How different would the toy landscape be had Star Wars not

Nobody would be posting here.

>>6486471
Still be big, toy manufacturers would have found out cartoons are a lisence to print toys eventually come the 80s

>>6486471
Probably a lot better honestly

>>6486471
no more shitty 5 POA toys

The only thing we should care about Star Wars is the popularization of Stormtrooper armor. Some cool powerarmors are based on those.

>>6486471
what did star wars toys do again?

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>>6487483
Peg warmed

>>6487502
so they did nothing and started a decades old meme that Star Bores toys helped the industry?

Action figured both western and Japanese wouldn't exist.

So this board would be pretty boring and empty.

George Lucas wouldn't have had enough money to make the prequels, so fans wouldn't have bitched for 10 years and consoled the child within their hearts by purchasing thousands of dollars in toys and talking about them on an anonymous image board.

Totally different.

>>6487483
Merchandising wasn't an actual thing before it.
>>6486474
Probably right, however. It would have been done eventually, but likely would have started slower.

>>6487529
>Action figured both western and Japanese wouldn't exist.
you are retard
merch existed before SW.
sw was just first dork fest. people would figure out to make more merch based on something. people evolve in non stop. If there wasnt SW, people would make other franchise

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>>6487845
>Tells others "you are retard"
>types like Bizarro sounds when he speaks.
MFW

Movies really weren't prime licensing opportunities for toy companies before Star Wars. In the 70s the focus was mostly on TV shows. Even Mego's Planet of the Apes line, which would appear to be mostly movie-based, only got made because of a short-lived Apes TV show that came out at the same time.

Would toy companies have eventually come around to licensing movie properties? Maybe. But the fact that Star Wars was such a huge success led to a lot of those blockbuster sci-fi/fantasy films being made in the first place (Star Trek: The Motion Picture was pretty much just an attempt to piggyback off of Star Wars). Star Wars was also one of the first (not the first, but previous attempts were less successful) small-scale figure lines, which allowed for the production of larger vehicles and playsets in scale with the figures. This is the exact format GI Joe: ARAH used, and it really applies to almost any big 80s toy line except perhaps Transformers. Before that most action figures were more like dolls.

It's cool if you don't like Star Wars, but it fundamentally transformed the landscape of the toy industry and forced competitors to either copy what made it work or get creative in their attempts to top it.

You could also certainly argue that there's a direct link between the rise of Star Wars and the current state of the industry, where companies can't get their products on the shelves of major stores unless they're connected to some shitty movie franchise, although that probably has more to do with the 90s resurgence of Star Wars, and possibly Batman.

>>6487929

Several big-money attempts to license toys off of movies shortly before Star Wars had also majorly flopped, which is why no big toy company was interested in taking a gamble on making Star Wars toys. Hasbro and Mattel both summarily turned Lucas down, they only got on with Kenner because Kenner felt like taking a chance. TV merchandising was a thing, but that was also very minor.

Together with the obvious fact that SW was a huge commercial hit, the fact that Kenner came up with the idea of small, affordable and durable action figure as their main licensing product was a stroke of genius. Previous "figures" were 12-inch dolls, built like a Barbie doll would be (such as the famous original GI Joe or Mattel's Big Jim and Major Matt Mason) and were big, expensive and fragile. Even when the 3.3/4 figures took off they still insisted on producing a 12" line of "traditional" figures alongside it, and even with the success of SW it sold terribly and ended up being canceled during Empire.

So it really was a confluence of SW being a hit and taking off and Kenner inventing a new way to market toys to kids. Other companies scrambled to either straight up imitated the SW toys (like the Black Hole and Star Trek TMP lines), imitate and improve it (Hasbro's GI Joe ARAH line) or do similar figures in a different scale (like MOTU and their millions of imitators). So it really kicked off the idea of action figures and licensed toys worldwide

>>6487929
>the current state of the industry, where companies can't get their products on the shelves of major stores unless they're connected to some shitty movie franchise

That has more to do with the rise of video games creating less toy retail space, and rising plastic costs. From the 90's up til the early 2ks, we were seeing all kinds of ridiculous literally-who's showing up in action figure aisles. The action figure business was hot thanks to McFarlane, Neca, Palisades, Toybiz... lots of companies were churning out products and store exclusives.

Of course that also meant mountains of pegwarmers which kinda soured retailers on betting on unproven IPs.

So no, it wasn't Star Wars at all.

>>6487862
>>Tells others "you are retard"
>>types like Bizarro sounds when he speaks.
>MFW
kek
im not english. Im patrician Europoor.

>>6486566
ARAH would have been 8 or 12 inch dolls with interchangeable outfits,

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>>6487956
I think everyone saw the writing on the wall when every single movie was getting its own toyline and every retailer ordering a bazillion units to overflow their shelves.
No shit would they recoil after being stuck with unsellable lines and overstocking on Bumblebees and He Mans.

