In 2019, Hasbro announced its plans to transition to plastic-free packaging for its figures. Now, less than a year since that transition went into effect, Hasbro has announced that plastic packaging will be returning.
“We wanted to share an update on packaging for Hasbro’s 6-inch-scale figures. Based on your feedback, we will be re-introducing windows and blisters to our 6-inch fan figures beginning later this year, into 2024 for select products across our portfolio of brands, including, G.I. Joe Classified, Power Rangers Lightning Collection, Star Wars Black Series and Marvel Legends. This will eventually expand to all new 6-inch figure releases.
The new windows and blisters will be made from bio PET or recycled PET helping us achieve our priority of meeting our fans’ expectations for extraordinary packaging and superior design while still developing packaging that minimizes waste and the use of virgin plastic.
Thank you again for being one of our biggest fans and for your continued support of Hasbro.“
While the idea of environmentally friendly(ish) packaging can be commended, the switch ultimately made life hell for both collectors and retailers. For MOC collectors, not having the figure visible was a dealbreaker. But the most likely reason for the rollback was from complaints by retailers such as Target and Amazon. Not only were fewer of these figures being sold but with collectors unable to inspect figures for defects or missing accessories before purchasing, the number of returns has increased dramatically.
2022 has been one of the strangest years for me as a toy collector. After turning 38 earlier this year, I had this sense of pending doom. It was like a mid-life crisis but instead of going out and buying a pickup truck or getting my ears pierced, I started to liquidate all of my assets. There were a few months there when I was sure that I didn’t have enough money to retire on and I had to correct that immediately. I started to sell off my figure and shoe collection as fast as I could. For weeks, my kitchen table was lined with boxes with shipping labels strapped to them. I was hitting up the post office so much that the attendant stopped asking me if there was anything perishable or lithium in the contents. She knew that was nerd shit. All of those Marvel Legends that I hunted down over the years…gone. The WWE figures that I amassed…gone. Those Yeezy’s and Jordan’s that I kept in air-sealed boxes so that they’d keep that fresh China workshop smell…gone.
Thankfully, that anxiousness began to die down as the year went along. After selling off the majority of my collection, I would walk into my home office and feel a bit depressed when my empty Detolf’s greeted me. Don’t get me wrong, I still have that sense of pending doom, but that doesn’t mean that I need to overreact and make myself miserable. It was time to collect again, but this time, instead of buying into the hype of the community or being a completionist, I was going to go with quality over quantity.
So as I start this new phase in my toy collecting, here are the five figures that I’m most appreciative of from 2022.
One thing that you should know about me is that I’m an absolute floozy when it comes to in-game seasonal events. This is especially true for Halloween-themed events. Regardless of the game, if I own it or have access to it, I’ll boot it up every October to check out the spookiness.
Some games go more into this than others. There are games that will half-ass it by providing a Halloween-themed skin or side mission, but others will really lean into it. For example, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gives Ravensthorpe, your main hub, a Halloween-themed makeover that is filled with quests, loot, and mini-games. But it’s Destiny 2 that really impressed me this year, and in doing so, might have finally made me get the Destiny 2 bug.
In the 8-9 years that Destiny has existed, I’ve tried and tried to get into it, but there’s a fundamental aspect of that game that doesn’t work for me. I don’t vibe with the repetitious nature of that game and firing my way through waves of enemies with a few strangers for the off chance that I receive some loot in the form of a gun that I’ll never use is a “nope” for me. Destiny 2’s Festival of the Lost doesn’t sway from that recipe. In fact, it doubles down on it. But for whatever reason, it finally clicked for me.
The quests of this seasonal event are fairly standard: Kill X amount of enemies with a particular gun; take out 100 high-level bosses; collect Y amount of XP while wearing a certain mask. These quests cannot be completed in a single playthrough and require you to play these same 3-4 maps over and over again. That’s usually a dealbreaker for me, but apparently, if you add some jack-o-lanterns and spooks, I’m a bit more tolerant.
At the end of my matches, I would head back to The Tower and see how far I had progressed in my goals. Seeing those numbers go up and those progress bars fill up provided me with a shot of dopamine that this post-2020 body desperately needed. This also encouraged me to go play through some of the older Destiny 2 content that I had never clicked with.
