Masters of the Universe: Origins

So Sharella is going up on Mattel Creations next week. Not 100% sure, but it looks like she'll be a Club Grayskull exclusive. So if you aren't a member you won't be able to order her.

Considering Hero, the first Club Grayskull exclusive, is still available (like pretty much all Origins releases so in the past year), I don't see it being much of a problem to get Sharella at a later date to save a bit on shipping.
 
No, I can't imagine Sharella will sell out quickly, if some of these other characters haven't been. Most MOTU fans honestly probably don't even know who Sharella is, and the ones that do, I'd say a large amount of them don't feel like they want or need a figure of her.
This figure is for the die hards.

I honestly wish we would have gotten her in the MOTU Classics line. But I'm happy to get her now for Origins.
 
Full photos of Sharella up on Mattel Creations.

https://creations.mattel.com/products/masters-of-the-universe-origins-sharella-jcc43

Nice looking figure but plain as plain can be for a toy offering. A bow, arrow and hip quiver. That's it. Granted it is a basic Origins figure with a fancy box, but for the second Club Grayskull exclusive it is pretty underwhelming. I guess they are going on the rarity of a Sharella toy ever being made, combined with the exclusivity of Club Grayskull to try and drive FOMO. Highly doubt it will work since nothing Origins has sold out this year so far.
 
Yeah, it's just kinda.... fine... isn't it? I've banged this drum a lot, so forgive me, but I feel like I could get more excited about something like this if I felt like Mattel respected its customers and this was them expanding on the offerings and going deeper now that they've given us all the major stuff we want. But they haven't done that. This is just another thing that isn't the remaining vintage figures and Mattel doesn't even have the basic decency to comment on that fact.
 
Sharella feels kind of underwhelming. I'm not sure what it is, she just seems bland. I mean, I'm still getting this figure, and I'm happy to have the character. But it's not what I expected. I don't know why. From all the art there has ever been for Sharella, that figure covers it.

But Damian, keep banging that drum. Because I agree completely. They promised to finish the vintage MOTU collection, and they are dragging this out to death. And I think some of why I am underwhelmed by Sharella, is because I just want to secure those final characters from the vintage collection.

And every time Mattel offers a Mattel Creations figure, and it's not one of the remaining vintage characters, I just feel like "for the love of goooooooood, finish this!"
 
Justice said:
What was the last vintage figure Mattel even released? Sy-Klone?
Click to expand...
I think Rio Blast came out after Sy-Klone, right? But even that was a while ago.


Super Camel said:
But Damian, keep banging that drum. Because I agree completely. They promised to finish the vintage MOTU collection, and they are dragging this out to death. And I think some of why I am underwhelmed by Sharella, is because I just want to secure those final characters from the vintage collection.
Click to expand...
Yeah - as I've said before, I think a lot of these non-vintage figures would be more exciting if they were ADDITIONS to our collection, not substitutions for things Mattel is blatantly refusing to make. And with things being what they are, we're ALL painful aware that Mattel is likely to price itself out of existence, or cancel the line out of boredom or whatever, before they finish the vintage line. So at this point every figure that isn't a vintage redo feels like a betrayal.

And that feeling certainly makes it hard to enjoy figures that otherwise I'd be pretty stoked about.
 
Damien said:
I think Rio Blast came out after Sy-Klone, right? But even that was a while ago.



Yeah - as I've said before, I think a lot of these non-vintage figures would be more exciting if they were ADDITIONS to our collection, not substitutions for things Mattel is blatantly refusing to make. And with things being what they are, we're ALL painful aware that Mattel is likely to price itself out of existence, or cancel the line out of boredom or whatever, before they finish the vintage line. So at this point every figure that isn't a vintage redo feels like a betrayal.

And that feeling certainly makes it hard to enjoy figures that otherwise I'd be pretty stoked about.
Click to expand...
Rio Blast was after Sy-Clone for sure (only remembering this cos I still have his box in my office) and not sure if Despera counts or not, but she came after Rio.
 
docsilence said:
Rio Blast was after Sy-Clone for sure (only remembering this cos I still have his box in my office) and not sure if Despera counts or not, but she came after Rio.
Click to expand...
Also Hurricane Hordak, but I don't know that he would count as one of the vintage figures people were clamouring for release.
 
