He-man and The Masters of the Universe were a part of my childhood.

>How can I get cheaper MOTUCs?
Invent a time machine. I know that's a cunty answer, but the only way prices are going to come down is if there's someday a newer, even more expansive and articulated MOTU line, and that's going to be a while, if ever.

>Will they ever be re-released someday?
Some are. The new manufacturer, Super7, is releasing "Ultimate Editions" of He-Man, Skeletor, Teela, Ram Man, and Faker, although preorders are closed. They'll probably run you $50 a piece when they come out. They'll probably do more but it looks like they're moving to an "all-in" model much like the one that kept MOTUC from reaching its full potential.

Personally, I always felt that at minimum He-Man and Skeletor should always be available, maybe Man-at-Arms, Teela, Beast Man, and Evil-Lyn too. I was lucky because I got in at just the right time (mid-2011) when all but a few figures were still affordable. I have a friend who loves He-Man, but by the time he discovered Classics they were already way out of his price range. Ultimately this lack of evergreen figures kept the line from growing beyond a few thousand die-hards.

>>6340432

He-man and Skeletor were perpetually available at Matty for YEARS as signature in stock items. At one point China was bleeding stolen versions everywhere (mainly from the DC 2 packs).

You guys just really really *REALLY* missed the boat.

>>6340350
There are two packs on Mattel's eBay shop of terror claws skeletor and flying fist he-man. Also the laser he-man and skeletor, and snake armor he-man and king hiss. They are 40% off and free shipping. That is probably the cheapest way to get a he-man and skeletor right now.

The cheapest way to get classic versions is to wait for the super 7 versions to come out.

>>6340350
Most will never be re-released and you will have to pre-order to get them just in the $35 range. Your best solution is to join a facebook group and create a want list. I'm only missing Beastman and Tri-Klops from my Evil Warriors as a result. It took me months of just buying one to three figures a month just to get there. Then I used part of my tax return to get Castle Greyskull.

Best thing you can do with this line is have patience and save up for a figure at a time and keep an eye out for bargains.

>>6340432
>6340432
>>6340450
>>6340453


Thanks guys. I guess I'm gonna pass this line. *shrugs* It's beautiful, but to complete it would take months, if not years.

>>6340457

Mind to throw a few pics of your collection? I would love to check it.

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>>6340460
It's all stored away on my backpoarch right now. I easily have over $1,000 worth of Classics packed away. It's hard to display my Greyskull so I'm waiting until I find a good spot to set them up.

>>6340450
I didn't miss the boat, I have all of the main characters and a bunch of the secondary ones, and paid retail for just about all of them. I just don't have this shitty "you snooze, you lose" attitude that so many collectors have. Why WOULDN'T you want your fandom to grow?

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>>6340350
>I went to eBay and most of them were 90~100 USD, and I don't have money for that
Well... Yeah. The line is almost a decade old, and aside from the Big Lots golden age and the DCUC 2 packs it never saw retail.

Here's part of my collection, packed away for a move

>>6340605
Most people into Classics just took their time collecting them. I pretty have no Snakemen or Horde figures and very few of the core characters. I have most of the Evil Warriors, then He-Man, She-Ra, Orko, Prince Adam, and Battleground Teela. I still need a propper Teela and Sorceress and some of the Masters. I also really want to collect the New Adventures of He-Man figures.

>>6340605

We're not talking about some stupid 5 minute preorder closure here. They were in stock and reissued for years. Complaining that they don't still have them so long after the line wound down and died is just being unreasonable. Heck, there was even the Super7 version that was open for orders for a fairly decent amount of time. The chances WERE there for He-man and Skeletor. Over and over and over.

That said, the reason why Mattel didn't want the 'fandom to grow' was pure greed. The company gave no shits about MOTUC; it was a side project that only continued as long as it wasn't making a loss. That's why they became such assjoles about it - encouraging scalpers, forcing blind subs. Money, not fans, were what counted at the top. The line is obviously created by people who love motu but they wete working under greedy suits.

