This is great news indeed.
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Is that it? That’s nothing more than we’ve already heard from Super7 in the Pixel Dan interview.
Great news. I am starting to get my hopes up!
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I would imagine Super7 and 4H doing the line the way fans have been accustomed to seeing as well as the retro styled figures!
:panthro
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Keeping my fingers crossed…
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Some years ago when bandai was making classics tc…i strongly voiced that i woul love to see some commemorative figures…i think i might have started a thread about that… anyway now that Super 7 has the possibility to get the license… and seeing those vintage-style He-Man figures maybe they are open to Commemorative ThunderCats… as well as the four horsemen Style
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must cost a billion dollars judging by the way your saying it ;):):biggrin s’funny that none of the other toymakers have this problem. they make toys in diff sizes n shapes and all are affordable. guess mattel must be run by paupers!! ahahahah
dude not everyone can buy every toy out there. people have lives, bills and families to pay for. of course we cherry pick stuff we like. u talk like evryone is obligated to buy everything from a line. we have to look at our budget, just like marvel!!! ;):biggrin:laugh:roflmao
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I would love for some LJN figures to be reissued.
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Sadly a lot of people on here have listened to ToyGuru’s explanations of how super expensive it is for them to make figures the last eight years and take his word as fact.
Exactly. 
I suppose I mustn’t have ben a true fan of any of the lines I collected as I didn’t have everything from all of them. 
My friend collects Star Wars and has hundreds of figures and not even he can buy every figure released for his collection.
Now THAT is a brilliant idea!!! Give us (or rather, those of us that want it) the new Classics line AND 'down the line" give us LJN reissues. I’d love a MOC Lion-O, Cheetara and the whole gang! Imagine if they finally released the Mad Bubbler AND Red Eye!!!
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No Lunatacks!
I would definitely be up for buying re-issues of all the Classics Thundercats toys though as I no longer have mine.
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A billion’s a tad high, but it’s not cheap (see boldfaced text below). As far as why other toymakers can produce things cheaply, well, there are a number of real-life, practical reasons beyond the sticker price you see, not the least of which are ‘economies of scale’ (also see boldfaced text below)
I’ve never been involved in toy manufacturing/production, as I’m assuming most people here haven’t been, which is why I defer to Griffith76 here, in lieu of the usual toy board bloviation: http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-3rd-party-discussion/635101-mmc-feral-rex-mega-thread-predaking-713.html
Dude was a designer for MMC, a third-party [small, independent] company that produced a well-received $500 Transformers toy–Feral Rex (Predaking)–and he talks at length about the costs of producing small-run, adult-collector toys vs. cheap, mass-produced toys, and indirectly gets at why a large-scale toy company can sell things cheaper.
Mattel is not a small, independent company, but the arm of it that produces MOTUC and similar adult-collector lines is given a small budget and operates–from what I understand–like a small, independent toy company. Anyway, excerpt below.
[B]"A production run means a single undisrupted cycle of injection of parts followed by painting, assembly and packing. Size of runs depend on a lot of factors but normally factories refuses small runs (small factories might require a min run of 1000 while huge factories might refuse anything below 10,000) because they “don’t make money” from those.
"I’ll give you a simple example (the number are not 100% accurate but not way off) for design vs tooling vs manufacturing costs and how much weight they hold in final pricing:
"Say you employ someone to design a certain Voyager sized figure, your typical design cost might range from $2000-4000. Protoype print might cost $1000-2000. Typically the factory requires at least 3 copies so they will replicate every single part in resin and its actually pretty costly but this cost is hidden. So your direct R&D cost is say $5000.
"Tooling cost for a typical [Voyager] scale figure can be $40,000 - $60,000 so say $50,000
"Manufacturing includes injection, painting, assembly, packing and misc stuff. Cost depend on quantity. Typical quantities range from 2000 - 3000 but rumors say some of our competitors can hit 10000 and above. So lets keep the quantity conservative at 3000 and the cost to be $60,000.
"There are lots of other miscellaneous costs like storage, overheads and etc that have to be accounted for in the price mark up as well under “costs” but lets just keep things simple at “production costs” for now.
