As someone who mostly held to his word to not buy anymore DC figures after DCUC died (I did buy Mattel’s Kyle Rayner and McFarlane’s Anti Monitor), I’ll admit that I’m cautiously optimistic and a little scared by the news.
My DCUC figures are still proudly displayed and while there’s plenty of figures that I still really wanted in the line (AAAAAZZZZZTEEEEEEEK), Ive been content on calling it a day and having them as my DC collection.
Now there’s part of me that would love for Mattel to make a DC line that matches what Legends is doing and is the same scale as them. I love DCUC but some of that articulation is ROUGH, the women generally look bad, and a lot of the later headsculpts done by interns look like crap. However, with how high figure prices have come, the idea of starting an entirely new collection and hopefully getting 150-200 characters, starting at $25 a piece and only going up, is daunting. My Legends purchases have gone way down and it feels like there’s an end in sight for them and my collecting with now well most figures are coming out and I’ve liked that. It’s freed up a lot of money for other figures but also non-figure stuff. So I can’t say that I’m excited about immediately picking up a brand new line, just to have nicer figures of characters that I already have a generally decent representation of.
So if they make them 7”, I’ll be out anyways. Which wouldn’t be terrible for me.
Mattel's He-Man lines are rather good toys. Masterverse does at least one thing better than ML...torso articulation. Ribcage articulation is used and used well. Figures are solid and have good range of motion. A DC line using a similar format to Masterverse would be a cool toyline. Masterverse is one of the better lines at mass retail right now.
I don't collect much of Mattel's WWE line but they also seem like solid figures. Especially, the Ultimate ones, which have extra hands, heads, and other accessories.
Also assuming we'll see a DC/MOTU crossover line, like the TMNT/MOTU and upcoming Thundercats/MOTU lines. DC superheroes using the MOTU Origins body type could be some really fun toys.
I'm assuming McFarlane will try to retain rights to make statues and whatnot (think of the Marvel comic cover statues he's making but with the DC license). Maybe Mattel will sub out a license for him to continue with Super Powers and BTAS, but maybe they'd need to be direct market and not mass retail.
Does anyone know if there was a change in leadership at Mattel between 2019 and 2025? I remember someone at Mattel saying they were going to work hard to get the license back after they lost it but I don't remember who that was. Also someone said on a recent post that Mattel was this large corporate unfeeling entity that doesn't care about its products. I remember motuc and dcuc brand managers and teams being very enthusiastic about their products but obviously they can't help what executive decisions get made.
That was probably me. And I didn’t really say Mattel doesn’t care about their product so much as I said they don’t care about the fans. And I’m mostly talking about the higher ups who make the decisions, not the guys in the trenches designing the figures. But when you think about it, Mattel doesn’t really seem to care about the product either. I can only go by what they did in the past, which was basically take the exact same body and repaint it like 200 times over and over again throughout a 12 year (or so) period of time. Add to that their quality control was some of the worst of any figures I ever bought. Remember the huge “dusting” issue from DCUC Wave 3? And over the years I had multiple figures breaking right out of the package. Wonder Girl, Cheetah, and Hal Jordan from the Sinestro 2-pack spring immediately to mind. And you want to talk about not completing teams? Mattel left so many teams halfway finished (if even that) it was a joke. For example they left the classic Perez era New Teen Titans missing a couple of key characters. And even if they had finished the team, Kid Flash was like a head shorter than the Dick Grayson Robin. Oh but I forgot, McFarlane is the only company that ever has inconsistent scaling issues. Forgive me.
But the biggest bummer about McFarlane losing the DC license is that not only will we be losing some absolutely great figures, but we’ll also be losing Todd himself. The CEO of the company, who actually speaks directly to the fans through social media and personal appearances. In fact just today I saw a video on IG of Todd using his personal laptop to pick the winner of a custom life-size ’66 Batman cowl. He even showed his screen step by step just to prove everything was fair and on the up-and-up. But I’m sure we’ll still that kind of personalized fan interaction from the CEO of Mattel. Sure we will. Now quick, without using Google, name the current CEO of Mattel.
