InspectorZartan

These vehicle/playsets by Playmobile are great! Unfortunately I don’t have room for these in any of my toy rooms or on any of my Star Trek shelves.

So I’m just recovering from SDCC and and the Hiss Tank charges yesterday and now we’ve got our first sewer playset, Target’s Fall Collector event, and PulseCon all hitting in September plus a possible Haslab Ghost Rider and Mattel Creations Eternia, plus all the other standard retail releases, S7 Ultimates, etc. No rest for the wallet lol.

Was there no Tuesday reveal yesterday?

No, the original Super Powers were not 3-3/4” scale. 3-3/4” scale were GI Joes, Kenner Star Wars, etc. and an average human vintage Super Powers character (like Green Lantern or Flash for example) looks to be around an inch taller than an average human in those other mentioned 3-3/4” lines. Side by side a standard height 3-3/4” Joe or Star Wars figure is over a head shorter than an average vintage Kenner Super Powers figure and even one of the shortest of the Kenner Super Power figures like Robin are taller than the extra tall 3-3/4” figures like Kenner Chewbacca. (and I just went an grabbed multiple examples of all of these lines and put them side by side just to make sure I’m not misremembering). So vintage Super Powers were significantly larger than 3-3/4” scale and somewhere more akin to 4.5” or 5” scale. Now I agree these new figures seem to be a smidge too big (haven’t seen them in person yet but it’s clear from pictures) and I assume you’re right that McFarlane probably had to make them a tad bigger due to the size ranges that are designated to be in Spin Master license territory. But if anything it’s more like maybe the vintage scale was closer to 4.5” while Todd’s is closer to 5” (which is an unfortunate discrepancy but no where near as far off as 3-3/4” vs 5” would be ).

Power Week??? Is that a thing? Never heard of it but again I’m not a Power Rangers guy. Is that an annual thing that’s been around for awhile or is it a first time marketing gimmick?

Hopefully that’s the case and my situation is just a random one off

So I’m not into Power Rangers personally but I have to wonder why did Hasbro decided to do these reveals a week after comic con instead of having Power Rangers reveals at the convention.

Just curious have you seen reports of people successfully returning them in store? Since they literally just started to arrive I’m wondering what percentage of people trying to take them back to the store have already done so (or attempted to do so). The only mentions I’ve seen were people who did online returns by mail—which without going into too much long winded detail I know from experience can also sometimes end up with problems getting a proper refund credited despite you returning it and them acknowledging they received it. When there are “system issues” at Walmart I’ve seen it happen to where you send it back, they acknowledge they received it, but then the refund never gets credited back to your card because of these type of “system issues”. IF that ends up being the case then those returning by mail may hit the same obstacle only it will be weeks before the customer finds that out or they just may never realize it if they don’t regularly check their transactions and notice that no refund ever shows up on their card (hopefully that’s not the case but I’ve seen it happen before).

There are zero Walmarts in Los Angeles so that store (located in Burbank which is 60 minutes away from me in traffic) is the closest one and the only one I’d be likely to be anywhere near any time soon. So going to another store isn’t a real option and if something is a Walmart exclusive then .com becomes the only real option for getting items. On top of that once I selected in store return which generated the in store barcode that removed the option to generate a label to return it via mail. It will get worked out and I’ll get it resolved but it’s just going to take time and be a headache which sucks as I’ve already more or less wasted a couple of hours. The bigger thing is if it ends up being a more system wide issue (which is what it seems to be) how many others are going to have similar issues returning these damaged cards.

Congrats Arkana99!!!

Is it just me or does it seem like if Mattel is going to make a big deal about announcing a single figure they should probably at least include a few details like MSRP, when/where it will be available, etc.

Is it just me or does it seem like if Mattel is going to make a big deal about announcing a single figure they should probably at least include a few details like MSRP, when/where it will be available, etc.

So just an update on the terrible Walmart situation with these carded figures. As I said, all 4 of these figures arrived this week from Walmart with completely damaged packaging (which makes them useless to me as I only bought them for the damaged packaging). The Walmart nearest me is over an hour away but I happened to have a meeting this morning somewhat in that vicinity so decided today would be a good day to return them in store. Long story short WALMART REFUSED TO ACCEPT THE RETURN. Walmart’s website generated a barcode to return them in store, the barcode itself said it was good until September, but upon walking in the store the barcode wouldn’t work. The reason why they said the barcode wasn’t working and they couldn’t accept the return: because since they were a preorder they were ORDERED over 3 months ago—thus the 90 day return window has expired. Now of course it should be irrelevant when these were ordered as normally that return window starts based on when the item SHIPS and when your credit card is charged (which was only a few days ago). But despite the fact that these just arrived days ago the system refused to take them. Just to be clear when something like this happens it’s my firm belief that we shouldn’t blame the workers. If Walmart’s system is screwed up that’s not the fault of the employees. That said, the first person who was at the returns desk, seemed fairly oblivious, saying things like “well you should have returned it within 90 days” while I keep calmly pointing out that I literally just received it this week and it’s not possible to return something before you receive it—finally that seemed to sink in for them. Then the manager came over and was instantly hostile for no reason, stating to me (the customer) within moments of being called over to help solve the problem “I don’t have time for this I have a store to manage”. Then a third employee came over and actually tried to help. She was not successful but at least she made the effort. She said she’d seen this before with preorders but had no direct way to fix it but if I called the corporate customer support number they could maybe help. So after a lengthy call they sent me “new” barcodes to try (which took 5 minutes to show up thus that phone agent had to hang up). We tried them and likewise it did not work (I suspect they were just the same bar codes I already had). Again the person I was working with now was nice and trying to help but wasn’t a manager or anything who could over ride the system. At one point she scanned the figures to just look them up in the system to try and find a work around but hit a dead end as she said “yeah this isn’t even something we carry”. By this point an hour had gone by and I was going to be late to my meeting thus had to give up for the day. So as of this writing an hour trip to the nearest Walmart, an hour spent in the store, and an hour spent coming back (so 3 hours total) proved to be a complete waste of time and as of this moment I’m still stuck with these damaged Joes and Walmart still has my money. Has anyone else here had a similar experience and/or has anyone else who received these figures in subpar condition been able to successfully get them returned to store?

I agree and share similar feelings about the Multiverse line (although I do feel like there are improvements) but this Super Powers line is a very different animal to where I feel like there will hopefully be different choices made. Outside of going back to Mattel who would your ideal candidates be to take over the DC license? I think the criticism of McFarlane character selection. is fair, but I’m not sure who would be able to do a similar (but better) job at a similar price point. We see that companies like SpinMasters and Playmates will focus on kids lines or less detailed form factors, Jakks over does the repaints and rereleases, collector companies like NECA or Super7 or Diamond only release a handful of figures at a time (thus probably making it even less likely to get non-Bat characters any time soon). Outside of going back to Mattel (which I definitely preferred) I’m not sure who would do it more right. And in those last few years with Mattel the amount of pegs and shelf space set aside for DC product at retail was dwindling (which is probably why WB was looking to make a change). McFarlane/SpinMasters despite any flaws do seem to be doing a better job of keeping more square footage on the isle for DC product

I’m Curious. Why not?