I thought i'd jump in on this.
As people have said before, i know that G1 Omega Supreme, Shockwave, and Jetfire are all supposedly originally owned by other companies, so legally speaking, there is no legal way to reproduce them without buying a sublicense or whatever in order to have permission to make those items again. That is if the molds are even still in existance.
Once upon a time, before the great boards deletetion, i read a thread about this sort of thing. In that thread, a fellow seibertronian spoke of how he worked with resin, and it turns out that the stuff is really expensive. he spoke of how it was bought by the gallon, and i want to say that 5 or 10 gallons of the stuff was like 5 or 10 thousand dollars or something ridiculous like that.
I also recall reading something about how doing remolds is a very costly process.
Furthermore, i also recall reading about how energon Wingsabre was one of the few, if not the only energon figure that was untouched by hasbro in the manufacturing process. As i understand it, Hasbro is/was a sublicensee of Takara/Tomy?, and Takara would give them figures essentially. Takara is responsible for the engineering process of the the majority of the toys. If hasbro has an idea or concept for a figure, they will draw up the alt mode and tell Takara "We want it to look like this, now make it." Like with Wingsabre for example, Hasbro supposedly said something to the tune of "We want something that will combine with optimus prime." Takara responded that that was the reason that certain sacrifices were made with Wingsabre in order to meet that goal, such as his teeny tiny arms/hands and general brickishness. But! He combined with Optimus Prime!
In the end, most of everything we discuss is speculation, but we can recap the facts which attribute to why we don't see some figures being reissued.
1. Takara/tomy/hasbro do not own some of the licenses or whatever for use of some of the names.
2. Resin costs a buttload per gallon.
3. Molds are prone to degredation through use, elemental exposure, and consipracy theories involving theft and such.
4. Remolds are costly to do and are usually only done when large amounts of a figure are going to re-made
We should all write to that program "How It's Made" on the discovery channel and have them do an episode on tf's. maybe they'd do it if enough of us asked them to?
http://community.discovery.com/eve/foru ... 6941947648Or maybe making tf's is a dirty business? Maybe we could write to Mike Rowe of the dirty jobs show and ask him to show us how it's done?
http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/dirty ... yjobs.html
...okie dokie...Speaking of molds, How can Takara re-use the Diaclone Convoy mold over and over w/ out it getting damaged? Come one, they used it's like a million times. (I know, a million is a big stretch but still)
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