Essential Indy Toys Hasbro Failed to Deliver

I really lament the passing of the Hasbro Indy 3"3/4 figure line - my wish list of things they omitted would include:

A Lao Che figure

German Mechanic

Toht/Melting Toht variant

Donovan/ Aging Donovan variant.

Any thoughts on how/why the line ended so abruptly and what you'd like to see?

The line ended because of poor sales. Indy toys, for whatever reason, have never sold that well for a franchise of its size.

I also think Lucasfilm really never pushed the merchandise.

I would have liked to have seen the guy with the Tommy gun who blasts away at the gong in TOT.

3 3/ 4" scale Flying Wing

3 3/4" scale Tank

Over ordering and poor cases distribution was the biggest problem with the last Indy line. Indy toys hit the shelves in early May several weeks before KOTCS theatrical debut. Wave 1 was Raiders of the Lost Ark and Wave 2 was Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The initial waves sold very well. I remember the week the film came out the pegs were quite bare. However the majority of stores over ordered the first two waves and simply restocked the shelves with wave 1 and 2. The initial demand already met within the first three weeks Wave 1 and 2 were now chocking the shelves. There was no peg space for Wave 3, The Last Crusade or Wave 4, The Temple of Doom.

Hasbro compounded the problem even more by only releasing wave 3 and 4 boxed with more figures from Wave 1 and 2. Figures from The Last Crusade were very hard to find, I seem to recall that there was only one Henry Jones figure per case, and The Temple of Doom wave were next to impossible to find. I never did see them.

Hasbro tried to sell the Indy line like Star Wars. There's always going to be Darth Vaders and Stormtroopers in a case of Star Wars figures because they always sell, unfortunately nobody is going to want a dozen Cario Swordsmen. If Hasbro had aimed the Indy line at a smaller core audience it would have been more successful. However, a successful Indy line would have only gone two to three waves per film. There's just not that many characters to make, unlike Star Wars. Having said that Hasbro did a pretty good job of getting a lot of Indy toys out there, more then I could have hopped for. I estimate they got about 60 to 70 percent of the stuff the hard core fans would want.

You can't completely blame Indy toys for not selling well on the property being less toyetic then Star Wars, which it is. LEGO's Indy line sold very well and managed to last for two years unlike Hasbro which killed their line in two months.

News of the San Diego Comic Con exclusive six pack (Melting Toht, Bald Mechanic Boxer, Sapito etc) is real tantalising:

http://toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=262&itemid=17319