Nothing to be sad about I've been stuck at 13 timbits for months now. 
More :timbits: being thrown around...
You guys are too kind! Although it was kind of neat to have a bakers dozen----now that being said I hope they aren't taken away from me. 
Anyway, I think part of Hasbro's problem was the movie line. they really positioned themselves out of the market with that crazy high price point. Hopefully the new movie figures will be a bit cheaper than the last. Because overall I enjoyed the figures they offered.
I partially agree. I think the problem is that action figure prices seem to have gone high. There must be a reason, I don't know what it is. Supply and demand? Don't know. If it is that, then we can expect prices to go down. If it doesn't happen, likely that it's productions costs, marketing, licensing etc, things that the consumer has no power over. Marvel Universe figures do sell at that price point. I'd say that it's because they're backed up by a strong media presence but also fantastic new sculpts, vibrant superhero themed colors that are very pleasant to look at, especially to kids and their parents.
Look at Avatar, can't believe those figures were marked above 10$ from the beginning. Terminator and Star Trek were obviously a design failure from the get go IMO even though their respective movies did great at box office. There's also a standard quality to be met by toy makers, which Hasbro and Mattel have been setting higher each time (exception to this are 3 inch DC superheroes). And some companies seem to be very stubborn to think they can get away with just marketing cheap looking design just as long as the movie it's based on is a blockbuster. Hasbro has been putting a lot of good quality product lately. They had an opportunity to make something more out of the ROC line. Unfortunately most of their product seemed to me like it was lacking originality such as lots of repaints and poor retooling, poor color palettes (the movie is responsible for some of it). I actually bought the first figures from ROC such as the Neovipers, Baroness, Snake Eyes, Cobra Commander simply because these were new unique looking figures. I threw my towel on the floor after wave 2 or 3 I think when they started to go wild on their repacks, and repaints, unfortunately Hasbro was unable to break from their ARAH prison for obviously many reasons. I'm not saying they did a bad thing, but it could have been done much in a much better way. Most of the items that saw release looked rather more like they were thrown at us, rather then say: "here we hope you can be proud and enjoy this incredible array of offerings we worked on". Not my feelings exactly. Some of them were indeed nice such as the Bench press soldier (I think that's what he's called, feel free to correct me
) but again my feelings is that these and a few others were just a few nice exceptions...
As some of you guys already know I've been collecting Star Wars for a long long time ago and recently stopped, so I have been able to enjoy both worlds for quite some time and make some personal observations about both brands. I have to admit that Hasbro was blamed a lot in the SW community for reissuing different versions of the same character since they relaunched the line in 1995. But these past years, they've been doing a fantastic job with the brand, offering a lot of brand new sculpts especially with the new Clone wars series, which forced them not to retool a lot of their past achievements as much. Hasbro should do the same thing with Gi joe and offer per instance more Renegades product. Despite it's downs, my love for Gi joe has survived ahead of Star Wars, and I would like to see the Joe brand shine again, and by "shine" I also mean that I hope that package design doesn't steer away again from the ARAH inspired look. POC is an obvious attempt in the right direction this time but has not reached its climatic stage IMO. If this line survives beyond Gi joe 2 and doesn't get tossed aside like 25th did when it made way for ROC, then I'll agree with many of you that Hasbro has indeed reached a new level of perfection. Nuff said.
