Your designers worked hard to make a awesome figure and a cool bonus figure and your marketing department worked really hard to sell them. Yet you let your distribution department totally undo all this hard work, and quite frankly, create just a little bit of animosity from your customer base.
Marvel Legends Infinite Series: Captain America the Winter Soldier Line, Wave 1-2. A Cool group of figures, even a Hydra and a AIM foot soldier to "army build" if you want. The "build a figure", or BAF as they are known in the collector community, is a very cool S.H.I.E.L.D. Mandroid figure. For those that don't know, Mandroids are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in battle suits using Stark Tech. Think bulkier less powerful versions of Warmachine.
The Figure Itself is cool. They re-used some parts of a previous BAF (War-Monger from an Iron-Man wave). My beef with this wave is the Black Widow figure.
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Nothing to do with the figure itself, it looks fantastic from what I can tell. And there in lies the problem. In the two or three months this figure has been out (give or take), despite extensive and exhaustive searches I have yet to find one of these figures retail. And I am not the only one. Many in the collecting community have been bemoaning the scarcity of this figure. Some say that "well female figures are always had to find." to which I would reply, (pardon my language) bullshit.
That may have been the case twenty or thirty years ago with "boy toy" lines, and the outdated argument that "boy don't want to play with girl figures." I have two sons, and when they were still playing with toys they didn't really care; a superhero is a superhero. But seeing as these company's don't cater to just kids as much as adult collectors these days that argument holds even less weight. In the last few decades since, I think collectors have shown we like the female figures as much as the male. And if by chance you still have some company executive with this line of thinking working for you, well...time to pass him his "golden parachute" and move into the 21st century. At this point they are only doing more harm that good.
From what I can figure out is the figure in question is "short packed" to one per case. Now as a rule, I am not a perfectionist (out of thy package I say!!) or completest when I collect
figures. I buy what I like and that is it. If I like the BAF in a wave, I will buy figures I don't necessarily want to complete the BAF. And I understand that this process of short packing can create what figure collectors call a "chase" figure. something rare that you have to hunt around for. Which can be fun as long as "hard to find" doesn't become "impossible to find".
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| Arms...arms everywhere. |
But the whole point of the "Build-A-Figure" in a action figure line is to get consumers to buy the whole line. DO NOT include the main piece of your BAF in a figure you plan to short pack. The fact that I liked the Black Widow figure and the Mandroid just pissed me off with this wave. And at the same time you had variant figures packed with the arms (Red Skull/Hydra Trooper & Baron Zemo/AIM Trooper), so now you have collectors everywhere with an over abundance of extra arms.
If I were a hard core perfectionist collector, or at the very least not so stubborn and pig headed, I could find this figure online somewhere if necessary. but a couple of things, a). is it really necessary? No with a little better planing Hasbro could have avoided this whole mess. b). It has now become a point of pride to try and track one down in the shops, and c). I just refuse to pay some of the insane mark up prices for this figure on the secondary market. Not that I haven't in the past, I have no problem picking stuff up online. Even stuff a little over priced, but its a mater of honour and principal now.
On a secondary note, my understanding is that she doesn't come with any guns (any you see in posed pictures are added) even though they include an extra set of hands sculpted to hold them. Yet another bad and somewhat odd decision from Hasbro. Why bother with the extra hands at all if no guns.
So all they have really accomplished with this figure is to piss off a lot of fans and hard core collectors. I know I will be very leery about picking up any BAF sets from Marvel Legends in the future unless I know for a fact I will be able to find them all... preferably retail.
In the mean time...some beauty shots!
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| *Firearms not included |
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| We have two agents MIA. Someone get Director Fury on the horn. |
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