SCW

What was the pic?

It again brings the question up… why buy Diamond if you were going to burn it to the ground? They already had a lot of bad reputation but to just scorch something you paid money for is just uh, not good business? There has to be some backdoor investment going on where they somehow profit by intentionally demolishing Diamond. We’ll probably never learn the truth.

This. Mego was dormant for 30 years or something and there have been more Mego figures in the last decade than during the heyday of the brand. Same for Super Powers. Minimates are infinitely more customizable than those. Luke has shown us the way. His upcoming DC stuff is better than most the stuff DST was doing. My favorite MM figure in recent years was a simple Rocketeer custom I made with a little help from 3D printing. Because DST was too dumb to make a Rocketeer Minimate. Hopefully the brand comes back and this is only a momentary setback, but the best way to keep the brand alive is to show there’s still a vibrant community out there doing things with it.

I seem to recall some talk about vehicles at some point early on when the MM TMNT were doing really well. I don't know if it ever got out of the discussion phase, but any insight into that might be interesting!

Will DST have a booth? I'm kidding, sort of... Will there be any representation from any of the conglomerate that now owns DST? Might be a good place for someone to ask a general "Hey what's going on?"

Gonna go against the consensus here, but the sculpted heads look a billion times better. It's strange that the choice was made not to sculpt the turtles heads when a bunch of the other characters had sculpted heads. I like the TMNT minimates as are, but the sculpted would have been better and probably attracted some people outside of Minimates collectors. The heads were the #1 thing people complained about.

Are you suggesting that buying a struggling company that was losing relationships by the day and then setting fire to all the remaining relationships isn't a good business strategy? In all seriousness, I've never entirely understood how it works and I'm somewhat simplifying things here, but there is a practice in business where you buy another business, burn it to the ground and then somehow profit over the loss. I assume it's in tax breaks and various losses you can put on your books. It's never made sense to me but it absolutely happens. Starting to look like this might be the case here. It's similar, but not the same as when places like Bain Capital (hey Mitt!) buy up a company on a loan, then take out another loan in the new company's name, pay the original loan off and pocket some of the extra money and then saddle the company with a ton of debt, run it out of business into bankruptcy, killing the business, but making money themselves. That's what happened to both KB and TRU, which were both companies that could have survived but private equity companies intentionally ran them out of business to make money. Gotta be something similar here but without the capital lending perhaps.

Neat!

If you made a 4 pack of Joe army builders it was going to sell 4X as many units as Gung-Ho or some other name character. Maybe not if you packed a single army builder into a 4 pack with other name characters, but if you made a pack of various Cobra troopers and perhaps a green shirt with a couple heads, it would have sold like hotcakes. Not saying it would have saved DST or anything crazy like that, just money left on the table. It boggles the mind that we got a few releases and no army builders with Joe. Especially with MM tooling being so minimal and most the parts already existing to at least get some basic Cobra troopers. C'est la vie.

As a kid I tried to army build. It wasn’t a lack of funds it was a challenge to get multiples because often figures weren’t as abundant. I only ever had one Foot Soldier as a kid. Hated that. But that was because I only ever saw one. That said of all the toylines, Joe was the one I was able to army build. Not insanely but I usually had a few of most kinds of vipers, etc.

Beating a dead horse here. Should have released army builders. Joe fans build armies.

Found the shot on Facebook! Thanks for the help!

Yes that’s the vehicle.

I could have sworn I saw a pic of some Minimates in the McFarlane Super Powers Blue Beetle Bug Vehicle. Now I can't find it and maybe I dreamed it up. I know the scale is for the larger figures, but I seem to recall it kinda working? Anyone got one? Pics? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

New Marvel FF wave just solicited.