Mattel DC Figures

Even back in the heyday of DCUC I was only a casual collector of the line... and yeah that basic buck was tired even then and the line suffered from quality issues... as mentioned especially in the thighs and legs... I've got several that are superglued back together.

I only picked up a few McFarlane figs, and they are better, but way out of scale with DCUC... to the point I didnt want start "replacing" them cause it would all look odd. So I guess what I'm saying is job 1 is to make the scale in the 6" to DCUC so that I want to buy and replace my display.

Gothneo said:

Even back in the heyday of DCUC I was only a casual collector of the line... and yeah that basic buck was tired even then and the line suffered from quality issues... as mentioned especially in the thighs and legs... I've got several that are superglued back together.

I only picked up a few McFarlane figs, and they are better, but way out of scale with DCUC... to the point I didnt want start "replacing" them cause it would all look odd. So I guess what I'm saying is job 1 is to make the scale in the 6" to DCUC so that I want to buy and replace my display.

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I'd argue that the McF stuff isn't even "better"...they just have their own set of issues. While DCUC had a few scale blunders, McF in particular is all over the place. Batman doesn't even scale with Batman in that line, for instance, and they have so many weird articulation choices that they don't pose well much of the time.

I certainly hope that Mattel learns from their past mistakes, as well as from Todd's offerings, but we shall see.

TheGillMan said:

I'd argue that the McF stuff isn't even "better"...they just have their own set of issues. While DCUC had a few scale blunders, McF in particular is all over the place. Batman doesn't even scale with Batman in that line, for instance, and they have so many weird articulation choices that they don't pose well much of the time.

I certainly hope that Mattel learns from their past mistakes, as well as from Todd's offerings, but we shall see.

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I don’t know if they are even capable of change. I look at their JW stuff and it seems to be all over the place. They haven’t mastered the correct scaling when it comes to the sizes of their dinosaurs, their human figures look bland, some collectors have reported that their figures have missing paint deco or they buy more than two of one dinosaur and no two are the same.

Also Mattel has this terrible habit of reintroducing the same figure from last year’s assortment into this year’s assortment, just so they can keep the figure on the shelves at full price vs having it languish in the clearance isle for 40% off. It’s so sleazy. They did that with their HC T-Rex back in 2023 after the hype died down and the price went from $50 down to like $28 in late 2022. So Mattel looked at the glut of figures that weren’t selling on clearance and was like “ Fuck it. Let’s send another 100,000 units to target at full price. That oughta thin the herd.” Nope. Didn’t work. All of that shit eventually made its way to Ollie’s and Ross for like $5 to make room for the inevitable onslaught of Rebirth and other large HC Dinos


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The thing is, it shouldn't be hard. The bar isn't that high. If they're trying to make DC Legends, it's not an impossible standard. Marvel Legends is like six base bodies that vary in quality, the occasional unique sculpt, and decent character selection.

This is year one. They don't need to match year 22 of Marvel Legends. Can we get, like, ML4?

Red Tornado
Superman
Zatanna
Captain Cold

Stoopid_Sandwich said:

I don’t know if they are even capable of change. I look at their JW stuff and it seems to be all over the place. They haven’t mastered the correct scaling when it comes to the sizes of their dinosaurs, their human figures look bland, some collectors have reported that their figures have missing paint deco or they buy more than two of one dinosaur and no two are the same.

Also Mattel has this terrible habit of reintroducing the same figure from last year’s assortment into this year’s assortment, just so they can keep the figure on the shelves at full price vs having it languish in the clearance isle for 40% off. It’s so sleazy. They did that with their HC T-Rex back in 2023 after the hype died down and the price went from $50 down to like $28 in late 2022. So Mattel looked at the glut of figures that weren’t selling on clearance and was like “ Fuck it. Let’s send another 100,000 units to target at full price. That oughta thin the herd.” Nope. Didn’t work. All of that shit eventually made its way to Ollie’s and Ross for like $5 to make room for the inevitable onslaught of Rebirth and other large HC Dinos


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I can't really speak to the Hammond line as I don't collect it, but it seems like the different groups within Mattel approach things quite differently. Masterverse is certainly very different in it's execution, and I'm really hoping the approach they take is more along those lines.

Rant incoming!: Part 1.

I, like most of us, had action figures as a kid. No rhyme or reason. No specific scale, no dedicated characters or properties. Just whatever I got for Christmas, birthdays, traded with friends, etc. I stopped somewhere around the age of 13/14. And took it up again 20 years later. Not certain why.

