I sent a PM to Rob Potts at Hard Hero to offer up copies of production materials if they’d be helpful in the statue design process. He got back to me and I’ll be sending him as much as I can by next week.
He also asked about banner space on the site and I’m instead suggesting that TCL take a more active role promoting the statues. I told him we’d like to do exclusive releases on the site that we’d then share with the other TC sites so that he only has to deal with one outlet. hope you guys are cool with this suggestion as it’ll mean more work for us but I think he’s going to go for it. It’ll also mean we get first crack at releasing news.
I’ve asked for access to things like pics of prototypes, initial molds, design drawings etc. so that we can do a sort of “work in progress” type of update stream on the site. I’d also like Nick to interview Rob’s team, hopefully we can organize a couple of interviews… one now and one when the statues are produced and being purchased.
Not sure what Rob will say about that, on the statue forum it sounds like WB is painful about releasing early information like that. It could be that their agreement keeps Hard Hero from leaking that kind of info.
I’ll keep you guys updated on my conversation. If anybody on the team has opinions on compensation from Hard Hero for our efforts please let me know. Rob has hinted that he could provide the site with a free Lion-O statue which we’d get before it hits stores.
I’m thinking we should update the toys section to include a section for the statues. I even think if we get exclusive status with Hard Hero that we should give the statues their own top level category temporarily until after the statues have been in the market for a year or so. Thoughts on that?
I’m in complete agreement with everything - even though my spare time these days is limited I remain 100% committed to this site and would be happy to assist in any way I’m able. I think the Hard Hero thing is the most exciting thing to happen to this site in a long time and I’d be all for anything that puts us at the front of things!
The only suggestion I’d like to make is that instead of locating the Hard Hero statues/busts info in the Toy Section, might it be better placed in the Merchandise Section? Busts/statues aren’t toys (and it’s not even like they’re being produced by a company in conjunction with a line of toys), but they are high-quality collectibles! PLUS, it would mean that there was finally something to display in our Merchandise Section!
Who has kept copies of these files, and can you upload these to the site again? I need to get a few of these scans to Rob for the statue development. It’d be a huge help.
Hey Mark, yep, that’s the ThunderCats Guidebook we received scans of from Azuma Windwalker - I imagine it probably got deleted when smaller version of the images from within it were uploaded to your Animation Art section…?
Anyway - I’ve taken the liberty of uploading it to your TCL staff folder - hope this is OK!
The guy at Hard Hero (his name is Rob) said that they’d be flat our trying to get the Lion-O statue together for Comic Con and that he’d contact me afterwards.
All the same I e-mailed him today asking for info on the statue so that we can promote the Comic Con reveal that they’re doing this week. Manny, I mentioned that you’d be at Comic Con and that you’d come by to take photos and to speak to the guys about the statue. Are you still planning on going?
If so, perhaps we should get an article ready on this for as soon as the photos arrive. I’ve asked Rob to send me any details he has available but we should get ready to publish this on the site as soon as Manny has made his way to the booth. Is anybody else from the team going to be able to be at Comic Con, or anyone who is a trusted regular on the site?
I will be attending tomorrow through Saturday. If you can get me a booth number, I will happily take photos and send them to someone. I’ll need a contact name for whom I will be speaking to.
Manny, here you go. Not sure of the booth number but hopefully they’re on a directory somewhere.
Hi Mark,
Rob is in San Diego now. You can call him on his cell phone at 615-438-7649 so Manny can arrange a time to meet with him.
Thanks!
Tanya
Hard Hero
Have a good meeting bro. Your contact is Rob and he’s willing to do an interview for the site with you.
For myself I’m curious to know how they decide on a look for Lion-O, what some of the drafts looked like. Also, what characters are they planning to do next and how many will they do total?
At what kind of selling point (volume wise) would the Lion-O statue need to reach for them to develop more statue?
Cool. I’ll give Rob a call tonight (after the convention) and schedule some time tomorrow for some questions. I have to do a lot of shopping for myself and some friends. Everyone wants a He-Ro! If anyone else has questions, feel free to post it and I’ll print it out for the interview.
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I’m not entirely sure if this is the statue, but there was a card that said approval pending. The booth guys were busy so I wasn’t able to ask. It was weird because the statue was at a random vendor booth selling comics and collectibles rather than from an actual Hard Hero booth or distribution company.
I’m going to post the photo as unconfirmed for now and will try to get a hold of Rob to verify. He isn’t answering his phone…I’m pretty sure he is busy.
EDIT: Here’s a photo I took. Please don’t post this photo on the forums or the site just yet.
Not really sure how much I love this yet. Manny great detective work we’ve scooped all the other sites though we knew all along we would especially with EOT.net out of action for a while. Still feels good to be first to get it online. I couldn’t see how its not Hard Heros statue.
Good luck with tomorrow, could you take more pics from different angles?
This is awesome news, is there any way that we can get first dibs at buying them since they will be very limited. Looking at the numbers from previous offerings these could go very fast
Yes we can almost certainly get first crack in fact Hard Hero is looking into whether the site can get one or more free statues in exchange for promoting Hard Hero and their T-Cat line.
I have a video going up shortly of the statue. I wanted to give a little time for the Mattel article I wrote. Mark, you’ve done a great job of advertising the site…once the video is up, feel free to embed the video everywhere you can. Youtube compressed the video way too much so I opened an account with Vimeo and it looks a lot better.
We’ve been getting lots of publicity this week with all the news. I know I haven’t been around the last four or five months, but I hope the coverage I did at the convention made up for what little I’ve contributed.
Now that I’ve unofficially graduated (walked the stage, but still have 2 weeks left of class) from college, I’m going to be devoting a lot of time to revamping the site starting in September, gearing up for the site’s anniversary in December.
Hard Hero has asked us if we wouldn’t mind putting a poll together on which secondary characters fans would like to see come out as a statue. Manny, you’d mentioned that you could help me set something like this up outside of the forums so that we could get more responses… could you give me a hand here?
I’d really like us to make this poll successful, and would love it if the team would use their facebook and twitter accounts and personal e-mail lists to ask any friends or contacts you have to participate in the poll. I’d like to show Hard Hero that we’re able to bring the fan base to give us input when needed.
Cheers,
Mark
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Hey gang,
To show their appreciation for our work to promote the line of statues, Hard Hero is working on trying to secure a discount for team members of TCL who are interested in buying statues. They are looking into what the discount may be, and whether they can look after shipping of the statues to our various locations.
I need to know who would like to buy one if Hard Hero offers them to us at around $100 US a piece. I expect we would need to pay shipping costs too and let’s just assume that is another $35 US. Who would be interested to get one?
For those who have already placed an order, I’ve asked them to let me know how you can be retro-actively discounted.
The $100 US sale price is approximately what most dealers are paying for small orders so this is effectively the wholesale rate.
Additionally Hard Hero is looking into running a promotion with us whereby we’ll run the poll I mentioned above, and all respondents to the poll will be entered into a raffle for a Lion-O statue. I’m working on the details of this with Rob and I’m hoping this will be a big success and that the poll gets lots of responses so they get good info for future statues.
Please let me know if you would like to buy a statue at $100 plus shipping, and if you want more than one please mention that too. We could probably get two each, and if you choose to list one on ebay or resell it that’s up to you.
I already placed an order with them using an alternate address (since they wont ship to APO addresses). It would be cool if we could get retroactively discounted. Dont know how that would work out with existing orders. Perhaps by providing the email used on the order to you and then you can submit them to HH??? That way they know youre not giving a discount to people outside of the team
If anyone else has questions, feel free to post it and I’ll print it out for the interview.