From your post to the firmament of spacetime...
When they did the retro Candyman, Randy was still active on Twitter. He said they would use the retro line to test the popularity of borderline characters. So if they sell well enough, they'll invest the tooling on an Ultimate version. Same thing they said with Snake Plissken, who also never made the cut.
And see, that kinda rubs me the wrong way. I mean, I suppose it makes sense, but I'd have to imagine that Candyman would sell at least as well as some of the other pegwarmers- Crooked Man, The Nun, Hooper from Jaws, etc. It's tricky, because I just don't care for retro style cloth figures like that, so I have no interest in the retro Candyman or Captain Blake or Herbert West, but if they made Ultimates, I'd buy every one of them. And, while not across the board, I suspect that many other collectors are the same way- that retro style is certainly an acquired taste; not everyone has nostalgia for them. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to relegate a character to a style that many collectors just don't want and then look at the sales numbers and consider them an undesirable character. In this day and age, when things are becoming more and more expensive by the second, I want something that's gonna fit in with the rest of the collection, not something that's gonna stand out for the wrong reasons. But such is how the business goes, I suppose.
Soft goods are but and miss. Some like Mezco and the Four Horsemen are great. Hasbro and ‘retro’ style figures are not. When done well they can really add something sculpture can’t as easily replicate. When done wrong, it just looks like a big shapeless blanket suffocating the figure. I have to agree that the retros do nothing for me and I would like Ultimates of many of the characters they’ve only done in retro. Heck, I’d buy Ultimate Golden Girls but those retro outfits leave much to be desired.My distaste for soft goods at this scale cannot be overcome.
See, and I specifically do not like the Mezco stuff. I don't think I've ever been impressed by a One:12 Collective figure (except the ones that don't actually have soft goods, like Iron Man), all I see are ugly seams and wrinkles everywhere. But people seem to love them. I'll never get it. Maybe it's got to do with me being more sculpt-first than other collectors, because I'll take sculpted cloth over soft goods basically every time. The materials just don't hang or move correctly at such a small scale, and I like the effort of sculpting in the wrinkles and such.