The same suits who mishandled 200x, DCUC, killed their own Disney goose, then destroyed Monster High.

Yeah Mattel is REALLY fucked up.

>>6340625
Careful how you store some of those figs. Last time I unpacked mine there was some color bleeding from the softer plastics onto white pieces.

>>6340817
They're only going to be in there for a few days. Appreciate the advice, though.

>>6340710
I didn't mean from Mattel's perspective (obviously their corporate philosophy is deeply fucked up), I meant the attitude that a lot of MOTUC collectors (particularly on Dot Org) have. The ones who would talk about "cherry pickers" as the scum of the earth because they weren't willing to blindly fork over $600 possibly in exchange for shit like the Fighting Foe Men, or would get pissy whenever talk of reissuing a particularly rare A-lister like Teela would come up because it's people's own fault that they didn't buy her when she was available for an hour in 2009. It's like they're this little clique and they don't want anyone new to join. If more people are buying MOTUs, then there's more money and resources to make more of them. If the fanbase never grows, we get the situation we're in now. It's mostly Mattel's fault, but those fans encouraged it because it was more important to them that their collection stayed rare and exclusive than for the franchise they love to thrive.

>>6341119

Dot-Orgers are insane, no argument there.

The quality of these does not usually warrant the $80+ many go for. Articulation is good but range is often limited, most older figures have ankles that move like bicycle wheels, and the genius move for body armor instead of new torsos mean most arms stay poking out sideways. There are also mold seams and lines everywhere and the paint jobs are not usually that great. For what was touted as an adult collector line the quality is usually no better than the standard stuff made for kids.

Super7 is seen as some great hope but they only sell to limited preorders, are forcing people to preorder whole waves, have delayed shit so much I wonder if George Brussard is their CEO, and they're a company that so far has really only made low-end crap like MUSCLE knockoffs, ReAction shit, pint glasses and other simplified crap that they pretend is "high end" but is barely dollar store junk. I'm sitting here hoping these Ultimate figures don't come out with serious QC issues. I want a toy-accurate Skeletor(because the 4H decided people really wanted them accurate to obscure card art and NOT the toys for some reason when they began the line, which explains why He-Man's head looks fuck-all like it should have) and a He-Man with the proper head and ankles that don't spin freely.

But for every $75 or up figure people go nuts over, there are other figures it seems no one can give away. Mattel's eBay shop still has a number of figures at 40% off, any of them are easily worth the $16-$17 prices. Glimmer and Moss-Man are unpopular, and I scored a Modulok for under $30. The odd irony seems to be that figures with vintage counterparts that are worth a fortune end up being the modern figures that sell dirt cheap. Funny how the Laser figures are such a massive expensive rarity, yet the modern versions are cheap

A neat side effect of the line is that if you want vintage MOTU the prices went way down on those, I think a lot of collectors ditched their vintage off in favor of the new stuff.

>buy MOSC MOTUC
>open them
>giant ass dents in limbs from where the packaging pressed into them

some "collector line" this shit is

>>6341286
Yes. There was a thread up about a sale and one of them bought 6 dozen horde troopers

>>6342030
and all but one will be sold for a 3X markup on eBay.

>>6341732
Pics pls.

>>6341643
MOTU 200X also took a nose dive when MOTUC started. If you can deal with the more anime-esque look, maybe look there.

>>6342056
You almost can't blame some of the more extreme stuff because of how badly Mattel fucked up. If some asshat hadn't been so incompetent or desperate to control the flow of sales, scalping oportunties would've been fewer and further between.

>>6342121
I honestly loved the 200x series style. I was hoping we would see more 200x stuff in the MOTUC stuff.

>>6341643

The line started out at a much higher quality. They had decent molding and more detailed paint, including gradient shading. As usual, cost cutting blah blah blah.

