JCC Kenner was better than Hasbro (or...WTH happened to action figures?)

A few weeks ago, my grandmother discovered a box of my old Kenner Jurassic Park toys I left at her house way back when and promptly forgot about. I decided to pass them on to my kids (somewhat grudgingly lol) and put fresh batteries in the electronic screaming raptor, and it worked just as well as it did 22 years ago when I first received it.
Sure the paint's chipped in a few areas, and one leg is bent at an angle that won't let it stand up straight anymore (easily fixable with boiling water), but it works.

Meanwhile....I found a Celebration III talking Darth Vader on eBay. Still sealed in the packaging, never touched aside from the button to make him talk....and when it arrived, after playing two or three phrases, the voice box started dying. I figured it was just the batteries, (raptor completely dead after 22 years, it would only make sense for Vader to be slurring like a drunken sailor after 10)....so I replaced them (Hasbro had enough foresight to allow access to the battery compartment without actually opening the packaging). The voice sounded okay at first, but then the slurring continued after cycling through his sounds two or three times.

And then just yesterday while at Wal Mart, the kids wanted to go look at the toys...and I noticed the new Jurassic World toys are pretty damn awful...they apparently aren't even making human figures.
And there's a reason all of the promotional images of the Chomping Indominus Rex figure show his left side....the right side is full of holes where the hard plastic body was screwed together. The Chomping T-Rex is all hard plastic with a weird flapping jaw that looks like a ventriloquist dummy. Worse, the head isn't even a solid sculpt....there's a seam in his nose where you can tell the snout was molded separately and then glued/snapped into place during production.
Needless to say, it's a pretty sad day when the LEGO toys are actually of better quality than the main line.

So what happened? I know that Hasbro bought out Kenner and shut them down after the Phantom Menace debacle (in short: Kenner oversaturated the market with Star Wars toys in anticipation of kids and collectors going nuts over the Star Wars prequels....which didn't happen), but was it so really hard to continue Kenner's reputation for creating quality?

 

I probably still have a bunch of my old Kenner toys somewhere in my parents' attic. Man, my brother and I used to have a blast playing with all those different Batman figures (primarily the Batman Returns line) and Ghost Busters (the color changing ones where a dose of water makes it look like they were sprayed with ghost slime).

But we got the most mileage on our TMNT figures by Playmates...though I recall those breaking fairly easily, whereas the Kenner Batman and Ghost Busters figures are probably still intact to this day.

 

Why waste money on action figure quality when the kids don't care and you can probably make more money on the tie-in mobile app?

 

The nineties were filled with companies printing money by overproducing. Only to destroy the same markets they hoped to capitalize on.

 

Reminds me of a tweet I made earlier this month:

 

Kenner



Hasbro

 

SithSense- Hasbro absorbed Kenner into the Hasbro apparatus completely before Phantom Menace came out (TPM toys were the first SW action figures to just have the Hasbro logo on them, instead of the Kenner logo). I think Hasbro ended up buying and absorbing Galoob pretty much the way you described (Notice there were tons of SW Micro Machines stuff from Galoob out for TPM, then nothing really for AOTC, and then Hasbro launched their Titanium die-cast line for ROTS, using Galoob's die-cast vehicle molds).

 

Hoe exactly did they make so much money if they produced more product than they could sell?

 

The companies overproduced thinking that collectors would come out in droves and fill in the gap where the kids sales lagged. Instead it backfired by killing the market for future product. Aka star wars toys, AKA SUPERMAN DIES COMIC BOOKS, baseball and basketball cards And even nascar racing collectibles.

 

So what did you mean when you said they were printing money by overproducing?

 

They made money the first time and everyone fell for it. The next time, not so much.

 

Thanks for translating.

 

I'm nostalgic now.

 

Star Wars is Hasbro's bread and butter, just as it is with My Little Pony and Transformers. The biggest problems with Hasbro's Star Wars toys are minor joint issues and miniscule paint mishaps. If you want to see a true victim of Hasbro's transition from Kenner, look no further than Jurassic Park's toys. I've take a picture with a few notables all stacked against a classic 5 inch Kenner figure.

1993: Kenner released the first Jurassic Park T. rex, which affectionately came to be known as the "Red Rex" due to the coloration following that of the novel's T. rex and being a deep red in coloration. Was it wholly accurate to the animal on screen? No, but it was electronic and had decent articulation. The internal electronics have become fragile with age, but what 22 year old toy doesn't this happen to? The "real-feel" skin continues to remain strong on them all to this day, a rarity for rubber skinned toys.

