The Vintage Collection Celebrates Another Sell Out

Following San Diego Comic Con, a trio of Vintage Collection figures went up for preorder. They were Darth Revan, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Pre Vizsla. All three have sold out on at least one online outlet. As we documented last Friday, Darth Revan is sold out on both Hasbro Pulse and Amazon. Shortly thereafter, Grand Admiral Thrawn sold out on Hasbro Pulse:


Yesterday, during my ritual perusal of Vintage Collection figures on Amazon, I was momentarily confused because Pre Vizsla wasn't at the top of the "featured" page as he had been for the past several days. In fact, it wasn't on page one at all, but for good reason. The initial supply on Amazon is sold out. Now, I will fully admit that I have no idea how much inventory Amazon had to begin with, but I can't imagine a behemoth like Amazon has someone analyzing individual characters and adjusting orders accordingly. That's far too granular. I suspect they have a standard order for Vintage Collection, so which characters sell out is telling.

That brings me to a comment from our friend Tyler from the @SWTVC Instagram Page. His comment was in response the the header image for our SDCC preorders article. This is that image:


And this is his comment:

Can we just take a moment to appreciate that graphic. These are characters people have been campaigning for for yeaaaaaaaaaars. Feels so good.

The key takeaway is that these are figures that fans have been requesting for years. If we go a little deeper, Cad Bane, Darth Vader (Death Star II), and Han Solo (Endor) are also sold out by Amazon (the latter two are available from third party sellers at inflated prices). Do you see a pattern with all of these? These are all characters with well established legacies.

During several of the brand team's Q&A's from SDCC, Hasbro asked whether fans wanted to see the budget focused towards legacy characters or new media characters. I feel like the market is making a pretty loud statement for the former. This is confirmed when I did some analysis of our affiliate sales recently, which is quite telling, and is the subject of tomorrow's article.

That does not mean that all legacy figures are a success, but the right ones, the ones fans have been requesting for years, are. Also, this argument too often gets distilled down to "OT only". Far from it, but OT characters are certainly a big part of that mix. I think it's not even debatable that the PT is the most neglected source in TVC 2.0, and it's filthy with characters that meet criteria for this article.

It just seems that characters with long established popularity are the safest best for The Vintage Collection. New media absolutely has to be represented too, but if it were my money, I would tilt the budget towards legacy.

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