Mother in Target said $30 was too much for kid to have Mustafar Playset

**Tycho** · 06-21-2005

I just came from Target. This may be interesting.

There are 4 Mustafar Playsets on the shelf for $29.99.

Where are all the adult collectors who should be buying these?

There were 2 kids, approximately age 7 and another younger (but at least 4) and they were explaining to their mother:

"This is how Anakin falls into the lava."

"They have break away platforms to fight on just like in the movie."

"See mom? It's a volcano and it launches fireballs."

Mom's response was to say she thought it was $89 - the price of the Lego TurboTank which was sold out and that was too much.

The kid responded that it was the other tag and he read it to make sure "$29.99."

Mom said "Where do you think $30 is going to come from?"

A sign of the times I suppose.....

I really want a large Star Destroyer and Jabba the Hutt's sailbarge and I'd be willing to pay several hundred dollars for either, and then again for the other one.

Many of us here will.

Target and Wal-Mart and Toys R Us contend with this mother however, who will not spend $30 for Mustafar and the kids are way more impressed with it than the folks I've heard talking around here.

(By the way, $30 is also the price of the sold-out ARC 170, but the mother would respond "It's still $30" I'm sure.)

So the stores won't gamble on larger playsets, no doubt, except if you really really hope we get lucky and Hasbro can produce something really nice for say between $50 and $100 and it's good enough for all of us to buy them out.

(The original sale price of the 1998 AT-AT Walker was $79.99 and it sold out. Later TRU clearanced some they would get in fresh off the truck for $10 each. Why they had them for that low I don't know. I can only guess that other stores backed off of ordering something to take up shelf space for $79.99.)

Anyway, your thoughts?

**VaderhitsJarjar** · 06-21-2005

I hear the same thing from parents - It is usually - "Pick One...No I said One....which one do you want? ...didnt you want a darth vader? Why don't you wait and find the vader...? No....I said Pick one..."

Now what Hasbro needs to understand is medium size playsets with a pricepoint no higher than $19.99 would sell fast.

Would be easy on the parents and collectors pockets.

Droid Factory - 19.99

Make it look like Jabba's droid room or the inside of the sandcrawler.

Or do both!!

For the sandcrawler throw in one of the droids seen on the film or a Jawa -

Then for the droids don't make them oversized or cheap looking but make a mix and match kit of maybe 4 differend colored r2 heads with different bodies and maybe r5 units - this would be awesome

For the jaba's droid room throw in a guard and the same.

Hoth Echo Base - $19.99 or make four sets at 9.99 each

Cantina bar - all we need is the tap or center part $19.99

add some of the booths with 2 figures later $9.99

Death Star Bridge Playset

Jabba's throne room

They will sell!!

If the price is higher than $19.99 sure they would sell but more would sit.

Soon Target and Walmart would have them for 14.99 and not order anymore.

In my area the Arc 170 sits and sits but the gunship has been gone for a month. I think 29.99 was a good price for the larger ships - I bought the gunship for 28.44 at walmart. Much better than the clone war toys - I remember the hellfire droid and tank going for 29.99 - that is why I still don;t have them...

I see the Sail barge going for about what the 12" speeder bike sets sold for

**Ji'dai** · 06-21-2005

I agree with the mom, $30 is too much for the Mustafar playset. I've passed on that one and all vehicles.

Lucas should wait to release his movies around Thanksgiving. Late Spring and Summer are really slow sales periods for the toy industry. I'm sure Hasbro is making a lot of money but not as much had the movie/toy release been in late November or early December. People tend to open their wallets more freely around the holidays; the kids will enjoy a perfect christmas, credit-rating be damned! Large, expensive LEGO sets tend to sell better around the holiday season, so I'm sure large, expensive action figure playsets would move at that time of year too.

**LTBasker** · 06-21-2005

Well really it's more like $20-25 for the playset, and then the extra $5 to $10 for the included figures. Much better than the ARC fighter actually, where you have to spend $20+ in order to get the three pilots and droid.

**Kidhuman** · 06-22-2005

Seriuosly, I have seen a few parents tell there kids to pick one figure as well. PArents arent prepared to spend 30 bucks on a toy. Maybe, like I etll my kids, you cant get anything higher than X amount of dollars before they go into the store. If they go higher I tell them no, Perhaps this is the same situation

**2-1B** · 06-22-2005

I won't pay $30 for it either . . . drop it to $20 and I very well might.

**JediTricks** · 06-22-2005

Where are all the adult collectors who should be buying these?

Saving their money instead of buying kiddified, undersized junk like this. This thing looks unusable for display purposes and doesn't have much in the way of interior play space. The outside parts are all inaccurate to the movie, right down to Ani's trip to lava central, and the figures look like pack-in quality junk, well beneath the quality of the pack-ins on the Battle Arenas.