1997: With the success of Kenner's 1993 and 1994 Jurassic toy lines, the toy company decides to exceed all expectations with their The Lost World: Jurassic Park line. The line is still arguably Jurassic's best selling and most notable toy line, and took NYC Toy Fair by storm that year, hoarding awards like they were going out of business. In 1997, Kenner released the largest dinosaur action figure ever: the Bull T. rex (pictured). A sculpt that had been planned for release in Jurassic Park's 1994 "Series 2" line up, it was scrapped until TLW due to the Red Rex being already being a large T. rex toy. However, along side it, was the Thrasher. Smaller, and much more articulated, the "Thrasher" had 4 points of articulation, a spring loaded jaw, and a "thrashing" feature that provided its namesake. The Bull, while lacking articulation, carried 4 movie accurate sounds, and the ability to "eat" smaller figures. Suffice to say, The Lost World was a roaring success.

1998: Kenner releases "Chaos Effect", and loses big time. Comprised of hybrid dinosaurs and popular TLW figure repaints, Chaos Effect bombed mostly due to the lines exaggerated paint schemes and Universal canning the animated series that was meant to accompany the line.

2001: By the point Hasbro has taken over Jurassic Park and the rest of Kenner's licenses. Firing many of Kenner's old team, Hasbro put in their place, Star Wars sculptors to work on Jurassic Park 3's movie toy line. They did not possess the skill for Jurassic Park that they had with Star Wars. The result was a widely out of scale toy line, and many many failures in both the eyes of children and collectors alike. From this point on, Hasbro releases nothing more than repaints and the occasional retool until 2013, when they release 2 new Jurassic Park sculpts to coincide with the rerelease of Jurassic Park in 3D.

2015: After 14 years of development hell, the fourth Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World and it is an unbelievable success! However, to accompany the film, the premiere T. rex figure looks like this:

And it is the size of the the 2001 large T. rex (pictured), and is made from the same hard plastic. Where Kenner used soft rubbery skin for their large dinosaurs, Hasbro had turned to using hard plastic. Their second Jurassic World T. rex, which is to be released this Fall, looks like this. Although the quality started by Kenner will never be seen again, this is very likely the best T. rex Hasbro has ever put the effort into making. Even so, it does not articulate on it's own, and is only partially comprised of rubber skin, while the premiere line's "Bad Boy Indominus Rex" figure is almost all rubber or soft plastic. Despite this, the rest of the lines is horrifically out of scale with each other, there are no human figures, and only 3 vehicles - all terrible. If it is any big name movie license Hasbro has taken over from Kenner that has suffered the most, it is Jurassic Park. By comparison, Star Wars is godly to Hasbro.

 

Hasbro is complete **** lately. There black series may have great detail, but the sculpting and paint is horrible. Anybody see the Slave Leia face?

I also bought Obi-Wans Jedi starfighter and was pretty disappointed. The paint is mediocre. And the attack fins have to be manually opened. Not spring loaded.

And as mentioned above, the Jurassic World stuff is horrible. The soft rubber originals were fantastic. Its a shame to see that gone.

I really hope they step it up with TFA.

 

Of course Obi-Wan's starfighter was mediocre; that's prequel blandness for you.

I assume based on the logo on the figure in Dino's post it's jp-30. A kiwi with the initials JP? Can't be anybody else.

 

Totally agree about the market saturation It has lead a lot of companies to scale down the production quality of their stuff in lieu of a good ROI on a smaller investment. However, Hasbro isn't the first company to try and pander to collectors only to have it go horribly wrong. Playmates Toys had the license for the Star Trek action figures and they came out with a pretty decent product which only got better in quality and sculpting as time went on. The down side to all of this was that every figure had a serial number on the underside of their foot, so you would *know* that you were getting a limited edition item. Most people didn't care about the numbers, a few people did and they would pay gobs of money for a mint in box Geordi La Forge first season TNG uniform with a two digit serial number. Playmates knew about this and instead of just putting out a decent product, they began to play games with the collectors by creating extremely limited lines of certain figures (one or two were limited to 3000 figures, another was limited to 1,701 figures) within a specific wave of figures and then only let people know about it if they happened to find one of the figures which had a "extremely super duper ultra limited edition!" label slapped on it.

Collectors who actually wanted these figures for the figures, and not the low numbers, were furious when they got word of this from other collectors. Letters poured into Playmates Toys and they had a PR nightmare on their hands. As a way of saying "Sorry, our bad.", they went ahead and created a boxed set of the three limited edition figures in a larger run so people could get those. While the collectors who didn't care about the numbers were happy, the ones who did care about the numbers were now pissed as it made their "investment" totally worthless. Playmates' Star Trek line lost a lot of credibility over this and never truly recovered. You can milk a cash cow, but you can only milk it so much before you get kicked square in the face from it.

 

Bump on this thread. Good discussion here.

 

Pity you didn't contribute something to it.

 

I like toys.

 

so does yer mom

 

I sold all my Star Wars toys on eBay that have been in storage since 1997 to pay for my wife's engagement ring. Thanks for reminding me!

 

Oh no you didn’t!

 

And then she sold her finger to buy a display case for your action figures?