carytheone wrote:o.supreme wrote:Seems like they way overproduced Hotrod. Of all the reissues, I've seen Starscream 3 times, and Devastator 2 times, and I've NEVER seen the minibots in store, but I always see Hotrod, and plenty of him.
Yeah, they've been keeps shelves cozy since they hit. I had a feeling we could get HR at close out prices. In my area, Starscream isn't doing much better. I'm hoping to roll up on a discount at somepoint. Devy on the other hand is here today and gone tomorrow.
I guess it's not just Decepticons that love combiners.
Part of it with Hot Rod might be the kerfuffle over him being boxed backwards, which the MISB collectors to whom cutting the tape and turning the tray around is heresy made much wailing and gnashing of teeth over
, and the surge of extra stock ordered to amend that.
o.supreme wrote:Probably sounding like a noob on this however, I wonder, with the issue of "lost molds" and such, why couldn't new reissues be reverse engineered from existing toys?
I mean we got 3 of the Dinobots in G2, but to say the molds are "too degraded" to ever reissue them again, when there are plenty of existing G1 Dinobots to draw from. Perhaps it may be too time consuming or costly to do so, if that's the case, i understand, but I'm not sure why it would be *impossible*
It's the cost and difficulty. They have to consider it worthwhile (like, say, if there's a hype train to ride). It's almost certainly been done with Optimus Prime, who is considered worth it because because Optimus Prime. but others aren't as guaranteed to make back the investment. Also, finished toys aren't necessarily optimized for extrapolating molds from.
Also, there's a difference between a mold being too degraded - as in, worn-out or coming apart - to use again (as is confirmed to be the case with Wheeljack) and a mold being missing in action - they may or may not still have it but don't know exactly where it is in their umpteen warehouses (think the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders) if they do. This is known to be the case with G1 Mirage, the G1 Dinobots (in these six cases I would bet they got mislaid when the G1 molds got hustled back into storage after G2 canceled all pending G1 redecoes to focus on new molds), a couple unreleased G2 Go-bots, Beast Wars Basic Rattrap, Insecticon, and Armordillo and speculated to be the case with Sunstreaker (conspicuously absent even from Encore and its e-Hobby Diaclone-based redeco parade) and probably the Aerialbots, Stunticons, and Protectobots. A mold merely being lost might actually reduce the desire to recreate it since there's always the hope it will turn up again one day. And molds thought lost
have resurfaced. The original Basic-class Terrorsaur, missing or presumed missing when he didn't show up in the Beast Wars Telemocha line, resurfaced in 2014 when used for a version of AoE Strafe.
There's also a difference between a mold being missing and simply lying fallow (they know where it is, they just don't use it). They probably still have Scorponok, Overlord, the unreissued TFTM toys, and so on, they just haven't yet deemed them worth reissuing for some reason or other.
Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2018 12:59 am
), but Legout was still reconstructed with a surviving point of reference, that much is certain.
(and this coming from someone who at one timed owned the original toy). I assume 
& 
would use the same standard of materials they did originally, if that was a viable option.