Last year at Comic-Con, Marvel Legends wowed longtime collectors with a new action figure of Crystar, a deep-dive ’80s toy character whom it turned out Marvel had the rights to. This year, they revived an even more notable vintage figure with ROM, one of the first electronic toys of the ’70s. Marvel made a tie-in comic book that outlasted the toy, but questioned remained as to how many rights they actually had. Until now, anyway. Rom is coming to Marvel Legends.
As for more Crystar-related characters, Hasbro‘s Ryan Ting says, “Potentially.”
Wings of Desire
The biggest reveal, however, literally and figuratively, was the giant Dragon Man, who’ll be offered as part of a preorder to determine quantity. As a result, it’ll be a much longer-lead preorder than usual, but not a crowd-funded HasLab.
“The number one thing about a crowdfund is that there is a stated minimum threshold upfront,” says Ting. “It is a binary deal where either it funds or it doesn’t. Open preorders, it’s happening, regardless, it’s just a matter of, we wanna make sure we’re building the right quantity that allows us to play with the timeline of things. You could potentially put it up for preorder and then later put it up for preorder again down the line, maybe. Not saying we would do that for Dragon Man. In order to make that a HasLab we would have had to add all these other things, and everyone wants different characters, like what if the three or four characters we would have added to a box set were not the characters you would have wanted?”
Ting and colleague Dwight Stall sometimes have disagreements about what they want that mirror fan arguments. In choosing an army-builder two-pack for the Infinity Saga movie-based line. Ting wanted Chitauri, but Stall’s choice of the Outriders from Infinity War won out, this time.
Hoofing It
They have more of an ongoing issue with horses in the line. In response to a question about the Venom horse in the latest movie trailer, Stall responds, “You guys need to petition Ryan. Find him on Insta and let him know how many horses we need in the Marvel Legeneds line. Because I need one for Valkyrie, I need one for Phantom Rider, I need one for Slade, I need one for Black Knight, I need a lot of horses for our line!”
Ting responds, “I’ve one word for you, Dwight – neigh!”
Enter the Void
There’s more unity over Deadpool & Wolverine, which will see its first action figures coming in October; “This is what happens when the movie dates shift around,” says Ting. Marvel Studios tend to let the Hasbro team know in advance what they might need to make figures of, but this time, spoilers were a bit tighter.
Says Stall, “Marvel Studios gave us assets for approximately six characters that were approved for pre-release development. We looked at all the wonderful assets they provided us and we tried to take some educated guesses on what we thought would be the best hits from what we knew. It’s hard sometimes when you get assets out of context. We had things that we weren’t sure how they were going to translate, so we went ‘Let’s hold off, let’s see how they do.’ It’s much worse to do stuff that we don’t know anything about that misses a shot, so we’re like, let’s lean into the stuff that we know everybody’s going to love – Logan, Wolverine, Headpool, and Deadpool of course, get those out to you guys as quickly as possible to have them aligned with the movie and then go in fresh and see of the reference we had, who resonated the best so we can jump on them.”
He adds, “I definitely wanna get a Cassandra Nova out after seeing the film, and there was a ton of other really cool reveals…Anyway, yes, we will be starting from today, technically 1 a.m. Yesterday, we already are starting to make some lists based on what we saw this morning.” In other words, don’t expect any spoiler characters in toy form until at least a year from now.
First Steps and More
But when it comes to variants, we wanted to know how a new Fantastic Four movie might affect the chances of a John Krasinski Reed Richards figure, as seen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Stall says yes, but only for the moment. “It doesn’t have any bearing on whether we could attack that down the line. But we’re focusing on the new cast, the new entertainment for now. There’s no reason why in the future, like when we do Infinity Saga programs and anniversaries, that we couldn’t potentially revisit that.”
What about a Ryan Reynolds likeness for Deadpool, or, dare we ask, Nicepool? Stay tuned on that one.
“It’s a pretty safe bet that if we’re able to activate on unmasked portraits we will, and so until that time comes…” says Stall…
“…we’re always negotiating and trying to figure out ways to bring the best product to our consumers,” adds Ting.
Adds Stall, “It’s no secret, there’s lots of other companies too, and you can kinda tell everyone’s in the same boat, right? So you just gotta look around at the landscape and see what is available and what is not, but again, we can ask, if there’s a business and consumer demand.”
In other words, Mr. Reynolds, sign that deal! Unless you want Green Lantern figures to be the only ones with your face.
A few more Marvel Legends photos are below.
