Evolution Revolution: A Beast Era Retrospective

IF! Editorial: Scale Change

As ExVee mentioned, scale change is evil. Especially to collectors and fans.
It's happened to every line you can think of, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. GI Joe's long and storied history has Real American Hero and Sigma 6 in the "win" column, and Super Joe and GI Joe Extreme on the losing side. Modern Transformers are largely immune, since scale in that line is a rough suggestion, but the shift to Action Masters is pretty similar in both intent and effect- with the added difficulty of losing the feature the toyline was named for. Marvel has just undergone scale change this year, and like ExVee said, it's happening to Power Rangers as well, with mixed results that are leaning towards poor.

How does scale change happen? Bad sales are usually a factor, because why change what works? When sales take a dive, a company decides that the best thing they can do to reinvigorate their toyline is to change it dramatically. While fresh packaging or new sublines are one way to go, scale change is the nuclear option- you can tell the difference in the toys themselves from a mile off.

One problem, though: what about the people who collect your toys, and all their freshly out-of-scale figures?

Collectors will readily buy more than one toy of a character, but generally we do this in exchange for something new or better: better articulation, more stable transformation, new accessories. Scale change is when the manufacturers ask us to lay out money for something that renders all our previous purchases obsolete, and may not even be an upgrade. (I have easily hundreds of MSiA and a big pile of Marvel Legends- and both lines have been tossed in favor of new scales in the past year or so. Argh!)

So now, the fans have a problem: pick up the new line and liquidate the old? Skip the new line? Try and keep both? All answers are costly, and not entirely satisfactory. The company, meanwhile, is facing a similar dilemma due to the change: try and keep the old collectors? Abandon them in favor of new fans? Try to please both? Courting new customers is like starting a line from scratch, and keeping only the diehards means you have an audience that can only shrink. (Hi, US mainstream comics industry!) And trying to please both is a tightrope walk I certainly don't envy. But there are things that can be done to make it easier.

The trick with scale change- the place where the new Mighty Morphin Power Rangers line fails -is that the quality of the new toys should be at least as good as the toys they're replacing if you expect to get anywhere. Super Joe was dismal compared to the 1/6 figures it replaced. Hasbro's new Marvel Universe line is seemingly of better quality overall than their take on Marvel Legends, and so it's doing well. Originally Marvel Legends itself was a tremendous boost in quality from the smaller figures ToyBiz did previously. Real American Hero was so vastly different from the Adventure Team and Super Joe that it's hard to really compare, but the fiction was far more impressive(everybody gets a name!) -and the vehicle selection was financially impossible, both for Hasbro and for parents, at 1/6 scale.

Power Rangers actually has a tougher time of it than most because it's competing against last year's RPM figures and 1993's versions of the same toys and characters. It doesn't hold up very well against either if what I've seen so far is any indication. I have a lot of fears that this may be the end of the road for Power Rangers, at least for the time being. Scale change isn't the only reason for that, but it's sure not going to help, not the way Bandai's doing it.

Before any company decides to try something so drastic, I hope they'll ask the important questions: will this make for better toys? Can we to win over the people we're alienating with this move? Most importantly: is this actually necessary?

-RAC, 11/24/09