Mattel DC Figures

mrboshek said:
Ah, a new place to complain about Mattel WWE pack outs. The woman in the WWE Basic are practically scalper bait when it's their first time figure. I find them to be, without a doubt, the most difficult figure to find at retail.
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IT'S THE WORST. Like, I have a giant women's roster, that's the core of my wrestling collection. Or expansive, I mean. Most of the women aren't giants. But the number of trips I've taken to the Walmart close by and seemingly just missed a First Time in the Line NXT woman.
 
Damien said:
Instead of focusing on eras, I hope Mattel focuses on demographics.
For every white CIS man in the wave, there must be 3 figures that are some combination of non-white and/or female.
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I hope the collector line's first year is exclusively women, and men that make heterosexual men feel insecure of their sexuality, just to spite Todd Mcfarlane.
 
scottg10 said:
No disagreement on Toy Guru being worthless lying sack of something or other and contributing to DCUC's failure, but I think at the end of the day DC and their desire to only promote New 52 had more to do with the end of DCUC. I've seen different versions of this story from different people who claim to have insider knowledge at this point (and all repeated in just the last few months), and I'm inclined to believe DC was the bigger issue than the questionable content of the last few waves. It is the same reason that DCD itself went on pause for quite a while and then came back all New 52.
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This is all true.

Julius Marx and I conducted an interview with Mattel at the 2011 SDCC.

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From left to right, you have Julius, Danielle something or other (the DC product manager that didn't know a thing about DC and never read a comic, watched a cartoon or seen a superhero movie in her life), the guy in the hat was a designer whose name I can't remember but he was really nice and VERY knowledgeable about DC, Bill Benecke, whom @Damien tells me is still with the company and then there's the guy in the blue Ghostbusters shirt whom I'm sure you all know.

Yes, at this interview that was conducted upstairs at the Mattel booth, the Mattel team told us off the record that it was Warner Brothers Consumer Products and DC Comics that pulled the plug on DC Universe Classics. The reason? DC was getting ready to launch their New 52 line and they didn't want anything with the word "Classic" in it available at retail. Simple as that. It was not sales that killed DCUC. The line was selling fine. It was selling well enough that Wal-Mart was asking for it's own exclusive waves. And it wasn't Super Friends or the Geoff Johns tribute waves that killed it, either. So it would be nice to put that to rest. It was the new 52. In with the new, out with the old. They wanted the New 52 looks to be what kids and collectors saw in stores.

And that's that. Yes, they told me that off the record but hell, that was YEARS ago, I'm not sure who besides Bill is even still with that company and I never signed an NDA anyway. I was heartbroken over this whole thing but in fairness, a lot of people were. People that worked at DC comics who had their books canceled and people who worked at Mattel that wanted to keep the line going at retail. They got screwed just as badly as the fans did.

The New 52 lasted for what, just five years? And now DC is very careful not to use the words "New 52" anymore.

Oh the irony.
 
SDcomics said:
My man.

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"It is a dream that I have ..."
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Just a fraction of the team... I don't know if there is a single image that has every member.

Sorry, I'm going to geek out a bit here, but there are some toys at the end so this isn't entirely off-topic...

The amazing thing about this team is that it not only includes the core team, but the Justice Society, the Freedom Fighters, the Seven Soldiers of Victory and technically, every Golden Age DC (and Quality Comics) hero.

All-Star Squadron #31, the first "full" roll call (I think):

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All-Star Squadron #60 - the final team photo before the delayed effects of Crisis kicked in:

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Who's Who Update '87 #1 - the post-Crisis roster (and yeah, I'll take Young All-Stars too):
Edit: I just realized they shoe-horned a couple of Charlton characters in here, Judomaster and Tiger, but no Dan Garrett Blue Beetle? Odd, I wonder if the rights were still unclear back then, given the public domain version from Fox...

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This is my All-Star Squadron shelf circa 2018, the full JSA team were on a different shelf:
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In 2020, with the pandemic in full-swing I went nuts grabbing customs off eBay to try to fill in my JSA and A*S rosters. Let's say these are of mixed quality, but most look decent on the shelf, just don't move the limbs too much or the paint scrapes off. Aquaman I did myself - the final member of the team before the affects of Crisis took hold, a Mattel Super Friends figure with repainted gloves. Of course, there are still many key characters missing. My biggest gap for the core A*S roster and want for this team is Amazing-Man. I commissioned a custom, but it never happened, and most of the customs I've seen for sale are not great. He had a big role in the latest Justice Society arc, so maybe someday Mattel will make one... I got a Ma Hunkel Red Tornado custom after this image was taken, but it isn't great, and I never got around to putting her up. Someday...

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As a Jimmy Eat World fan, I truly sympathize with anyone who can't politely abbreviate a thing they like.

Isn't the Squadron just, like...all the Golden Age heroes available to DC, even if some of that's retroactive inclusion? Are there ones that aren't part of it? It's weird that a whole era's technically a team. That must be a pain to want, that's just dozens of characters. I sympathize with that too, I guess. Lotta holes in my Suicide Squad and I don't know that we're getting a Stalnoivolk anytime soon, despite the will of the proletariat.

I like the occasional Golden Ager, but I hope they at least get a little weird with it. Get me some LIberty Files looks (love their Mr. Terrific) and that weird insect Doll Man from Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes pitch.
 
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PantherCult said:
My first house I bought was $100,000 - a three bedroom house in a nice neighborhood near downtown without being in downtown.
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I may or may not be fantasizing about choking you out, but I swear it's not personal.
Poe Ghostal said:
It's becoming increasingly clear that American hard and soft power may have peaked in the 1980s, and so there's a tendency to want to revisit that era again and again.
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I was going to argue that it's the '90s, which I maintain is the pinnacle of American society, but by then Japan had become a cultural force. American culture has not been the default world culture for quite some time now.
Poe Ghostal said:
I often think about this 2014 article:
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God fucking dammit, we used to be a proper country. Two cultural critics trading essays about economics, adulthood, and masculinity in major publications. Where the hell did that go? (To 30-second video clips made by people with eight brain cells, I know.)

This is such a fucking bar:
In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.
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That line—written in 2014—would explain the 12+ years that followed.
 
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