Upon starting a side quest that I hadn’t touched before, I was given gear and weapons that were over 200 points stronger than what I was currently using. Again, seeing those numbers increase as I bury bullets into enemies is so satisfying. It encouraged me to go back to the Witch Queen DLC to see if that new loadout could help me finally beat that boss that I was struggling with – it didn’t.
Spending a few hours with Destiny 2 this last week has helped me appreciate the small things about that game that makes it so unique. I love the way that the weapons in that game feel. There’s a weight and feedback to those that Bungie has mastered throughout these last few decades. On top of that, the sheer amount of customizing that you can do with your character is so vast. I’m playing as a Hunter and the ability to craft what I want that character to look like and what I want their skills to give me this sense that my character is truly unique. In a game with millions of players, that’s not easy to pull off. And it goes so far beyond gear and analytics too. The overall story and lore might not be very interesting, but the design of the levels, weapons, and characters are all top-notch. Even if I’m not invested in the story, running around various worlds and climates with a new gun, and watching it take out enemies faster than the one that you had previously is a thrill in its own right.
“Festival of the Lost” may be coming to an end, but thanks to it, my time with Destiny 2 may be just beginning.
Over the course of the past few years, there has been no shortage of Power Ranger figures. In fact, it’s overly saturated at the moment. Bandai has them, Hasbro has them, Threezero has them, and Super7 is adding them. Anyone that wants to add them to their collection can.
It’s been rumored for the better part of a year, but this week, Mezco finally confirmed that they’re releasing a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers wave in 2023. Are they too late to this party? Well, no.
As with any Mezco release, customers are getting a premium product — and paying a high premium for it. But just as some will snub Diet Mr. K in place of a Diet Coke, Mezco collectors have been sitting on their hands just waiting for this moment.
In this $400 set, you get the original five Rangers — Jason, Billy, Kimberly, Trini, and Zack. At nearly $80 per figure, that’s a steal for Mezco’s. In addition to swappable heads, you also get a stand, a half dozen sets of hands, and the weapons each Ranger wielded.
The lack of new sports figures over the last year or so has been excruciating. My favorite teams in the NBA and NFL finally have exciting young players so, of course, now McFarlane loses their sports figure licenses. The pain of that was slightly alleviated earlier this year with the announcement that Hasbro was bringing back the Starting Lineup line from my childhood.
Unfortunately, as details have begun to emerge, it seems that the line is destined to go away again.
This is a launch that should have been a layup for Hasbro. Instead, it’s an air ball that has both sports fans and toy collectors shaking their heads. Lets break down some of the questionable decisions around Hasbro’s recent botched announcement.
The Price…
Looking at these things, what would you guess that they would cost? Probably the $22.99 or whatever a Marvel Legends or Black Series figure is going for, right? How about $50? $50 for one of these?! Fuck off. Look, I get that the world is on fire and inflation is killing us, but you cannot put that price tag on these and expect them to succeed. To collect this entire wave you will have to pay $400. That’s insane. I’m an action figure collector, an NBA fantastic, and I’m also lucky enough to have disposable income, but even I’m not going to consider any of these for that price. Even if there’s a legend’s wave in the future with some of my all-time favorites like Dikembe Mutombo, Allen Iverson, or Grant Hill, that’s not happening.
I have so many fond memories of going to Toys R Us and buying Starting Lineup figures. That was even my entryway into some sports. I couldn’t have named a hockey player aside from Wayne Gretzky back in those days, but I liked the figures so much that I’d collect them and look for them to pop up on Sportscenter highlights.
Kids aren’t going to have that option with these at that price point.
The Look…
I don’t like that Hasbro tried to go with a realistic representation with these but I understand that’s a personal choice. I dug the simplicity of the older line where the only difference between Charles Barkley and Mookie Blaylock was their jerseys…but that’s me.
However, If I wanted a Lebron James with lots of articulation and lifelike features, I can spend a little extra for a Mafex figure. Plus it seems silly to me that Hasbro went through the effort of getting Nike involved for the sneakers and such but that these players are missing their tattoos. If part of that $50 price point was to pay for Nike’s likeness, I would have preferred that they pay that to the tattoo artists and given these players generic shoes. But again, that’s just me.
