Origins: Repaints vs Reissues

[Darkkosis]

Setting aside that Mattel is a massive, slow-moving bureaucracy by toy company standards, to do something like that needs a justification.

I hate it on some level that publicly businesses exist to make profit. But doing what you suggest could literally get people fired and sued in a worst-case scenario, even if it might not be likely with the scale we'd be talking about here.

It has to make business sense. I don't mean that in every day sense of the phrase. I mean it has to be justifiable to people who will hold them accountable.

I've been in some of those board meetings before, and reshuffling under the upper management's supervision is doable and sometimes it takes place when it was necessary.
Unless you're part of Mattel's (or any other toy company's) managerial team, your narrative here is nothing but assumptions, speculative and unnecessarily dramatic... No one is commenting a crime or laundering budgets, it's a business practice within the company itself. And with Origins' budget, it could be just a drop in the bucket... Sigh.

[Secret]

I've been in some of those board meetings before, and reshuffling under the upper management's supervision is doable and sometimes it takes place when it was necessary.
Unless you're part of Mattel's (or any other toy company's) managerial team, your narrative here is nothing but assumptions, speculative and unnecessarily dramatic... No one is commenting a crime or laundering budgets, it's a business practice within the company itself. And with Origins' budget, it could be just a drop in the bucket... Sigh.

The people selecting the characters almost certainly aren't the ones setting the budgets, though.

[Darkkosis]

The people selecting the characters almost certainly aren't the ones setting the budgets, though.

That doesn't matter though unless someone "in charge" has a big liberty to do whatever they want.
a) Designers, engineers, marketers, cost/budget managers and team leaders work in unison regardless. Things have to go through to the proper channels before production starts.
b) Usually budgets (and the potential sale revenues, and potential risks) dictate at the end what can be produced, and how to fork it is usually the trick.
c) Supply and demand play a part as well. And sometimes external and internal politics have an effect on what can be produced and what cannot be done at that moment in time!

That said, it all depends on how the company normally operates and what their business model is like. Always exclusion can happen, but that's usually not the norm!

[hadley]

I’m of two minds here. I went from skipping this line entirely to seeking out Skeletor’s villains, and it’s kinda frustrating. The shelf presence of these things is so ephemeral. I’ve got about a six week window to find any given figure from when the wave finally hits my area (seems to be 90 days after I first see pickup posts here) to when it sells out and they leave the pegs bare until the next wave comes. So in a way I think that straight up reissues are probably a good idea, because selfishly I want Mer Man. I don’t want blue Mer Man standing in for him. I can easily put myself in the shoes of a kid who didn’t get Man-E-Faces when he was out, and now he’s evaporated into the ether.

On the other hand, if I was all in on this line from jump, I would die for wacky recolors. I loved them in 200x. Some made me scratch my head for certain, but most of them were super cool.

[anytimepally]

I’m of two minds here. I went from skipping this line entirely to seeking out Skeletor’s villains, and it’s kinda frustrating. The shelf presence of these things is so ephemeral. I’ve got about a six week window to find any given figure from when the wave finally hits my area (seems to be 90 days after I first see pickup posts here) to when it sells out and they leave the pegs bare until the next wave comes. So in a way I think that straight up reissues are probably a good idea, because selfishly I want Mer Man. I don’t want blue Mer Man standing in for him. I can easily put myself in the shoes of a kid who didn’t get Man-E-Faces when he was out, and now he’s evaporated into the ether.

On the other hand, if I was all in on this line from jump, I would die for wacky recolors. I loved them in 200x. Some made me scratch my head for certain, but most of them were super cool.

Mer-Man has been reissued (apparently online only) and is in stock at BBTS if you're willing to shop online and pay a little extra.