So, I for one will be very sad to see Todd and DC Multiverse go away, and be replaced by a giant faceless, soulless corporate entity. It’s truly the end of an era. A fun era that always reminded me of the early days of Marvel Comics when Stan Lee would speak directly to the readers and try to make it feel like a real community of like minded fans. But hey, at least DC figures might be 6-inches again, so there's that. Yay.
I mean, how much overlap would there really be if both McFarlane and Mattel were making DC figures? Even if both companies released the same version of the same character, at the same time, their audiences are so different. That much is apparent from all of the message board and social media posts over the last several days.
The McFarlane haters aren’t going to buy the McFarlane version even if there was no Mattel version, the Mattel haters aren’t going to buy the Mattel version even if there was no McFarlane version, those that like both are going to buy both, and those that don’t like either are going to pass on both.
Maybe it’s personal bias - I bought a ton of McFarlane figures I wasn’t so crazy about because they were my only option for DC figures. Unless Mattel just has no interest in certain stories or scales I just can’t see it happening. I’m sure many McFarlane fans will end up buying Mattel figures, just like many who had no interest in a 7” scale collection ended up buying McFarlane figures.
But the biggest bummer about McFarlane losing the DC license is that not only will we be losing some absolutely great figures, but we’ll also be losing Todd himself. The CEO of the company, who actually speaks directly to the fans through social media and personal appearances. In fact just today I saw a video on IG of Todd using his personal laptop to pick the winner of a custom life-size ’66 Batman cowl. He even showed his screen step by step just to prove everything was fair and on the up-and-up. But I’m sure we’ll still that kind of personalized fan interaction from the CEO of Mattel. Sure we will. Now quick, without using Google, name the current CEO of Mattel.
So, I for one will be very sad to see Todd and DC Multiverse go away, and be replaced by a giant faceless, soulless corporate entity. It’s truly the end of an era. A fun era that always reminded me of the early days of Marvel Comics when Stan Lee would speak directly to the readers and try to make it feel like a real community of like minded fans. But hey, at least DC figures might be 6-inches again, so there's that. Yay.
Except they operated like a soulless, faceless entity. Aside from their own constant thoughtless re-use, I also follow McFarlane Toys on IG and it was always the same cookie cutter message from Todd. The figure is “super cool” while he is unable to recognize the character unless he reads the name off of the back of the box. They knowingly produced low numbers of figures or chase variants and said out loud at comic con to get them before they triple in price on eBay. On a podcast yesterday at Toyfair, after hearing about a Spawn fan with hundreds of figures of the same character, Todd made a joke that sellers on eBay should double their price.
When he talks about the Spawn line, you can see his passion and it reminds me of any collector. But it’s clear he’s out of the loop on most DC toy matters. A quick search of company employee reviews shows that Todd has nothing to do with the sculpting of most figures. The decisions we know he influenced were often not well received (side eye, wind blown hair and capes, taking liberties with source material) while Todd kept an old school mentality about female characters and selling figures in the boys toy aisle. Their line was friendly to retailers and scalpers way more than their own customers. Todd is there for the public appearances every once in a while but the actions of their company are not friendly to the little guy.
Early on, they sculpted a lot of new figures, took chances, kept the price low, etc. But for the most part they had the same issues as every other mass market line, except they were way less accessible.
So for me, I like Todd's figures. Yes, his proportions were off sometimes and his figures were hit or miss but overall he did good. The figures being 7 inches did not bother me. I also like Mattel as well, they make good figures. Im not taking any sides but lets see if Mattel can do better this time around, Well see.
To me, the podcast interview seemed like Todd was trying to string people along with false hope.
"We'll see" will sell a lot more toys than "It's over, we're done in nine months."
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