Raving Toy Maniac

I've noticed him posting a lot on Hisstank lately.

Seen some posts recently on Breitbart.com under the name "JediJones" that look like his work. He was defending Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in one...

I enjoyed many of his posts here, and never understood the hate directed at the guy.

Two responses in as many days. What happened?

Yep, if you look at the "Last Reply" column on the list of forum threads you'll see I made two of them within the past week or so. I'm probably not here as much because this site is more superhero-focused, and both the DC and Marvel lines have been pretty dead this year. Just one wave of DCU, one wave of MU, and two waves of ML that came and went within a month, and the year's almost half over. And the 6" product is about all that's worth talking about in the Avengers, Dark Knight and Spidey lines.

Meanwhile, G.I. Joe and Star Wars are suffering their own setbacks. TPM 3D was a non-event that left a lot of product on the shelves clogging up distribution of anything new. And G.I. Joe went on its own 6-month hiatus to prepare for a movie which is now delayed and has everything but its first mediocre wave of toys pushed to next year.

It's pretty clear that LEGO and WWE are the hot toy lines now and people like me who don't "do" those lines are getting a smaller and smaller amount of more and more cut-rate product (like articulation cutbacks on many of Hasbro's 3.75" figures). Meanwhile Hasbro's got some cool stuff lined up for SDCC and we'll all be lucky if we can even purchase it before it sells out in 5 minutes or less.

And despite the fact we've all been able to save money on toys this year, we still have local collectors swapping junk toys into new boxes and returning them (e.g. old Action Fleet vehicles and dollar store 3.75" figures being repacked into Star Wars TPM mini-vehicle boxes, and Joe Retaliation UPCs "inserted" into older Joe figures' packaging) or just flat out slicing open the bubbles of MU figures and stealing them in the store. Truly pathetic.

Well, to add a silver lining to the cloud at retail, Rebelscum and CoolToyReview announced these TRU exclusives today (they didn't say for sure the MU 2-packs are TRU exclusives, but everything else said so). The list below shows the release date, product name, price and the quantity it's limited to. Obviously it's TRU so these dates won't be exact.

7/1 TRU X-Factor 5-pack $34.99 20,000
7/1-7/31 MU X-Men vs. Avengers 2-packs $16.99 40,000
7/1-7/31 TRU Takara Masterpiece Optimus Prime $100 20,000
8/1 TRU Star Wars Adventurous Ewoks 5-pack $34.99 30,000
8/1 TRU Yavin Pilots 5-pack $34.99 30,000
10/1 TRU Star Wars Speeder Bike w/ Scout & Cannon $19.99 30,000
10/1 TRU Star Wars Endor AT-AT $? 30,000
TRU Star Wars Slave I $?

I'd like to see what the XM v Avengers sets look like, from the descriptions. At least there's one new(ish) figure per pack, unlike the Avengers MU four packs that had only the new Hulk in 1 set.

And isn't the X-Factor set a 6 Pack(Jean, Cyke, Iceman, Angel, Apocalypse and Mr. Sinister)? Probably just a system typo.

Star Wars...meh, this time around. Though the Slave 1 has potential, as long as it isn't terribly priced.

Thanks for the info Jones

So much for me ever finding Masterpiece Optimus Prime.

I never knew they released production runs. Is Prime's that much lower than Grimlock's and Rodimus?
At least it's not a Walmart exclusive.

One other item they announced...

9/1 TRU 6" Deadly Foes of Spider-Man 4-pack (Spidey, Ock, Lizard, Venom) $49.99 40,000

With 875 TRUs in the US, and MP-10 being limited to 20,000 pieces, that means that, if they're evenly distributed, each US TRU will get approximately 23 MP-10s.

That really sucks.

Edit - My bad, that 875 apparently includes Babies R' Us stores, too. Anybody know how many TRUs are in the US? Google has failed me.

Why? If it were I'd actually stand a chance of owning one at retail...

Emerje

I'd feel better if it were a Target Exclusive. Toys R Us is 2+ hours away & despite being a Supercenter, my Walmart NEVER receives exclusive toys w/the exception of the DCUC wave w/Zatanna.

I'm a bit down on Walmart.
I haven't had much trouble finding exclusives at TRU. Actually I found Walmart's MP exclusives easy to find but that was a few years ago. Since then the Walmart's in my area have become very unreliable. The 6" Avengers, for example, have been a frustration, nothing in the eight closest stores, not even peg space.

In my area...

If it's a TRU exclusive, I can get it.

If it's a Target exclusive, I can get it on clearance.

If it's a Walmart exclusive, I need to get it from someone who lives far away from here.

Yeah, it's pretty much flipped for me. At Walmart I tend to have no trouble with all exclusives, Target I can often hold off until clearance, and with TRU (as far as Transformers go) I'm never there at the right time, I either get there just before they start going on sale or I'm there after they've sold out. MP Optimus Prime is no different, he'll be out in October, I'll be there in September... Probably won't hit TRU again after that until next Summer.

Emerje