This time I came back focused. 6” scale, comic styled figures starting with Spawn, but encompassing much more. WildCATs and Savage Dragon from Playmate. Witchblade from Moore Action Collectables. The Tenth from Resaurus and so much more in this mid-late 90’s time frame. But this was short lived. These smaller boutique companies started going out of business. Quickly. Product began to dry up. Spawn remained, but as small plastic statues. DCD was rising and I abandoned Todd toot sweet. The premature cancellation of LCBH nailed that coffin shut. As a lifelong comic fan, DC was my spiritual home.

End part 1 of rant.

Part 2:

In 2000 I jumped into DCD with both feet. I loved the character selection and risk taking. But mostly I loved the characters. Something I couldn’t say about Spawn. Ever since CoIE, I’ve been a DC guy. I loved that this was happening. In comparison, Hasbro, who had the DC license at the time, was pretty lame. DCD was running circles around them. They lost the license to Mattel who took over in 2003. And by comparison, made Hasbro look good. Arctic Attack Batman and Jungle Mission Batman are not for me. In this time, Mattel made around nine comic accurate figures. Some only available in Europe. DCD was my comfortable old sneakers.

But things change. Mattel upped their game with DCSH, eventually acquiring the DC Master License. DCD QC and character selection were cratering and I jumped ship yet again. I can even tell you the specific DCD product that turned me. A Batman 4-pack where one of the figures was a Sprang styled Batman which would’ve gone into my JSA. Which is typical for me. I wanted one figure out of a 4-pack and was willing to pay full price to get him. I scoured half the state to find one with a decent paint job. Never did find one. I was out of DCD.

End part 2 of rant.

So... as an example I picked up the DCD COIE figures back in the day... and the paint was blah and the figures not nearly as posable, but when the heck were you gonna get a psycho pirate again??? The MF Psycho Pirate is a much better figure... but so out of scale with anything else I have! Same for Monitor and Anti-Moniitor IMO.

I liked DCD for what they were at the time... but will quickly ditch them if anything remotely better comes along.

I'll be optimistic till I can't be, and then go back to enjoying what I have until something better comes along!

I'm thinking that Atomic Knight likely has more rant coming, but I can relate.

I started my action figure collecting in around 2000 when I was 25 and my first son was born and was ending my "party days" of going out all the time. I started collecting the Toy Biz 6" Marvel Legends and their various "Classics" and movie sister lines. I also started buying DC Direct around that same time. Marvel has always been my #1 and DC my #2 interest when it comes to figures. My favorite IP is X-Men followed by a second tier of Batman, Spider-Man, Avengers and Justice League and then several others IPs like Fantastic Four, Superman, Wolverine, etc. on lower tiers.

I collected everything DCD in those early days and I loved the more obscure stuff such as Vandal Savage, Tom Strong, Promethea, Sandman and the Endless, The Authority, Planetary, Preacher, Promethea, Phantom Lady, Legion of Super Heroes, etc. When Mattel announced their DCUC line, I slowly began replacing my DCD figures with Mattel substitutes but keeping the DCD stuff that Mattel didn't make . I remember even then getting frustrated because many of the DCD figures I hung onto were too tall to properly mix in with the Mattel stuff. The difference in articulation didn't bother me as much as the scale. I still continued to buy DCD figures (renamed DCC) for characters that Mattel didn't make and the newer DCC stuff seemed to blend in with the Mattel stuff much better than the older stuff did. I was mostly happy even if I didn't like my DC collection as much as my Marvel collection that continued from Toy Biz to Hasbro at the same basic scale.

Then came the announcement that the DC license was moving from Mattel to McFarlane. At first I just shrugged. I had owned lots of McFarlane Spawn figures but felt the early stuff was mostly cheap junk and the newer stuff at that time were mostly just intricate statues with little to no articulation. That had been my prior experience with McF. Then came the news that they were changing the scale to 7" and I was beyond livid. I swore that I was done and that I was out. Then I got pulled in with buying some of the "Dark Knights Metal" stuff that neither Mattel or DCC had gotten to. Then I started finding a lot of McF product for deep discounts of 50% or more at retail in those early days when he was over-producing and I started buying more at those clearance prices. Fast forward and now I'm at a point where I have at least one version of every character that McF has done in the line.

