The POP-EXPOSE ‘Star Wars’ by Mitchell Smith
Star Wars has always been a marketing juggernaut, even being poked at in the spoof “Space Balls.” I am a collector of Star Wars, but I haven’t gotten anything from the “Force Awakens”. I loved the last 10 years of Star Wars figures. There were some great marketing technics, some of the great ones are the build a droid, the collector coins, and pretty much just taking a figure and slightly changing something such as Luke with a good hand, Luke with a shot hand, and then Luke with a gloved hand, but I had to buy all three to show the progression. I really liked the Cantina aliens, Jabbas palace patrons, and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on.
The sculpts and articulation were great. The figures from the new movie just haven’t grabbed me the way those figures did. I’m not sure if it’s the over stimulation of the other 10 toy lines of Star Wars stuff that overwhelms me maybe, or perhaps the price that makes it a little less appealing, I’m not sure. I had a hard time controlling myself on buying every figure from a line the past several years, and now I just don’t really care if I have the new figures. Could Disney have completely destroyed the figure line? Maybe it’s the over commercialization that just shut the whole mystique down for me.
To much of one thing can have a reverse effect. Especially with Disney marketing other styles and lines of figures, that leaves less money and time to invest in 4 inch action figures. They also took over the action figure line when the detail and articulation was awesome and not even at its peak, and reverted to a figure not much better then a 1990’s figure, but cost 3 times as much to buy. Even the Black series figures aren’t close to what we were getting 5 years ago. I won’t even get into the cheap overpriced vehicles. I guess I was just spoiled with high quality figures and play sets and now to me anyways its just one big overpriced heap of plastic. Lucas seemed to care about the quality of his merchandise, Disney seems to care about profit margins. Maybe Disney is just pointing there marketing at kids and not collector.
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