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Soapbox Sunday: I’m KILLIN THE LIEN (One out of Three Subs Ain’t Bad)

Yes, I’m a procrastinator. I haven’t submitted my pre-order for the Mattycollector subscriptions. But when I do, I’ll be one of the guys KILLIN THE LIEN. When it comes to Club Eternia, Club Infinite Earths, and the Ecto-1 pre-orders, I’ll be saying no to Ghostbusters and Masters of the Universe Classics, and giving a hesitant yes to DC Universe Classics.

When I started thinking about this post earlier in the week, I was planning on something a little different. The gist was going to be, “I’ve subbed for Masters and DC (note: I always knew I was going to pass on the Ecto-1), and now it’s up to you” – I’d present my rationale for my decisions. I wouldn’t tell you to sub too (I hate that), but rather ask you to consider how the subs line up with what you want and to make up your own minds.

For the past couple of days, I started to really put that into practice for myself. As someone on the bandwagon since the subscriptions started, it was the de facto choice to keep subbing. So I was pretty surprised to come to the decision to stop subscribing to Club Eternia.

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Soapbox Sunday: Five Lessons Mattel Can Learn from the Four Horsemen

It’s like a Tale of Two Cities – the Four Horsemen are involved in a couple of product pre-order campaigns running in parallel. On one side, they’re the design shop behind Mattel’s Mattycollector Club Eternia and Club Infinite Earths subscriptions for Masters of the Universe Classics and DC Universe Classics. On the other, they’re taking pre-orders for their own Gothitropolis Ravens line through the crowd-funding platform, Kickstarter.

As we’ve seen over the past week, folks from Mattel and the Four Horsemen are tearing their hair out over whether the Club Eternia and Club Infinite Earths subscriptions will hit the minimums needed to survive. Meanwhile, the Four Horsemen’s Ravens are flying high. Their Kickstarter campaign hit the funding target during its first week, and proceeded to blast through every stretch goal they started with and even a few more they had to put together along the way.

You might think it easy to dismiss the stark differences in the success of the campaigns as coming from collectors’ growing dislike of Mattel and their service partner Digital River. And while I see a fair amount of anecdotal evidence for Mattel-hate, I believe there are some clear differences in how they run their campaigns that is causing the Mattycollector subscription fallout. If the Mattycollector subs live to fill in product silhouettes again next year, here’s some things Mattel can learn from the Four Horsemen, to make the sign-up period less traumatic and uncertain.

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Ask Matty Q&A for 8/15 (a Few Days Early!)

It’s been a long time since our last Q&A with Matty, but we’ve decided to get back into it. Toy Guru provided some answers early, because he’s either going to be driving for every last subscription to Club Eternia and Club Infinite Earths, or he may just be out of the office for a few days.

1) A lot of people thought that the DC Unlimited and Batman Unlimited lines were doing well at retail. What were the reasons for canceling those lines?

We are always working with retailers to find the best way to bring DC figures to mass collectors and moms and kids. Right now the 6″ line will continue on Matty pending we get the min number of sub holders.

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Soapbox Sunday: How Much is Digital River to Blame for Mattycollector Fallout?

Get ready for a little rant – I just had another bad Mattycollector experience. This past Friday was Early Access. Normally it’s no big deal, offering the figures we’ve already subscribed for and customer service stock on a couple of other figures. But this time it was for some of Mattel’s San Diego Comic-Con exclusives.

Hurray for subscribing, right? Nope – leave it to Digital River to make it painful.

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Iron Man Movie Hall of Armors Infographic and Hot Toys Poll

We found this great infographic in our inbox about the Iron Man armors portrayed in the three Iron Man movies and the Avengers. It shows enough factoids about each to perhaps extend the Trivial Pursuit line to include an Iron Man edition. Oddly, the Mark 42 is notably absent from the list. The Iron Man infographic is from Costume Discounters, of all places. I guess they would like to do a brisk business in Iron Man and other super hero costumes, and I wish them the best of luck.

The last portion of the infographic shows the new Iron Man 3 armors revealed before the movie opened (minus the Mark 42 of course). And we know Hot Toys is working off this list, since they’ve already announced the Iron Patriot, War Machine, Red Snapper, Heart Breaker and Igor as upcoming releases.

It got me thinking, which of the three remaining armors will they make next? But more importantly, which do you want next?

I think I already know, but let’s see what you guys have to say. Of course, there’s a ton more armors featured in the movie (spoiler, if you somehow managed to miss all of the Iron Man previews they showed in the last few months), so this list will probably grow even longer – anyone know a site that lists them all?