I have a lot of McF figures that I do really love, but I've still honestly never really "bought in" and still consider my Mattel stuff to be the core of my DC Collection. I've never sold any of those figures. I fully expect to sell most, but certainly not all of my McF collection as we move forward with Mattel. I'll keep all of those characters that McF has done that haven't been done by Mattel or DCD but everything else will likely go over time. I'll likely keep all the vehicles from McF though as well as I've bought every single one. I expect that the new Mattel line will eventually become my core DC collection, but I'm withholding judgement on that until we actually see the product. I still like the old Mattel MOTUC more than I do the new Mattel Masterverse, for example. I'll likely avoid the basic low price point figures and only focus primaily on the "Ultimate" and some "Elite" collector stuff (if they follow the WWE model). My focus will continue to be on figures of characters that I don't already have in my collection from the last 25 years of collecting DCD/DCC, Mattel and McF and only upgrading when appropriate.

While I'm not as big of a DC fan as I am Marvel, it irks me that the various companies haven't been able to stick to a consistent scale. I expect differences in paint and articulation across different manufacturers, but I really wish that all 3 companies could have kept more consistency with scale. If Mattel is really now doing 6.5" instead of 6" as rumored then it feels like they're trying to "split the difference" and I'm not particularly crazy about that idea either. It will depend upon the execution, which remains to be seen.

Part 3:

Mattel was like a godsend to me. DCUC piggybacked off of DCSH and it was amazing. Finally a counter to Marvel Legends. Or so I thought. It was bright colors and innovative character selection that even DCD didn’t approach. Still hoops to jump through for characters like Animal Man and Adam Strange, but they were getable. Assorted QC flaws dogged the line, like gummy hips, loose heads, etc. But I didn’t experience much of that personally. I was content. Almost happy. I was getting JSA and New Gods figures on the regular as well as assorted other oddball characters. Mattel kept the same scale they’d started years earlier with “Zipline” Batman. Which was good. But soon, the wheels started to come off. A shift in focus at DC Comics saw a shift at Mattel. Personal agendas along with a corporate culture of belt tightening and corner cutting resulted in a product that didn’t evolve. Even devolved in some respects. Neitlich lied and obfuscated. Enormous bonuses were paid to underperforming executives. Apathy coupled with greed, and DC wanting to move away from “classics” led to the debacle of SDCC 2011. The job had fallen to “Fangirl 2.0” to deliver the news the DCUC was over. Classic figures would be distributed through a subscription service and the retail line would focus on Batman and the New 52. I was crestfallen. In a snit, I sold my collection for pennies on the dollar and washed my hands of these people. By 2014, DCUC was dead. I did eventually return after a few years. I started finding DCUC at comic shops and I missed it. I never was able to replace everything though.

Mattel took a year off and returned in 2016 with DC Multiverse. More focused on media figures than comic figures, Mattel put out 44 DC figures in 2016 with only 12 of them being comic style. Some still on the same DCUC bucks. To say I was disappointed doesn’t remotely describe my mental state. 2017 was truly the end with the last of the DCUC bucks being used.

I’ll interject here that of the thousands of figures I’ve bought over the years, 95% have been comic figures. Most of them comic style. 75% of those have been DC. It’s not like I’ve never bought a wrestling or gaming figure, just not many. And I never ended up keeping them. Comic is and always will be my action figure collecting focus.

2018 and 2019 saw some improvement in articulation, but they fucked up the scale. They didn’t scale with DCUC, which went all the way back to Zipline Batman, nor did they scale internally with each other. Shit show is putting it mildly. Nightwing was .5 inch taller than Red Hood. IIRC Tim Drake was the same size or slightly bigger than Red Hood. Tim was still being considered as a teenager back then. Jason was a grown man. Scale is important. Internal consistency is more important.

Mattel lost the master license after 17 years. And I wasn’t happy. Better the devil I know…was my attitude.

End part 3.

“Mattel put out 44 DC figures in 2016 with only 12 of them being comic style”

And as a primarily a comic fan I lost interest at that point… why can’t I have an Arion??!!

Part 4.

All of my problems with Mattel come after the fact. As I said before, I wasn’t happy to see them go. I thought they could fix it. Turn things around. I wasn’t happy about the scale change. I was only going to buy stuff I could fudge into DCUC. But Todd quickly won me over. Even the scale didn’t bother me anymore. DCUC looks fairly primitive to me now. I own 342 comic accurate DCM McFarlane figures. I’ve got 10 more on preorder and if the rumors are correct, lots of stuff to pick up this year.

