"Jay Bell, post: 27334" said:
That's cool. If you want to believe the revival is going to kill Thundercats forever because you saw a statue you didn't like, then have fun being you.
I think he actually has a valid point. I don't think the franchise will die, but WB has shown that they aren't going to spend money on a property that doesn't generate money. The Q&A session on their DVD properties 3 or 4 months ago clearly demonstrated that by how many properties people asked about either getting released on DVD, or having their DVD run finished that they responded back as having "no further plans for". Don't think for a minute that if this revival doesn't turn some green for WB that they won't bury it without a second thought. I think what The Fallen is sort of pointing to is some questionable decisions by WB in this department
* 3 seperate statue lines, two of which the statues cost over $200 each - It is nice that they decided to release the property in statue form, but that should be almost like an after profit project, not a test ground to see how viable the property still is. Honestly, how many pop culture fans out there do you know that collect statues? There are a handful on this forum, but I don't personally know any of my friends that are into comics books/cartoons/video games/etc that collect statues....much less $200+ ones. Whether you (not you personally, just 'you' in general) want to admit it or not, it is a very, very small market segment to bank on an attempt at a resurrection of a property.
*
3rd statue line is from a brand new company (the one in this discussion, Icon Heroes) - I at least am assuming they are new as I've seen no other products from them. This is an even riskier decision than the previous one: giving rights to produce a product from a company that has no portfolio of previous work. This isn't such a gamble if it is an action figure company because those appeal to a much broader audience and thus have more potential to bring in money. Not so with statues (I know some will disagree, but again this is just a simple economic truth).
* Bandai as the choice for all Thundercats action figures - This one is being discussed in an entirely different thread, but I don't think Bandai was in the top two or three choices of many Thundercats fans as for who they wanted to produce figures for a new cartoon. But, purists like myself could live with that so long as there was a chance the 80s license could have been granted to another company to produce figs from the old show. But no, that also went to Bandai as well. A lot of fans on here and other pages are saying 'lets wait and see what they look like', which is fair. They just don't have a great track record thus far of figs that I've seen that inspire me to really be excited or be hopeful that these figures will come anywhere close to living up to the standard of the old LJN line.
In short, WB hasn't exactly knocked it out of the park here. There's a lot of uncertainty by fans about the quality of the upcoming action figure line, the Icon Heroes statues and the new show....and that honestly will make or break this franchise so long as WB owns it. If they continue to do well, we can probably expect periodic revivals and even more Thundercats related product out there. However, if this experiment fails.....I'm almost 100% positive you'll never see Thundercats brought back out ever again unless someone offers WB enough money to buy the rights to it outright.
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