The Rest…
Okay, so they have messed with the iconic design of the figures, they’re overcharging for them, but how else could they mess up this re-launch? Oh, I know, NFTs!
Each figure from the Starting Lineup line will come with a Panini digital NFT card that has various levels of rarity attached to it. Surely they could have passed this by enough focus groups to know that including NFT’s in any way was going to create backlash.
Between that and these figures selling through Fanatics, I don’t know that this could have been botched more than it has been. Hopefully Hasbro is able to pivot on the fly and save this line, but it seems doubtful.
With all the reboots, film adaptations, and Target graphic t-shirts aiming to exploit my generation’s childhood, Silverhawks is a brand you don’t see a lot of today. It was no Transformers or Thundercats, but Silverhawks was a cartoon I was obsessed with as a kid. But as a toy collector, Silverhawk figures were always an issue. 30+ years later, that’s still the case.
In the end, it turns out that Monstar wasn’t the Silverhawks greatest threat, it was overall product quality.
Kenner’s Silverhawk figures from the 1980s are beautiful, even by today’s standards. The villains, such as Monstar, Molecular, and my favorite, Buzz Saw, were sturdy and vibrant figures I played with for years. For the actual Silverhawks, though, it was a very different story. Characters like Quicksilver, Bluegrass, and Copper Kid looked sharp with their shiny paint jobs, but they all fell apart once you played with them. Literally. Because the figures were coated with thin chrome paint, they would chip almost immediately. Over the years, as I have attended toy conventions and browsed vintage toy shops across the country, my goal has always been to find an unboxed Quicksilver in mint condition. They’re hard to come by. Super7 announced a Silverhawks line in 2021, but my nostalgic boner drooped when I saw that the figures didn’t have that chrome finish – instead going for a cartoon-accurate grayish blue.
That was the appeal of this new Ramen Toys fig. Releasing before Super7’s – assuming that Super7’s ever launches – this Quicksilver figure appeared to be everything a fan of the old Kenner line could hope for – at least initially.
At first glance, Quicksilver mostly passes the eyeball test. The suit design is a modern take on the traditional Silverhawks design, and it gives Quicksilver an Iron Man-like vibe. There are a lot of things about the Silverhawks cartoon that didn’t age very well, but the character design isn’t one of them. But while I dig the design of the suit, I have a big problem with the color of it. You see, I pre-ordered the Ramen Toys figure and paid $50 more for it than the Super7 version because I wanted something that was a better representation of the toy line. However, in hand, the color of this suit is not what the promotional shots showed. Instead of the chrome-like paint that the promo shots had, the actual figure is a matte grey. It’s still a sharp character, but I feel cheated and lied to. I can go down to Lowe’s and buy a can of chrome paint for $6 and re-paint it, but I shouldn’t have to do that when I spend $100 on the figure itself.
The issues with the color are one thing, but the issues with the quality of the figure are a much bigger deal. When you’re paying a premium price for an action figure, you want to be able to feel that improved quality in your hand. That’s one thing that I really appreciate about Mezco and Mafex: Say what you will about their prices, but few people complain about it when they receive their figures. This Quicksilver does not have that. He feels flimsy and cheap. I’m scared to bend any of his joints because it feels like they’re about to snap off. He’s destined to sit on my shelf in a permanent T-pose because of that.
The inclusion of extra hands, wings, and faces is nice, but, again: Quality. Replacing the hands will leave an ugly gap between the hand and wrist; the pegs on the wings don’t want to fit into the openings on his side, and the face swapping is even worse. The additional face allows you to choose between a nakie-faced Quicksilver and one that has his visor down but switching those exposed the biggest quality problem of all. When you pull the face away from the head, there’s a magnet to make this seamless. Except they forgot to glue the magnet in place. So now, when you pull a face-off, you have to pry the world’s smallest magnet off the back of the face without dropping it – which is easier said than done.
Those frustrations aside, I do really like that Tallyhawk that’s included. He also comes with a swappable pair of wings, and those are actually really easy to do. I also really like that Tallyhawk can pose on Quicksilver’s arm thanks to some well-placed magnets – and those actually stay in place.
It hurts me to say because I have been searching for a Silverhawks figure for so long, but this ain’t it, friends. This figure is far too expensive for the quality that it is. Buyer beware.