Does Todd have issues? Most assuredly. Did he take away the wrong lessons from the 90’s? Absolutely. I hate the incentive figures too. But as the only line I collect, I can justify paying eBay prices a little more. It’s also debatable if we’d even be here having this discussion without him.

I hope he gets a workaround. Unlikely as it is. I really, really don’t want to start over. I want what Marvel fans have had for 25 years. Not another restart.

Take the license away from Todd, I get it. Giving it back to Mattel? Why for the love of God? Shitting the bed is standard operating procedure for them. I’d have rather seen just about anybody else come up with it.

And I seriously doubt that the new DC Mattel line is gonna be compatible with what has come before. Seems very unlikely. Will they be cheaper? Will distribution be better? Mattel is notoriously cheap, secretive, and risk averse. I’m not optimistic.

End rant. Thank you all.

What's funny to me is I've always been more of a DC guy as well, and until re-sorting my comic book boxes this past week, I kinda forgot that. My dad is one of the biggest Batman fans ever, so much so that all his kids were assigned Batfamily members (I was the youngest of three born in the early 2000s, so I got Tim Drake), our computers all had Batman themed accounts, so on so forth. And that definitely rubbed off on me.

My earliest toy collecting was all LEGO Batman. All my early comic reading was Knightfall, Cataclysm/No Man's Land, and all the graphic novels and elseworlds my dad had in the longest longbox of his collection, which was the only one of his I was allowed to sift through on my own. I also grew up with Spider-Man, Power Pack, and Pet Avengers comics from a magazine subscription my family had, but Batman and DC was all my serious comic reading until middle school.

But DC figures of their classic looks were not available when I made the jump from LEGO to action figure collecting in 2014, so DC toys just passed by me. Mattel improved very slowly before dying, and Todd has now dipped his toes into all the things I love-- but all have some sort of issue. I love Shadowpact, Ralph & Sue, 90s Batfamily, and Aquaman. Jiro Kuwata is also one of my favorite artists. All have something from Todd, but they're all just not quite right, and the figures are usually pretty bad. Money is tight at this point, and I can't justify buying any figures I'd see as a stopgap, unless that character is just that important to me.

I can understand the aversion to starting all over again, but from my point of view, all DC collecting has ever been is constantly replaced toylines that invent new ways to deliver half-measures. I'd rather a toy company I can fully trust, but I'm fine with a new attempt at the line from a Mattel that's improved in some of the ways I was hoping for back in the day. My biggest worries are with capes and QC. Their fabric is still absolutely abysmal.

Epilogue:

So what happens next? Rhetorical question. We really don’t have any idea. What do I do next? Hope Todd gets a workaround through DCD and the collector section at Wal Mart and Target. And I’ll happily continue. Failing that, I’ll probably do an inventory followed by a purge. Maybe a big purge, maybe a small one. This happens only after all McFarlane DCM has been shipped and received. This is my only current collection. All other figures I owned have been liquidated.

What can Mattel do to entice me into buying? I’m not really sure. It has to be interesting. And since interesting is subjective, it no longer includes “classic” style figures. Jose Luis Garcia Lopez need not apply. I understand the need for evergreen looks for top characters, but that’s not really for me anymore. JSA being the exception. I’m gonna need absolutely outlandish, outrageous character selection. Scare Tactics, Bloodlines, New Age of Heroes and much more. Standard fare ain’t making it this time around.

Niko (protozoalord) said:

Money is tight at this point, and I can't justify buying any figures I'd see as a stopgap, unless that character is just that important to me.

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Proportionally the hobby has gotten more expensive. In the 2000's figures averaged around only $8. Now you're lucky to walk away with something for $25. so a 3x increase in price over 25 years... yet most peoples wages aren't 3x. Point being, 25 years ago buying a figure as stopgap was pretty common, I did it all the time. I bought lots of stuff just because they looked cool and some of those odds and ends are still favorites in my collection.

Atomic Knight said:

What can Mattel do to entice me into buying? I’m not really sure. It has to be interesting. And since interesting is subjective, it no longer includes “classic” style figures.

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I think it is subjective, one of the things licenses do to generate sales is to try and tap into nostalgia. DCUC did that by recreating their original superpowers line, and a lot of people really loved that. I didnt because I want comic accurate figures, but it drove the sales for awhile. I see marvel legends doing something similar with Secret Wars. But what I want is a Volcana, ya know to go with Titina . So we'll have to see what gimmick works to drive sales and it wont resonate with all or maybe not any collectors, but we'll see.