>>6342131
Mattel WANTS scalping. They make more sales and think it drives demand. Remember that this is a company that caters to the huge community of assholes that is Hotwheels scalpers.

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You guys know when the Ultimate MOTU figs are gonna be shipping? Just sorta ordered mine.

>>6340350
I would say your safest bet is finding used stuff at comic stores or set up ebay alerts. You can find some legitimately rare stuff for cheap if you just look around.

Usually around the fan forums on he-man org, they have sale threads. Patrol the BST threads here.

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>>6342221

Well they do have Snake-Armor He-Man and King Hiss from the 200X show.
If you want a more 200X inspired He-Man, take the head from that and pop it onto the one you currently have or the upcoming ultimate figure.

Then, if you have an older 200X He-Man toy, the harness/armor perfectly fits onto the MOTUC buck. Take his sword and bam, 200X He-Man.
I believe the one in this pic is using King Greyskull as the base figure, considering the wrists and belt.

This line isn't really worth it honestly. I got some on clearance sales on Matty's site and most of them have weird design features that make it seem like they hardly tested the designs (Rio Blast's chest flap hardly closes) and then you got really easy to notice QC issues (my Rio Blast had two left knee armor pieces, Lord Dactus' ankle joint wasn't even fully assembled) And in general the articulation felt like it did little to service the very static sculpts. Even having gotten them on sale, I really don't feel like they were worth the price paid.

>>6342479
I actually have my 200x harness on BG Teela (replacing her metal bra)

>>6342491
Rio is one of the worst figures of the line, it's a pretty bad idea to write off an entire line based on a figure that is easily in the bottom 5 of roughly 150 releases.

>>6342543
This. Modulok, Mantenna, the Gryphin, and Draegoman are top tier figures.

>>6341286
Toyguru blabbed a bunch of stuff about Matty Collector right after they shut down last year. The forum turned against him in a bad way. They called him a liar or a disgruntled ex-employee and started getting pissy when he wouldn't disclose things he couldn't talk about due to NDA stuff. They claim he's a liar yet beg for the secret stuff he can't talk about without getting sued into the poorhouse.

The summary of what he said was that Mattel, despite being a majorly successful toy company raking in big bucks, is super stingy about spending more than bare minimum on making toys, and were even less willing to spend on the Matty stuff. They barely gave a shit about the line, they deliberately squeezed customers with fake subscription threats to force them to buy toys they didn't want, and kept lowering the budget as time went on, which is why we got shit like the weapons packs instead of packing them with the toys. He left because he got sick of dealing with it and taking all the public blame for the higher-ups.

The shields piss me off so much. I don't think it's possible to get them on without stress marks. Excluding female shields which actually have sturdy clips, anyway...

fucking Hordak's bat has 2 stress marks from clipping it to his wrist. There's no excuse for that. They could have made it a solid PVC figurine but no, they had to make the tail part hard plastic that has no flex to it at all.

And goddamn is getting He-Man's shield on a pain in the ass. For all of the 4H's supposed talent, they really seemed to just fuck up hard on some of the functional designs.

>>6343186
I should point out that it is common knowledge that Mattel's legal department has JVS3 by the balls, which is why almost any critique of Mattel is against forum rules.

>>6342543
If you're willing to do some minor work and ditch the gimmicks, Rio Blast is okay. They're cheap enough on Mattel eBay you may as well get a second to display with guns out and mod the other one so the flap closes.

Laughable they even made a unique torso for Buzzsaw Hordak in the first place(for a "gimmick" that didn't even matter without the launcher) but they could have done a minor retool of that torso here. Shit like this just foreshadowed the eventual downfall of Monster High into a budget line.

