Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Rant About SDCC


Ah, San Diego Comic Con.

I'm sure there was a time when it was actually focused on comics, but in recent years it seems that the focus has shifted to selling overpriced exclusive merchandise and booths featuring attractive female models paid to stand around all day wearing comic costumes and looking like they would rather be elsewhere instead of being ogled at by nerds or whoever attends this thing anymore. Corporate bigwigs? I don't even know.

But mainly they focus on the overpriced exclusive merchandise.



Take for example the one piece of merchandise I wanted this year: a box set containing the "Lost Wave" of Indiana Jones action figures. Now this set dates back to 2008. Hasbro developed a toy line for the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull film that hit theaters (has it been three years already?). I disliked the movie when it came out but haven't watched it in a few years. I'm probably overdue for a viewing and I'll probably like it this time. Where was I? Oh yeah, the toy line.

Hasbro initially developed four waves of figures. The first two waves were shipped to stores in May 2008. Wave 1 featured figures from Raiders of the Lost Ark while the second wave contained figures from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now this was all fine and dandy, but stores over-ordered on these first two waves. Casual fans and collectors picked everything up initially, but soon stores were left with "pegwarmers," that is figures that are never purchased and "keep the pegs warm." The primary pegwarmer of the line was the Mutt Williams action figure, the character played by Shia LaBeouf. Mutt Williams had two versions of his action figure produced, and they sat on the pegs along with the action feature ridden versions of Indiana Jones and the Rene Belloq figures. Terrible paint applications on the action figures didn't help sales.


A third wave based on The Last Crusade was released in July 2008. This wave blew the original two out of the water, but was pretty hard to find for most people due to the backup of the first two waves. I got lucky and found an unopened case of the wave at a Wal-Mart one afternoon, including the super rare Henry Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery) figure. A fourth wave based on Temple of Doom was also made but never did ship to stores. They were only available online, and I had to order a case of them from EntertainmentEarth.com. Of course the case contained one each of the new figures and more Mutt Williams repacks. Case assortments played another big role in killing the line.

A fifth wave had been announced by Hasbro but was ultimately never produced, until now when they announced the six "lost" figures would be put into a special box set and sold at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con. This set was highly anticipated by collectors and fans of the line, and everyone wanted to get their hands on it.

Flash forward to last week. Virtually no news had been released about the set's production numbers. Much information was given about Hasbro's other SDCC exclusives, such as the Star Wars Revenge of the Jedi Death Star box set, which they mentioned several times before the show would be produced in limited quantities. Now not everyone is able to attend San Diego Comic Con, and people not unlike myself were forced to wait for the show to end and the Hasbro exclusives to be placed on sale on their website Hasbro Toy Shop.


At some point during the weekend Hasbro announced that all exclusives would go on sale on Tuesday. Of course they never mentioned what time they would go on sale. Now the one good thing about being an unemployed recent college graduate is that I have a lot of spare time on my hands. I had originally planned on pulling an all nighter, checking HTS' web page and hitting the ole F5 button over and over again, an action that is usually reserved for 4chan.

Now being an unemployed recent college graduate, my seep schedule is all sorts of screwed up from four years of all nighters, cramming for exams, eating nothing but fast food and drinking nothing but alcohol and energy drinks. So I drifted to sleep sometime around 3 AM CST, and with my luck, my alarm clock failed to go off in the morning. Luckily I woke up shortly after the exclusives went on sale. I won't mention the time I woke up because I don't want people to think I'm a lazy bum. Collectors know the time, however, and won't think anything bad of me. :) The only thing I will say is that it was before noon, so huzzah.

So anyway, I grabbed my handy dandy Android phone and turned the wi-fi on and hit the website.

It won't load.

I thought of a swear word that rhymes with "another trucking skit" and reloaded the page. Still nothing. I tried loading the page using 3G and 4G. Both got me nothing. So I booted up the ole laptop and went to my trusty collecting headquarters JediDefender and Yakface. I was temporarily relieved to find that pretty much everyone was unable to access Hasbro's web site. Apparently the servers couldn't handle the insane amount of traffic and kept crashing. That's... pretty unheard of in the year 2011, but whatever. I was determined to get that set by this point and decided to keep refreshing.

(My times may be exaggerated here but this is definitely what it felt like) Eventually the page loaded after roughly 30 minutes and I was able to add it to my cart. Of course HTS cleared all of my cookies since I last ordered something from them and I had to log in. That took another 20 minutes to accomplish. Now it was finally time to wait for the checkout process. Got in after about 10 minutes, but had to enter all of my credit card info. Now of course each time I hit "continue" the website kept crashing, and I had to enter all of my info at least 10 times. After about 15 minutes I was finally able to get through and complete my order, confirmation email and all. I lucked out and was able to accomplish this fairly quickly, as other unfortunate souls were stuck waiting for hours. It only took me about 90 minutes total.


So to summarize: it took a ridiculous amount of time to order six action figures. The whole process was simply broken this year, as I have never had a problem tracking down the Hasbro SDCC exclusives I've wanted in previous years. It's insane that Hasbro didn't anticipate the large amount of web traffic and had their site crash, especially in the year 2011. You'd think a major company would have been prepared, especially if their exclusive items were limited. Limited brings out the scalpers, who buy stuff and then sell it on eBay for double or triple the original price.

So San Diego Comic Con. I'm still not sure what all the hype is about. It seems to me like its only purpose nowadays is to purchase exclusive, overpriced merchandise and look at models paid to dress up as comic book characters who probably want to be as far away from the convention as possible.

Hopefully next year goes better.

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