Ghostbusters Archives - Page 6 of 30

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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Toy Guru Sets the Record Straight about Mattycollector Subscription Targets (Again)

Toy Guru returns to YouTube to continue the push to hit the targets for Club Eternia, Club Infinite Earths, and Ecto-1 pre-orders. He also tries once more to squash the conspiracy theories about the meters. Repeat after Toy Guru: they are real – they are not a marketing ploy! Hey – repetition is a proven way to get a message across.

One of the more interesting remarks he makes is regarding the Club Eternia sign-up last year – he tells us that there was no meter on Club Eternia, because they thought they didn’t need one. I guess their surprise at the implied drop-off (I have no idea what the subscription numbers are) is why we have a He-Man shaped silhouette on the Club Eternia sign-up pages for 2014.

I’m still collecting both Masters of the Universe Classics and DC Universe Classics – Ghostbusters died for me when I couldn’t bring myself to buy that Dana Barrett. But I particularly feel for those of you just collecting DC. Maybe it’s just leftover from last year, when the MOTUC bias was much worse, but it still feels to me like DC is the red-headed stepchild – this video is shot in front of current and vintage Masters figures. On the DC front, only Doomsday is name-checked. I know Toy Guru is a big DC fan, but with his favored JLU line completed, there doesn’t seem to be any cohesive vision for what Club Infinite Earths should be – maybe that’s why it’s been hard to articulate why we should be buying the DC subscription.

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Watch Mattycollector’s Ghostbusters Ecto-1 Mockup and Comparison Video

I may need to be covered in mood slime and blasted with some Ray Parker, Jr. – because I don’t think things are looking too good for the Ghostbusters Epic Creations Ecto-1. When I checked yesterday, the subscription tracking silhouette (typing that in made me miss the thermometer) hadn’t moved for over a week, if the 726 on the photo means July 26.

Toy Guru is bringing the marketing effort to YouTube, where he stacks up the foam model against the short-lived Mattel Ghostbusters figures and some earlier Mattel Ghostbuster vehicle efforts that somehow didn’t need pre-orders for Mattel to make them. To be fair, the earlier toys are smaller and didn’t have lights and sounds. In Ghostbusters, Ray Stantz was able to pick up the Ecto-1 for $4,800 – Mattel only has to sell 22 and a third of their 1/12 scale Ecto-1s to recoup the cost of the original.

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MattyCollector Subscriptions and Pre-Order Push – So it Begins, So it Ends?

It’s just been a week since the Mattypalooza panel at San Diego Comic-Con, but Mattel has already alerted fans that the 2014 subscriptions and the Ecto-1 pre-order are “quite below” expectations, despite them opening up the subscriptions several weeks early. Call it scare tactics, sales and marketing, or just the plain unvarnished truth – Toy Guru is once again warning fans that pre-orders for the Club Eternia and Club Infinite Earths subscriptions and the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 pre-order have to hit their minimums or they’re not happening.

And while, thank Grodd, they’ve replaced the thermometer graphics this year with product silhouettes, the picture they paint right now is pretty daunting. There’s under three weeks to go to the August 19 deadline. Continue reading “MattyCollector Subscriptions and Pre-Order Push – So it Begins, So it Ends?”

SDCC 2013: Mattel Mattypalooza 2013! Panel Presentation Slides

Mattel provided their Mattypalooza 2013 presentation as a PDF in their SDCC wrap-up, but we’ve done you a solid and it to images you can just flip through right here in your browser.

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