Previous Post I watched the same three episodes you did. I may catch Barbie later. I felt they sort of glossed over Kenner's acquisition by Hasbro. They talked about Hasbro's bungling of the perfect contract and having to renegotiate. But why exactly did Kenner have to sell? They didn't talk about the commonly held belief that Marvel contracted Hasbro for a SHIELD vs Hydra line of figures and when they pulled the license, Hasbro replaced SHIELD with GI Joe and Hydra with Cobra.

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/12/30/netflix-toys-made-us-pretty-freaking-great/

Looks like Transformers, Lego, Hello Kitty and Star Trek will be next.


As to the Masters of the Universe, I got many chuckles out of that one and the tales they spun about how things came to be. Truly things came together to form a perfect storm. Also the implication is that the addition of She-Ra may be what started the collapse.

They also all agree that horrific life action movie did NOT help.

The 90's one with He-Man in space, I remember seeing a couple of episodes....what a dud.


The 2002 reboot...they needed to talk about that more, I feel they glossed that one over. There were rumors that the toys suffered a similar problem mentioned in this episode about the merchandising of the original line in that eventually the core figures like He-Man and Skeletor were not in the packages sent to the stores but all the secondary characters were constantly being made and shipped thus collectors and kids can't get the core figures.

A case full of Buzzoff or Stratos doesn't exactly guarantee sales.

The 2002 cartoon was also well structured and actually started the conflict at the beginning and gave us origins of He-Man and Skeletor, and also made it where Adam being He-Man was no where NEAR as obvious as it was back in the day.