william-james88 wrote:Thanks for clearing that up. While I like Spector's insight on the toy market and him giving us all context from his experience, he's not an employee at Hasbro nor is he a consultant for them. He's not up to date on whatever internal policies may have been updated, so anything aside from general or historical toy market claims, I see as an assumption or educated guess which isn't infallible.
True, but there must be something to it as there's a number of figures that would have benefitted from a little retooling and a release perhaps in selects. There used to be speculation that we couldn't have movie figures in Selects because it isn't a movie line, but that didn't stop them doing movie figures in Buzzworthy Bumblebee. I don't think we're seeing the full picture.
In that particular video though, I get the opposite info from what you were saying. The better comparison is to Mattel which owns the MOTU line and reuses parts between it's own line and licenced WWE stuff. So parts sharing between different lines is fine if the to company owns the main brand (according to him).
He specifically said it only goes one way. Mattel can use MOTU parts to make WWE figures because they own that IP, but they wouldn't be able to use WWE parts in MOTU figures.
In terms of movieverse molds being found in non movie lines we now have shard engineering (one steps), shared parts/cad models (X-Panse), redecos with retooled heads (Generations Platinum Dinobots, GDO Springer) and straight up redecos (stomp and chomp grimlock) so we can't discount anything. Hasbro sure doesn't.
X-Spanse is easy to explain if you read the legal:
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It's still made under license from Lockheed Martin and Dreamworks who hold the Jetfire license so it's not so much like the license moved backwards they just added another layer to it.
The Dinobot set could be down to a technicality since all of them are based on preliminary art and not as they appeared in the movies.
GDO Springer doesn't use a movie figure mold since it's a Transformers 2010 line figure which mixed movie toys and original toys in Hunt for the Decepticons and later would add G1 characters under Reveal the Shield. We know Hasbro considers supplemental characters as non-movie figures because BotCon wasn't allowed to use movie molds, but they were able to use HftD Seaspray to make Octopunch and RotF Bludgeon to make Overlord among others I'm sure.
Stomp & Chomp Grimlock could be the same case as the Platinum Dinobots, just unique enough to not infringe. I also noticed that on the legal info it says patent pending (for the play feature I'd guess) which could indicate another layer of ownership for Hasbro giving them free use of the figure.
Speculating a lot of course. Like I said before there's probably a lot we don't fully understand. Can't believe we're discussing this in the haul thread...
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