>early MOTUC- 4-5 accessories, good paints, semi-decent QC, $20 and $7 postage

>late MOTUC- 1-2 accessories, everything else in a weapons pack, okay paints, loose ankles, no card bios, dents in limbs from bubbles pressing into them, $30 and $10 postage

>>6343199
4H doesn't have any say over the plastics being used and whether they're hard or softer. Once they deliver the sculpts they don't get a say in anything. That's why we got Stinkor with upside-down foreams and the reversed shoulders on figures like King Hiss and Galactic Skeletor, and why so many of their sculpts in the 200x line were hacked apart to make new He-Man variants.

>>6342464
They're shipping to Super7's warehouse at the end of May, and should be heading out to purchasers at the end of June. So places like BBTS will probably be shipping in July, unless they get priority shipping from Super7.

>>6346018
>no card bios
If memory serves, the bios were all written by Scott. After he left, nobody could be bothered to bullshit a paragraph about Lt. Sunder or whoever to keep things consistent. There were never more than five or six people working on this line who truly gave a damn.

>>6346922
Scott has said he never wrote more than the Mighty Spector bio. The writers were random.

Not that I expect people cared about them anyway. They tried too hard to mesh minicomics, old DC, Filmation/NA and 200X into one story and it didn't work. They probably knew most people were just going to stick the old Filmation story to the toys anyway, and most collectors knew who these characters were.

>plastic quality, number of accessories and paint app quality kept dropping after Scott left
>everyone acted like he was Satan and hailed his departure because you got a package of 6 fucking HEADS that cost as much as a full figure, even though it was the Mattel execs and not Toyguru that nixed 200X head pack-ins and other nods

Proof that these people are so desperate for anything, an overpriced pack of heads that don't even blend in well with the intended bodies is enough to pacify them

And Toyguru hated 200X? Then explain Zodak and all the other 200X stuff hat was made when he was around. The cutting of spare heads was Mattel's penny-pinching on accessories. Most people probably disregarded extra arts anyway. Did we really NEED Kronis bits with Trap Jaw?

>>6346929
Really? All this time I've given him credit for the most brilliant "real name" in the line, that being Clawful's: "(pronounced through a series of claw clicks)". I guess that was just some random intern.

The bios were decent reading material prior to opening the figure but pretty forgettable overall. There were some details that were pretty great, like Mermista decapitating Mer-Man with his own trident during some battle or other.

>>6347040
It's possible he did write bios, I don't know- he was probably so overworked that he probably couldn't recall if he did certain small things, he wasn't always the most honest and sometimes contradicted himself, and he was probably under enough NDAs that he couldn't say certain things. I get the impression from his post-Matty statements that his memory was faulty on small details, and they never bothered to credit ANY of the bio writers. The only remote credit I could find for Toyguru writing the bios was Poe Ghostal's site. Even if he did write the initial bios, interns and such may have taken over later.

On that note, if Toyguru did write bios, most were better written than the Mighty Spector one. But if Mighty Spector was his usual writing style then I'd be surprised if he did write others. It was far too badly written, far too Gary Stu, far too self-masturbatory over a character with his likeness. "The guy with my face is SOOOO great, he beat everyone and saved the world"- and it's supposed to be the same character as the generic Palace Guard with his face as one of the optional heads.

If he wrote that on purpose to be sarcastic, he was a genius. He did know the existence of the toy itself was already pissing off the fanboys severely for no reason other than "it wasn't an obscure Filmation character". If he chose to gave them the finger over it, bravo. But that's IF he did it as a big fuck you to people and that's a bit questionable.

I have no problem with the toy itself- aside from the fact it belongs better in the DC line than MOTU. The spandex superhero just didn't mesh with the other toys. Looking like a generic hero didn't help, the purple really made it look like a knockoff of the Phantom. The playing card spade chest emblem didn't help mesh it into the MOTUC line either. Scott no doubt made his own character on his own time, and MOTUC was the only way Mattel would let him make it as a retail product so it was shoved in- probably why it was part of a set of 3 special figures Mattel wouldn't have made otherwise, giving us the long overdue Fearless Photog.

