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More Notes Regarding the Collapse of Hasbro and Disney's Influence
🕑 Added 2024-03-22 00:28:51 +0000 UTCNot often someone goes to such effort to relay this for our Patreon members, but a close friend of the channel has this to say regarding what's going on behind the scenes regarding the toy industry:
The new Haslab announcement comes only 7 months after their previous project successfully funded (The Ghost spaceship from Rebels and Ahsoka, which cost a whopping $500 usd).
Hasbro’s previous 2 successful Star Wars projects were the aforementioned Ghost and Jabba’s Sail Barge, which were both in the smaller 3.75 inch Vintage Collection figure format that they have been trying unsuccessfully to distance themselves from for years now.
However this newly-announced Haslab project will also be in the 3.75 inch scale. The only previous attempt by Hasbro to do a crowdfunding project in the 6-inch Black Series collector scale was a Rancor figure which flopped and couldn’t get funded.
Collectors have been taken off-guard by this sudden announcement as the trend for Haslab campaigns so far has been to wait for at least a year between similar projects. For context, the Ghost hasn’t been released yet and is only going to start shipping in September 2024, yet they’re already going back to the well for another large crowdfundjng project.
What does this mean?
So far we don’t really know what the new toy could be, speculation is running rampant. People expect it to be some sort of vehicle and some ideas floated around have been the Marauder from the Bad Batch, Ahsoka’s Jedi ship, a new AT-AT walker or a new Imperial Shuttle. None of these really fire me up though to be honest.
On top of that, and on the back of another lackluster figure reveal during a Hasbro streaming event this week of a bunch of 3.75 inch figures that are mostly rehashes and repaints (and Acolyte lol), I’ve been seeing more and more comments from people saying that they are done backing these Haslab projects without getting more figure support in the smaller Vintage collection line in general. The view is that the 6-inch Black Series gets more new tooling for a single wave than what the 3.75 inch gets in a whole year.
Fans are also starting to speculate that Hasbro is using these Haslabs to keep back-door funding the 3.75 inch series, using it as a lifeline to keep it and their Star Wars product license afloat. It could explain the sudden rush of a new crowdfunding project. It also falls in line with an interesting rumor that the project could in fact not be a ship but a Death Star playset with a modular design that will allow it to be added to and expanded upon via future separate retail or exclusive releases by Hasbro (the “core” set would be the Haslab and then future additions would be separate minisets, like a dedicated trash compactor that attaches to the core set, for example). This actually sounds like a lot of fun to me and would be my pick if I could choose.
All that said, when you look at all the financial problems Hasbro has been having lately and their rumored panic over Star Wars becoming a dead brand and having no new content that will sell coming down the pipeline, it all seems to line up. Time will tell.
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Let me know what you think in the comments down below!
Your pal,
Pro
Comments
Reier Gotter
Very interesting! I used to collect the Black Series and that line has gotten to be nothing but a bunch of Mandalorian repaints and reissues. There are tons of prequel Jedi and Clones that the fans want that aren't being made. I stopped altogether after the prices kept going up and my interest in Star Wars waned. The Vintage collection is in a worse spot and that's what started it all. I think there are still enough diehard collectors with money to spare that would be willing to fund another original trilogy-based HasLab project. That does seem to be the only way the line stays alive. My local stores have almost zero Star Wars toys on the shelves and The Acolyte isn't going to move product.
