Imperial AT-AT Walker, forthcoming from Hasbro
Hasbro’s Collector/Fan Media Day event at Toy Fair was almost a note-perfect instance of a GeekDad moment. Among many other toys, Hasbro owns the license for these intellectual properties: Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers, and GI Joe. Realizing that these lines have an almost iconic appeal, and that adults spend lots of money and time collecting them, a few years back Hasbro started a Collector/Fan media event during Toy Fair: An afternoon dedicated to rolling out all the new toys to the action figure / mythos connoisseurs so that they can clear space in their budget or display cabinets for the new materials.
During the Q&A session, a writer from a Star Wars site asked the panel if they consider themselves to be designing toys or collectibles. Without missing a beat the panelists uniformly said that they’re designing toys, although with at least some attention to collector or adult fan sensibilities. The crucial point, they said, was that everything they ship has to stand up to play, although they also rushed to point up how long they’d been devoted fans. (I will say, though, that the claim that they’re making “toys” raises questions about their decision to produce a “sexier” [their word] version of Juno from The Force Unleashed!)
It was a great question, though, one that speaks to the “Raising Geek Generation 2.0” sensibility: When my 6-year-old says that he loves LEGO and Star Wars—does that mean the same thing to him that it does to me? Even when we’re interested in the same Star Wars toys, our interests in them are probably a little different. (George Lucas talked about this on The Daily Show a few weeks back.)
The Hasbro event was pretty terrific. The big Star Wars news was probably the AT-AT, available this fall, and the Boba Fett (with firing rockets!) that will be available a little earlier as a mail-in reward. All of this, obviously, is linked to the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. There were lots of interesting toys, though. You can see my pics here, and I’ve been uploading official pics here.
One thing that was interesting was that in both the Marvel and the Star Wars lines they’ve introduced card-based play modes. Each Iron Man 2 figure will come with cards representing armor pieces, which kids can remix into custom armors, and then viewed in the Rolling Headquarters. All Star Wars figures, vehicles, and battle packs will come with cards that list the capabilities of the figure or vehicle, and a dice-based game for resolving battles between characters. (No need to rely any longer on the good will of a sibling or playmate—the die will tell all.) I’m not sure that I agree that such supplementation is required, but it does make sense, given the popularity of Bakugan, Pokemon, and the like.
It was definitely a gloriously geeky experience: Audience members were railing about the shift from 6” to 3.75” Marvel figures, debating nuances of articulation, and complaining about design flaws in product packaging. Several of the presenters bonded with the crowd by commiserating over this or that disappointment over the past several decades of the various mythologies, or by alluding to the kinds of specific insider knowledge that only a devotee would possess. And they focused their presentations on the needs of the audience: discussing the finer points of packaging (new serial numbers, new color schemes, etc.).
Exposing the designers to the hardcore fans and collectors produced some cool moments. One of my favorites was when they unveiled the new version of the Force FX lightsaber. In this year’s model, the blade unscrews, and you’re left with a prop-style lightsaber handle that you could wear from your belt. (On Halloween, say. Or a Tuesday.) During the Q&A, someone in the audience asked a perfectly sensible question: “Are the blades interchangeable?” The designer took a moment to think and said, “I don’t know–it honestly didn’t occur to us.” And so when we all trooped downstairs to see the toys in person, he checked it out. (Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be no.)
And two days later, my 6-yr-old sat me down with his copy of the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary, and pointed out what he insists are several errors in the book’s taxonomy of clone troopers and storm troopers. Which suggests, perhaps, that the difference between “collectible” and “toy,” or parent and child, probably isn’t worth fretting over.
