It’s a golden time to be a Marvel Legends collector. We’re getting much-needed redos, contemporary movie versions, and some truly out-of-left-field B-listers. It truly seems as though the line has reached its golden age… but what next? What happens when a company delivers all of the fan-demanded characters, movie variants, and cornball secondary characters? What happens to our wish lists once everybody has been done?
It seems preposterous, I know. How could one toy company ever give us all of the characters we want? Even minor characters have multiple variations that can be mined almost indefinitely. And yet, when you consider the numbers, it’s entirely possible that Hasbro’s Marvel Legends 2015 strategy can ultimately lead to the demise of the wish list in our lifetime. This year alone we have four Avengers assortments, plus two for Spider-Man and one for Ant-Man, totaling 49 figures total (including BaFs). Factor in box-sets like the Agents of SHIELD 3-pack, the Disney-exclusive Avengers 5-pack, and miscellaneous others, and the number goes a bit higher. More than 60 figures in the space of a year is nothing to be sneezed at. While evergreen lines like Star Wars can manage the same numbers over the course of a year, their character selection is nowhere near as deep as Marvel’s. For the Original Trilogy to remain relevant at retail, we’ve seen a shift to 6-inch figures, allowing the line to “reset.” Marvel Legends has never taken that track — every series adds to the line’s numbers, enriching our plastic armies. We have dozens of Spider-Men, several Fantastic Fours, and enough random X-Men to fill a dozen Detolfs.
Let’s look at The Avengers. Thanks to its presence as a media juggernaut, my favorite childhood comic is now a “brand.” That means that, alongside the obligatory Cap, Thor, and Iron Man figures, I can expect a smattering of peripheral Avengers in every series. Fifty-four Avengers have already been produced (some multiple times). That leaves roughly 40 more team members without figures. Obviously Hasbro isn’t going to bother with Avengers that joined only to die in the space of a single issue, modern characters that require excessive amounts of new tooling, or anything overtly X-Men-related, which means we can chop that list down to roughly 20 characters. That’s little more than three assortments (one year’s worth) and poof! The end of the Avengers.
Obviously advances in technology allow companies to improve previously produced figures, but what happens once we have the perfect versions of all our favorite characters? You can only do Spider-Man so many times before you finally (maybe even accidentally) get him right. Some might argue that Hasbro has no intention of providing the perfect version of Spidey or any of Marvel’s characters, stringing us along with product that’s almost perfect but can always been improved upon. If that truly is their strategy, it will inevitably backfire. Sooner or later the consumer will have had enough: I’ve owned dozens of different 6-inch Spider-Man figures over the years — its going to take something truly special for me to to go down that road again. Now, one might argue that I’m not the target audience for these toys. Well, show me one 8-year-old that’s spent as much on Spider-Man figures as I have and maybe I’ll conceded that point.
With Marvel focusing its attention more on the movie franchises, it stands to reason we can expect to see more of those characters in Marvel Legends. After all, collectors still don’t have a Falcon, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, or Vision. These could be knocked out in the space of two series, leaving what? Ultron drones? Yondu? The Hulk dogs? Aside from redos, most of the main players in the MCU have been covered, including newcomers like Ant-Man. So what then? With the big characters available in abundance and new properties getting their own lines, we fall back on comic versions.
Take Safari-Jacket Wonder Man. He’s a divisive issue here on the Fwoosh: some people think he’s pointless, other people need him like oxygen. Considering we’ve already received C-listers like Hellcat, it’s a safe guess we’ll end up seeing Wondy in the next few years. It just makes sense on an economic level — the cost of a rubber overlay is nothing next to the tooling needed to produce an entirely new figure. Economy seemed to win 9 out of 10 times; it’s a safe bet we’ll see Safari-Jacket Wonder Man before a classic Crimson Dynamo or Zzzax, but I’d be happy to eat my cybernetic hat if I were wrong.
So is the Man in the Anthill crying the sky is falling? Or does he have a legitimate concern? It’s probably somewhere in the middle. Thanks to the unexpected popularity of Marvel Legends, it’s safe to assume we’ll see many new figures before the line’s demise. It’s clear Hasbro is open to producing some of Marvel’s less-popular characters, so the chances of getting your favorite character, however niche, are better than ever. If you’re a fan of the “Big Three” Avengers, you’ll do even better, with multiple versions of the characters available to add to your collection. How long that lasts is anybody’s guess.
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