Forgive my idiocy, but are ultimates 100% compatible with classic figures?
I think I remember super7 is using the same mattel tooling but not quite certain if I'm correct.

>>6347453
They're just reissues of MOTUC figures. IF they ever actually come out, this shit is bordering on becoming a delayed video game.

Frankly I question the lost/damaged molds thing, if that were the case, why weren't they informed of it months ago when they got the molds? At minimum it makes this novelty goods company look more inept. And that's what they are, a company that makes cheap novelty goods.

Wait until they actually deliver on the toys before you pretend they are superior to Matty. Not only deliver, but I want the joints tight and the paint apps clean. If this shit has loose ankles and paints that look like they belong on a cheap retail toy for kids, then they failed. The preorder only bullshit needs to die too, make stock and sell it like a store. S7 is pretending they're some elite collector company and it's pure ego.

>>6347730
Boy, you sure found that tangent to go off on there, bud.

>>6347730
>And that's what they are, a company that makes overpriced novelty goods

ftfy
Seriously, ReAction is a decent idea but was pushing it at $10. $15? Kiss my ass.

>>6348089
>le asshurt D7 fanboy

keep pretending that MUSCLE and ReAction are like Ferraris or Jaguars. Your company makes novelties, not high-end collectibles.

>$65 and up for fucking ugly vinyls that cost 5 cents to make and look like they belong at a Dollar Tree

The only thing not overcharged are the MUSCLE stuff at $2 apiece(if you like unpainted figurines), but they probably assfuck you on the postage.

Asking more than $4 for ReAction was insulting when Funko sold them at retail.

>>6347730
What happened with the molds? I didn't followed this story.

>>6350473
Supposedly some of them had been used to the point they were damaged. It's a questionable excuse though, as they supposedly only found out near the expected release date and not months ago when they got the damn molds, and because the parts supposedly ruined were lesser use pieces while the heavy use bodies were fine.

I think what's really going on is that a novelty junk maker company thought they could take over a major line with complex tooling, hoping people would blindly suck them off because "we're not Mattel", and found out the hard way they were in way over their heads, so they've made up excuses.

But if you're dumb enough to think limited preorder windows, no extra stock for normal sale and being forced to buy entire waves is better than Mattel, then you were probably assfucked by Digital River one too many times and are just hoping it's different this time. Maybe they'll use a condom? You have morons praising them as a savior of the brand and they've yet to actually deliver on any products.

>>6340350
>How can I get cheaper MOTUCs?

Search for ones without packaging. The package material makes up 90% of their listed price.

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Today a legend of the Masters of the Universe franchise passed. RIP William George. Thank you for being part of our childhood, and always a source of creativity, immagination, and inspiration.

>>6348128
He asked if figures were compatible and you sperged an autistic rant as a reply. Then when I made fun of you for that, you went into a second autist rage tangent over something no one brought up. Nobody cares about vinyls, calm your assblastedness.

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>>6353056

>Commercial art.
>painstakingly detailed with genuine artistic skills.
>Totally awesome to boot.
>Regarded as tripe by the culture & arts community.
>Lowbrow art at best.

VS.

>Some guy pisses in a jar and throws a crucifix in it.
>Takes a pic.
>Avant garde transgressive art that must be seen by all!
>"The formal qualities of the work are, in fact, quite mysterious and beautiful."
>Sponsored by the NEA.

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>>6353056
We lost Earl Norem in 2015.
I legit cried. The man's art accompanied some of my most fond childhood memories through toy packages and storybooks.

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Best toy line ever

>>6356332
Me too. Earl Norem, Alfredo Alcala, William George. The 3 legends of the Masters of the Universe, who will always be source of inspiration, and through their artwork brought in life Eternia. As the Eternians would said, Good Journey.

>>6353103
I guess the argument is that actually profitable skills aren't 'special'. Artists rarely make the steady income of degreed skilled workers, though.