I love action figures. I like collecting them and taking photos of them. I like hearing what’s coming next and seeing how cool they look. I like fiddling with them and seeing how they are designed and how they articulate. They look good on my shelf too. Action figures are awesome but do you know what isn’t awesome? Exclusives… especially when they are exclusive to a shop that can only be found in America leaving all of us across the pond out of luck or when the shop that they are exclusive too doesn’t know what they are doing and cancel pre-orders and people don’t end up getting their toy. It sucks and it is beyond me why more and more exclusives are becoming a thing. It doesn’t work guys, stop limiting your own sales because do you know what happens? Scalpers come along and buy a dozen of the figure then resell them for ten times the value online. It’s a crappy system and honestly, it’s killing action figures for me. When I see a new figure reveal and get excited I have all the hype pulled from under me when I hear it will be an exclusive to a shop I have never heard of. Then when it comes out people who pre-ordered it complain that they never got theirs because the shop cancelled their pre-order for some reason and it is gone in the wind.
You might be reading this rant and be wondering who broke my heart like this? Well, I’ll tell you, Gunslinger Spawn by McFarlane Toys. I like Spawn, he is such a badass looking character, I also like cowboys. So when the two came together in plastic form I fell in love. But guess what? Gunslinger Spawn is a Target Exclusive. I’ll probably never get him seeing as though there are no Target shops in South Africa. He’s appeared on Amazon by scalpers but they are asking ridiculous prices for him. And while he was re-released with a different accessory (which is a whole can of worms for another article) chances are people in other countries will never get the rifle variant.
It’s a system that makes no sense to me in the action fire world and it’s really starting to get to me. Exclusives are killing action figure collecting and quite frankly, it’s getting real tiresome.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