I suppose the delaying of the remaining vintage based characters is just like any line does. They spread out demanded figures with other stuff to maintain interest in the line. If they finished the vintage characters, how many people would just move on? Sprinkle in new stuff and keep people at least paying attention while they wait for those remaining figures.

Hurricane Hordak wasn’t that long ago. And then it was Despera and now Sharella. Frankly, I’m just awaiting Two-Bad. I feel like once he comes out, I will walk away from the line. Got enough Cartoon stuff. I’ll get the Thundercats crossover line. And eventually Two-Bad, but by delaying him I’m at least looking at Sharella and thinking maybe she’d do a bit of world building for me should I breakdown and get her.
 
Ashtalon said:
I suppose the delaying of the remaining vintage based characters is just like any line does. They spread out demanded figures with other stuff to maintain interest in the line. If they finished the vintage characters, how many people would just move on? Sprinkle in new stuff and keep people at least paying attention while they wait for those remaining figures.

Hurricane Hordak wasn’t that long ago. And then it was Despera and now Sharella. Frankly, I’m just awaiting Two-Bad. I feel like once he comes out, I will walk away from the line. Got enough Cartoon stuff. I’ll get the Thundercats crossover line. And eventually Two-Bad, but by delaying him I’m at least looking at Sharella and thinking maybe she’d do a bit of world building for me should I breakdown and get her.
Click to expand...
I think the other problem is how many people have already moved on?

The old days of instant sellouts seem to be gone, and Origins figures selling out now seem to rely on sales to get the remaining stock gone. I think Sy-Klone and SDCC Two-Bad were the last quick sellouts for Origins figures. Everything else since then, including Rio-Blast, are either still available or took months to finally sell out (usually after a sale).

So while talk about walking away from the line after "X" figure is released, and keeping the line going by spreading out those remaining vintage figures people say they want, I don't know that there are that many interested buyers anymore. At least the number of them has gone way down since the days of Kol-Darr, Wundar, etc.
 
Ashtalon said:
I suppose the delaying of the remaining vintage based characters is just like any line does. They spread out demanded figures with other stuff to maintain interest in the line.
Click to expand...
I'm sure that's how it started. But like canprime pointed out - I also think a lot of those customers they were trying to drag along with them chose to move on anyway. Mattel needed to walk that line between giving fans what they wanted, and stringing things out to keep them invested. The reality is that they just did an absolutely terrible job of it and dragged it out so long that plenty of people just stopped caring.

Obviously it's a VERY different beast, but I think it's comparable to Star Wars. You can take a couple of years to get the entire main ANH cast out there in figure form, depending on how many releases you have per year. Wait too long and customers are just going to catch on to what an unserious dickhead you are and either lose interest or literally refuse to buy your stuff out of spite. Mattel is just an insanely-poorly run company that makes awful choices all the time.

It's unfortunate that the other side of this argument rarely gets any support from big name companies, but it's something NECA did really well a few times: Get everything people REALLY want out there as quick as you can. Show them how committed you are to being customer-friendly and fan-oriented. Hook them. And then drag them along once they're hooked.
People didn't stop buying Cartoon TMNT once the main cast was done -YEARS- ago, right?

JADA has done this with Street Fighter and I honestly don't know if any toy company currently has more goodwill with customers than they do. If they got the license for Mortal Kombat tomorrow - everyone would be there for them, fully trusting them to get every character done eventually and, just as importantly, to make good on the commitments they make to the customers. Mattel has literally NONE of that goodwill and they did it to themselves.

If I were at Mattel, I would have argued a long time ago that the best sales pitch for Sharella is 'look how deep we have to go to find characters to make because we keep making everything you asked for' and the WORST sales pitch for Sharella is 'look, how about this instead of the figures you have literally begged us to make for several years?'
 
It can backfire too, though. Like with NECA's Gargoyles. Or ... every Ghostbusters line. Though those licenses were always a bigger risk than something like TMNT.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top