JoeCanuck

Quote from: "ARROW"

This is what I was dreading.

Re-purposed , badly under-scaled, or just plain oddly assigned vehicles.

I have the "Ice Dagger"--I have a much better looking version of it in the Ice Saber. Zero incentive to get this re-hash.

Night Raven.  Design is okay, but its VERY small. Its clearly intended to be derivative of the original toy design, but its missing the mark is size. What it says to me is the toy line is going cheap because there's not a lot of faith in the brand--despite the movie.

The "Hummer".  This one is wrong on so many levels for me. The biggest one is that its "conventional". The movie might be setting different ground rules in design aesthetics, but throughout the toyline's history COBRA has embraced the unconventional in terms of design.
A "normal" looking 4 wheeler is prosaic for COBRA. If the thing has 7 wheels, with one in the center-line back, then it would look "COBRA-weird" enough. It would reflect the maverick weapon design philosophies of Destro and be visually distinct from vehicles that GIJOE uses.
This ain't that.

The Rockslide. The only "good" design in the bunch. This is an example of doing something with nothing. How do you make a snow mobile cool? You sleek it up on the nose, add weapon hard-points on the ski struts, and give it a camouflage  paint job.
But as a toy......it misses the mark. it looks cheap. Solid cast parts like the tread assembly always says " cut corners for cost"--especially when they are unpainted plastic.
Its more of the same, and not enough of what it could be.
I was hoping for something a bit more daring, a bit more involved and a bit different.
This isn't it.

I usually agree with you on things arrow, but I think you are wrong here on many things.

1) Night Raven:  It's small because Hasbro doesn't have faith in large vehicles anymore.  As well, if the Night Raven isn't featured heavily in the movie, then parents/kids won't be willing to pay a lot for something that is barely remembered.  The best example is the AT-TE from Star Wars.  It probably did sell well, and was featured heavily, but it still had leftovers that went on sale for less than half.  The movie isn't going to be another Star Wars, especially with retailers, so they won't be as willing to bank on a large vehicle.  Especially since it is now known that there is a PIT coming (at $100).

2) Scarab.  This vehicle is in one of the big chase scenes, and while the rest of the vehicle line up looks futuristic, when trying to get around a city, you can't really draw too much attention to yourself.  A crazy design will do that, this doesn't.  Overall I get it that it is a personal choice for you, but I think this is one of the best designs so far.  I always preferred the more realistic/semi-realistic vehicles over the crazy designs.

3) The snow vehicles.  I agree with you on the Ice Dagger/Sabre.  However I find the Rockslide a design mess.  From the picture of the movie version to this toy one, I feel it comes off as someone just adding a long windshield and going "TA-DA!" future snowmobile.  It just doesn't work for me.  However, knowing my luck it will feature in the coolest part of the movie and I will love it afterwards.

So for me, the best things shown so far are the Night Raven and Motor Viper.  The Stratoviper looks like the 25th version, so I will use the original colours version.  The Motor Viper is begging to take over my old STUN.

How can another person's opinion be wrong?

As toys, as what they are.........they are largely boring. There's no "balls" to these toys---they say nothing in terms of design to me.
I'm more intrigued by Playmates T4 Hunter Killer in this scale than any of the GIJOE vehicles I have seen thus far. It my perennial complaint about "movie" toys at work here , in that they are often limited by the practical effects and budgetary limits of what is possible in a movie. But that doesn't even really apply here because it appears that some of these designs are not even IN the movie, and are just re-purposed or recoloured stuff from other GIJOE lines.
I'm disappointed because here was an occasion to make the brand really shine and instead we got bland instead.
I understand the "whys" but it doesn't stop me from wishing for more.

Walmart or Zellers might be the easiest, cheapest places to find the figures on foot.
There's retailers on-line that offer them, and collector/comic book stores that will carry them but you will suffer a mark-up that way.
How easy it will be to find the figures will depend on where you live.

This movie looks like I expected it to be, and that is a positive thing.

Looking forward to the summer now.......this is going to be a fun ride.

The unfortunate thing with anything "exclusive" is that you get into unit numbers and cost per units that make the whole thing untenable in a small scale.
The GIJOE club faces this kind of thing all the time........and its why things like their convention sets are so expensive.

Its not a matter that any of these given toys costs "just a couple of bucks to make"--they only do so if they are produced in great numbers.
Per unit costs on runs that the GIJOE club handled are on the order of about 10-50 times what you'd expect.
With small retailers like those mentioned, you'd have to have a balance between the order number ( the club says they are compelled to make orders between 1000 and 5000 units) and the cost per unit.
Simply stated, is anyone here ready and willing to pay for a $50 or $100 "exclusive" if it went to a small retailer, because that is probably what it would cost?

Hasbro probably tells the Canadian retailers that an exclusive offering to them would required  a set amount of units purchased, probably at an amount the retailers do not think they can sell. Usually, retailers doing the exclusive thing pay for the whole deal up front, so if there's too much product and not enough buyers, the peg/shelf- warmers sit until discounted and the retailers take the loss.
Any time we do see exclusives up here, its usually an offering that is so large that the US chain diverts some of it north to the chains up here, like TRU etc ( who are separate from their US stores) and essentially lets us piggy-back along on the order.
But the risk of over-ordering is still there--and more than a few exclusives end up being very common ( ML Crystal White Queens anyone??)

This is why we do not see those kinds of offerings up here as much anymore, and will probably not see at all in the future even if the property is crazy-hot at the time. Given the market climate right now, the retailers up here are taking ZERO chances with things like exclusives, because they simply cannot absorb a potential loss like that.

There's a big difference in marketing a product (or movie) online and using online response as a guage for consumer demand.  I'd bet that the online community represents less than 10% of the actual in-store shoppers.

I used to think the numbers were 1 in 10 myself, and they used to be.
The industry folks i have talked to over the past year say that number has changed, drastically......to the tune its now somewhere between 1 in 100 to 1 in 1000.
The online communities tend to radically overstate their populations and the interested parties--and its easy to understand why. We, as a community, have such a vested emotional interest in the stuff.
But........the reality is that, as a consumer demographic, we represent a VERY small, albeit mostly dedicated, segment and Hasbro and most of the major retailers know this.
The thing is that the casual consumer base needs to express more interest for certain lines to offer more--which is why some GIJOE items have not made it up here as yet in any sizable amounts.

I really want an AT-TE but everyone is saying how the legs won't stay on and the transport won't stay upright without modifying the legs.  I'm not willing to pay that much for a toy I need to fix.
Walmart U.S. had a promotion on leading up to Black Friday where you could buy the Falcon and get a bonus vehicle free.  I kind of wished I had got one but spent my money elsewhere.

There's an EASY fix to the AT-TE, with a video on U-Tube showing what to use and how to fix it.  Trust me, its an incredibly easy fix, and should not deter you from getting the toy.

I don't see what the problem is with this, because it can work in a hobbyists favour.
Revenue Canada's own literature states that " any endeavour with a reasonable expectation of profit can be considered a business"--which means that when you report the income, you also get to make the deductions from business expenses.

That meas you can essentially write off the cost of your collection and collecting purchases as business expenses.

The key things about how Revenue Canada states this ( and you can confirm this with the,--I already have) is that the business need only have a reasonable expectation of profit--something that is very hard to quantify--and CAN show a loss, even over time.
So you do not have to make a bundle, you could make just $1 in profit and its all good.

The thing about going serious/legit with this is that ANYTHING related to your collecting can be written off: display shelves, gas money for hunts, trips to toy shows or conventions, internet use to learn info on new stuff etc. As long as it can be seen as being used toward the "business" its all good.