"So ‘tooling’ for 3K units makes up for over 45% of the total amount received by the factory. That’s very significant to us and the factory.
"Now lets do some guess-work for Hasbro. I know absolutely nothing for their numbers but I’ll be making some guesses here. Let’s just assume a conservative production quantity of 500k for a single ‘mold’. And say their factory charges them 75% lesser in unit price than what they are charging us for a run of 3000. That’s $5 hasbro pays per piece for manufacturing vs $20 for MMC. Now that makes total Hasbro pays to factory is $2.5M just for manufacturing. Not including repaint over repaint over repaint.
"Tooling costs then becomes 2%. And I believe that I’m on the conservative side with the estimates on the amounts that hasbro pays to the factories but I can be completely wrong of course.
“So you understand why its not that crazy for the factory to do free tooling for the molds? Do you be fussing over a measly $40-50k when your client is paying you millions for the production of a single figure?”[/B]
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Indeed. But the cost of the Third Party Transformers isn’t really comparable to the MOTUC figures. Those Transformers are all different from each other, superior articulation and made up of a vast amount more parts than a MOTUC figure. In Feral Rex’s (Pedaking) case he is also 5 separate robots.
I would put Classics in a slightly higher tier above 3rd party as far as production runs. The point here is, and I would assume it was crystal clear already, that Classics is not a massed produced line sold at retail. Therefore does not have the budget and resources of a mass produced line. I get that a lot of you want a TC line that doesn’t fit in with Classsics and is sold at TRU but that’s just not on the table right now. In fact there are a lot more people that do want to see where the Classics line is going. People ignorantly come here thinking they know how toys are made and make blanket statements on why a company is “lazy” or trying to screw people over with subs or forcing people to collect a line they don’t want. When in reality that’s how this property is going to survive as of now. A toy company is not going to say “Hey, let’s lose a ton of money on a risky proeperty that has a history of failure because some whiney, entitled fans want us to change everything to suit their needs”
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That perfectly sums up MOTUC. LOL.
In Griffith’s example, he was talking about the cost of one voyager-sized Feral Rex figure, not all five figures. That’s quite a bit closer to a He-Man figure. But how much more does tooling cost for one voyager figure than for an MOTUC figure? Are they in the same range? No idea, though I don’t think it’s accurate to say they’re “not comparable.” Then again, I don’t want to quibble over facts and numbers we don’t have as regards a field in which we have no expertise, since that’s not the take-home lesson here anyway.
This is the take-home lesson. This, and tooling (making the molds) makes up a considerable amount of overall costs for a small company, whereas it’s negligible for large ones, leading to differences in final mark-ups and retail prices. This stuff is more complex than people think, but it’s a lot easier to just blame people/things like ToyGuru and Mattel.
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Businesses are in the business of making money and to do that you keep your costs as minimal as possible The steel molds are quite expensive when your selling a niche collector line that has no retail backing
It’s fine for collectors to buy whatever they are happy with However you can’t complain when things sell out and are then marked up on the secondary market as that’s the beast of being a cherry picker. A company wants to sell by waves which makes complete sense to avoid any character being a virtual peg warmer and most fans prefer the subscription model. Either sub or risk paying more per figure later is all I’m saying
I never said that. You often post you bought a few and then stopped a couple of times (first MOTUC, then WWE) which left me wondering are you the type of collector that cherry picks a couple of figures then move on. That’s why I asked
I also find your negativity a bit tiresome as you never have anything good to say about the Mattel toys. We get it, they are not your thing as you dislike the MOTUC style. If you dislike something that much why bother discussing it?
Most folks either love or hate the Lunatacs for some reason.
As a child growing up with the Thundercats, I admired their design (although, some claim that it is uninspired) since they had some kind of a ineffable, mystical flair about them. The same can be said about the newer cast of Thundercats, namely, Lynx-O, Bengali and Pumyra. It’s hard to explain but they felt a bit more futuristic, surreal and mystical. Not sure if I am making any sense, though.
I like and have interests in far too many toy lines. The true fan remark wasn’t really aimed at you. It’s just some people on here really liked using that term for themselves.
Well what else should I say about another company that has messed up Thundercats?