The biggest problem facing Star Wars playsets isn't the price or the shelfspace issues or even the moms, it's the perceived quality of the playset for play-n-display purposes, Hasbro's playsets have not lived up to the quality of days gone by, and it's all their lines, not just SW. Playsets from the outset have to be more fun than a vehicle even to entice a perspective consumer, there are far less playsets and the playset is far more limited than a vehicle which can go anywhere in a kid's imagination. Hasbro's playsets unfortunately don't look much like their movie scenes so display-based collecting shows less interest, and don't look much like a lot of fun beyond "reenact what you saw on the screen" action. BTW, I don't mean "here's a missile to fire" action, that's what Hasbro's answer to everything is these days: jam a projectile-launcher into something and call this pointless inclusion a feature.

Another problem is that Hasbro is incredibly foolish with playsets (and vehicles too, in this department), they think they have to be chintzy and give only what they can be sure they'll make back in each playset, so each $30 playset is only designed to sell that amount of product. However, a playset's TRUE value lies in its ability to convince consumers to buy MORE figures! Hasbro used to recognize this truth with their GI Joe: A Real American Hero line (and even its converse, that back in the day figures sold vehicles and playsets) but somewhere in the early '90s they lost their way. Now, playsets don't even come with WALLS most of the time, much less opening doors and fun & imaginative features that encourage consumers to buy more figures to play with, and don't get me started on the miserable quality of the pack-ins they include which both negates the co-sell properties AND lessens the perceived quality of the set since the figures generally suck. If Hasbro wants to put out a $30 playset, they better make it a $50 value at least, and in return they'll get hundreds of dollars in figure sales per unit, sounds like a win to me rather than watching unpopular playsets continue to languish on shelves time after time.

The original sale price of the 1998 AT-AT Walker was $79.99 and it sold out. Later TRU clearanced some they would get in fresh off the truck for $10 each. Why they had them for that low I don't know.

SOLD out? It did ok but never anything remotely that good, stores couldn't get rid of these things since they didn't have much room for them and the pricetag was so high, Hasbro's merchandise on these backed up and eventually they couldn't get rid of them at all, so they warehoused 'em until they closed all their warehouses and decided to get rid of old stock at super-slashed prices since warehoused product costs the company money AND extra taxes, so they sold the remainder cheap to TRU and KB and Big Lots (at the time KB was owned by Big Lots IIRC).

Originally Posted by Basker

Well really it's more like $20-25 for the playset, and then the extra $5 to $10 for the included figures. Much better than the ARC fighter actually, where you have to spend $20+ in order to get the three pilots and droid.

Funny you should mention that since nearly everybody here who owns the ARC-170 has bought at least that many figures to man it, yet most of us wouldn't look twice as the Mustyfart Playset - what should that tell Hasbro? That the packin quality is poor and should be raised? Perhaps, but that's not the REAL answer IMO, the real answer is that the quality and interactivity of the playset should be raised, as I mentioned above in this post.

**ronhudy** · 06-22-2005

There hasn't been a decent playset since the likes of the Ewok Village and Castle Grayskull!

Although I have to say I find the mother's comments a little bit disheartening - parents have no problem spending $200 for a PS2 and $40-$50 a pop for a game. Maybe Mommy should think about how much a few 6-packs of beer or a couple of cartons of cigarettes cost...

**stillakid** · 06-22-2005

Mustafar is pretty lame as playsets go. But then again, there really was never much about that "location" anyway. How could anyone really design a piece of plastic to "accurately" recreate a volcanic planet? It just isn't going to happen...

But ships are a whole different ball o' wax so comparing them is like comparing apples and footballs. The exterior of a ship can be easily sculpted to actually look like what it does in the film while the overall design can integrate some "playability" within. The TPM Queen's ship and the Millenium Falcon are excellent examples of this.

While some playsets over the years have been worthwhile, such as the Ewok Village and maybe even Dagobah, most have suffered from having to somehow integrate an entire location into something that fits into a box. Then to make it small enough to keep the price down to something reasonable is something else. This isn't to say that Mustafar isn't overpriced for what it is...it isn't worth $30 bucks even with pack in figures...but the point is that no matter what they did with it, it wouldn't have ever been a high quality piece.

**JEDIpartner** · 06-22-2005

I think otherwise. I think it's a great playset and worth the price. If you stop to think that the original Death Star playset sold for $25-$30 in 1979-- that would cost practically double by today's inflated prices. So-- this actually would be akin to the similarly "undersized" Dagobah playset from 1981.

Ta.