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Post by /\/\att on Aug 3, 2009 14:33:07 GMT -5
You know we've had some talk on this, but here is a great post on TNI: toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=10&itemid=14806I personally didn't care about getting gleek or the wonder twins. They're not in Superfriends animated style, they're in comic style, so not interested. However, I know a LOT of you guys are and so the story rages one. And theFwoosh.com (which is a great site) got a bunch of Gleeks. Not their fault, but also maybe not cool of Mattel to single out one website to offer these on instead of splitting them more areas of the net. Thoughts? Discuss!
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Post by jlavaia on Aug 3, 2009 15:21:42 GMT -5
the best part of the article is toynewsi taking that nice shot at fwoosh. as for the what's going on with the figs, it is Mattel we are talking about. they have too many problems to count and this just adds to it. i cant even imagine the problems they will be having next year when they are also going to be producing WWE figures. its one thing if they made the announcement about the Gleeks, its another to say nothing and try to pass the set off as having all figs including due to the slipcase.
they should have sold them on their site though for a special price for owners of the set. just have people put in the sku for their set and do one per customer. that would've been smarter imo. i have no desire for the Gleek fig anyway, so to me the whole situation is just comical.
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Post by /\/\att on Aug 3, 2009 15:55:11 GMT -5
I'm am in the luxurious position of finding it comical too Joe. Now, if this were a directly batman related thing that I actually wanted, I'd be ticked off, lol. So I understand you gleek freaks! (I had to).
AFI got so much crap for the JLU Hal Jordan deal. I got one too, no one bashed me. lol.
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Post by kilowog52 on Aug 3, 2009 18:36:54 GMT -5
When I click on the link all that comes up is a blank page.
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Post by /\/\att on Aug 3, 2009 20:26:08 GMT -5
Mattel is starting to become very frustrating to a lot of us site owners. They seem to play favorites and many sites are left in the dark. Here is the text from TNI if you can't get the page to load.
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Mattel has done it again – they managed to send the entire collecting community into a fiery outrage, and sometimes you can’t help but wonder if they don’t have some perverse reason do this stuff deliberately.
So what did they do this time? It all started a few months ago when they initially announced their exclusive offerings for this year’s San Diego Comic Con. One of those exclusives was to be a very nice-looking 6” DC Universe Classics Wonder Twins box set featuring the characters of Jan and Jane from the 80’s DC Super Powers animated series. Now anyone familiar with the Wonder Twins knows that their pet monkey Gleek was an integral part of the group. In Mattel’s infinite wisdom, they decided to offer a Gleek figure only to those who actually attended the convention (opposed to those visiting the Mattel website to buy the figures online after the show).
The initial announcement generated a frenzied rage in many collectors, claiming they would not buy this set without the Monkey. Petitions were sent out, anti-Mattel Facebook pages were created, and many arguments on the DC action figure message boards all across the Internet were started about how Mattel was screwing over the fans. Still, none of this caused Mattel to waver in their decision and Comic Con began. Only those who attended the show and were willing to stand in the long lines at the Mattel booth would be able to get their hands on the little Monkey, at least at non-eBay prices.
The initial announcement generated a frenzied rage in many collectors, claiming they would not buy this set without the Monkey. Petitions were sent out, anti-Mattel Facebook pages were created, and many arguments on the DC action figure message boards all across the Internet were started about how Mattel was screwing over the fans. Still, none of this caused Mattel to waver in their decision and Comic Con began. Only those who attended the show and were willing to stand in the long lines at the Mattel booth would be able to get their hands on the little Monkey, at least at non-eBay prices.
Now the Gleeks were packaged separately from the Wonder Twin figures because they were an add-on, which Mattel did announce before the show started. However, Mattel never indicated that collectors purchasing the Wonders Twin set at Comic Con AREN’T guaranteed a Gleek (as far as I know), so you can see how someone might not think to remove that outer white case right there on the convention hall floor to check and see if they got their Gleek. And the people selling the figures at the Mattel booth from what I have been told by people who bought these, did not bother to inform them that they had no more Gleeks and that they would not be getting the Monkey despite the previous announcement from Mattel.
Now if that wasn’t bad enough – it gets better. According to Mattel’s Facebook page, a lost box of Gleek figures was found in the Mattel booth storage room on the last day of the convention. If you have ever been to a convention the size of Comic Con and seen how hectic things can be, this might not be so hard to believe. So it’s not really where these new-found Gleeks came from that is the issue, it’s what Mattel decided to do with them that has once again outraged many collectors. You see in their explanation on their Facebook page they state the following"
"We knew from day one that we would have more Wonder Twins than Gleeks at the show and would sell out of Gleeks before the Wonder Twins sold out. And we did advertise this multiple times online and on message boards."
Now whether Mattel went on to some obscure message board and said something, I cannot say but in the initial news Mattel sent out to the media and posted on their own Facebook page and websitr, there was no such mention of this shortage of Gleeks. Click here to see the original announcement about this set.
So instead of trying to get these lost Gleeks into the hands of those who came to the Con and bought the Wonder Twins figures thinking they were also getting a Gleek figure or even taking the figures back with them to sell on Mattycollector.com at a later time, they decided to give the figures to a small fansite called Fwoosh to give away to their registered members. Now I will be the first one to tell you that I do not cast any aspersions on Fwoosh for taking Mattel up on this offer (though if they did it in exchange for running free ads on their site for Mattel then I think Fwoosh is the one getting ripped off, but that’s a story for a different time) because they are looking out for their readers which is what any good website is going to do. This is not like when Mattel sent another fansite a very limited edition JLU Hal Jordan figure as a Christmas present a few years ago, and the webmaster of that site took lots of pretty pictures of it to show off to their readers but then kept the figure for themselves. I mean Fwoosh did give these away to the collectors, but the rub here in many people’s eyes is that Mattel had an obligation to get these Gleeks into the hands of those who traveled to Comic Con under the impression that if they stood in those long lines and paid their hard-earned money for these sets, that they would get the Monkey they were promised. Even if this lost box of Gleeks had not been found, I think Mattel should have informed anyone buying the Wonder Twins sets at the convention that the sets did not contain the Gleeks and a.) offered some type of discount or b.) gathered the purchaser’s information and then made more Gleeks to be sent to those people at a later date. Of course, maybe I’m expecting too much from the largest toy company in the world. After all, this is the same company that after months of being online still seems unable or unwilling to spend the money to allocate enough bandwidth to their website Mattycollector.com so that people visiting the website on days something goes on sale aren’t constantly getting timed-out messages on their browsers.
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