs next to kelvin kirks, it matters that TOS kirk looked like this:
and kelvin kirk looked like this:
I first saw these figures a little bit after Into Darkness came out, so they've been around for awhile, but you really had to look around for them at the time. IIRC, they were Japanese imports, so they were also kind of expensive to all but serious collectors.
It's been almost a decade since I read it, I don't even know where to find it anymore, but there was a report that the big three toy retailers at the time--Wal-Mart, Target, and the now defunct Toys R Us--didn't want everyone to be in "Enterprise uniforms" and Playmates obliged. I recall it saying something that there were so many figures in that initial wave, and that they didn't want a sea of characters in the same kind of outfits on their shelves. That might have been what Trekkers would have wanted, but the Big 3 were the ones placing the orders at the time, so they were calling the shots as far as what got in their stores. Maybe if Playmates had done smaller waves over a longer period of time and just stuck to one figure scale, maybe McCoy and Chekov could have been released in their regular uniforms later as was originally planned.
From a store merchandising perspective, it ,makes sense as they know that people collect these so the more versions - the more sales to said figure collectors.
That chest joint is pretty standard these days, modern superhero costumes help hide the cut so it isnt as noticeable. I believe the old DST figures also had a similar joint, but hid it under a soft plastic "shirt" - not sure why these figures didn't do the same, maybe a cost-cutting move or the soft plastic didnt work with the arrowhead pattern.
These are new figures first released this year, the Japanese ones are a little bigger and the scupts are more stylized.
Who am I kidding?
Hence the twenty different variations of Kirk in the original Playmates line
ST4: The Rise of.. the BorgWith Star Wars movies taking a rest after episode IX and thus losing one of their biggest competitors, maybe Paramount will give Trek another go.