Video games have little to do with toy sales, as 99% of kids have already been playing and wasting their money on video games since the 80s and kids have always been the majority purchaser of toys.

>>6486559
How so?

>>6486471

Well without action figures we'd all be collecting big dolls instead, so that would be weird. Also Lego might have bankrupted in 1999 without the Star Wars license to save them, though maaaaybe they could have survived on just the Harry Potter theme.

Transformers would still be around, but not in the version we have today.

>>6488445

Not video game sales, retail space. Boys toy aisles have shrunk and game aisles have expanded. Smaller spaces means you hold less stock.

There's also the death of all the toy related chains - KB, FAO, etc. That killed tons of smaller figure companies that depended on them.

>>6488445
>Video games have little to do with toy sales, as 99% of kids have already been playing and wasting their money on video games since the 80s and kids have always been the majority purchaser of toys.
in the 80s video games were just a fad in the eyes of most. In fact the industry crashed and no one was buying video games in the west until the early nineties saw Nintendo rise in popularity, pulling the industry out of the ashes with it. So it is hard to say how much video game sales have to do with it, because their sales and popularity were not as high as you think they were for a good period of time.

Personally I feel it was not just video games on their own that diminished popularity of toys but the rise of multiplayer games and social media as well. Now the phrase 'but all my friends have one!' takes on a different level of importance cause now it's no longer a matter of having the same action figure to fit in, but the same game to join the fun.

>>6489954
>retail space.
This too.
Companies only want to carry major sellers now and that's mostly just WalMart rubbing off onto everyone.
And Suncoast/Sam Goody rotting apart was one of the major things that led to the demise of a once bigger market. Palisades, SOTA, and even McFarlane heavily relied on them.

>>6489967
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Video games might have been seen as a fad in the 70s, but by the 80s, video games were firmly entrenched. Arcade owners became millionaires. Chuck E Cheese and its wannabes became a thing. Tons of new video game companies started exsting. Nintendo's new direction toward video games started. All before the 80s.

Saying it's a fad because of the crash ignores the fact arcades were still booming. This is where the majority of cash was being spent up until probably the early 90s. Only consoles were hit by the crash and Nintendo became popular in the mid-80s, not early 90s.

>the rise of multiplayer games
Nope.
Arcades existed and some of the most popular games were multiplayer for double the cash in one machine.
If anything has affected children buying/wanting toys, its that even toddlers need iPhones now and how there is a multitude of free games.

FYI, NBA Jam made nearly a billion dollars when it first came out. The arcade machines. 25¢ per play. That's more than any movie had ever made.
This is how popular arcades were back in the day and shows how much money kids were putting into VGs back then.

>>6488546
>though maaaaybe they could have survived on just the Harry Potter theme.
Might buy them a year or two but Harry Potter isn't really on the same scale of Star Wars when it comes to fans.

>>6486471
The only difference would be the changes to the collector's market. There wouldn't be as many scalpershits.

Every other aspect that SW revolutionized in the toy world would have come to fruition regardless, just a few years later. The uptick in TV channels and the slow collapse of the nuclear family/stay-at-home mom throughout the 70s and 80s meant more cartoons to pacify the TV-addicted child audience, so the aspect of lucrative toy tie-ins was inevitable. Then you couple that with the advancements in production, which made injection-molded plastic not only cheaper but also richer in detail than fabrics (which would require 4+ fabrics for one outfit). You also have the post-Nixon expansion of asian labor which called for a product requiring less skill to produce, and at higher volumes, thus ushering in the need for smaller modular full-plastic toys that can be built on assembly lines with minimal need for quality control and next to no training.

Those factors would've pushed the industry into what we have today regardless of SW. Cheap full-plastic toys, no cloth, and reduced sizes for max profits were a given. The real question is, how much did Star Wars speed it up? I'd say roughly 5-8 years. The surge of the religious right and the moral majority in the 1980s created a lucrative environment for children's cartoon shows, as the PSA's were used as a wonderful social engineering project to indoctrinate children to certain social norms. The only way that America could complete its two biggest post-war objectives (1. destruction of the labor force's true market value by inflating the job pool 100% with an equally large female work force and 2. pushing the average American into bigger (meaningless) debt in order to sustain the global borrower's market shell game) and continue to instill anti-communist pro-western ideologies in children was through those very cartoons. They were coming regardless, along with the tie-in merch.

>>6487527
The first star wars set was so highly in demand that they sold cardboard boxes with the promise of figures later for people who couldn't wait and wanted to make sure they'd get their figures on release.

Now, decades later, people were willing to pay 40 dollars for a Darth Vader with a remake of that same cardboard because they couldn't wait and wanted to make sure they got their figure on it's release.

>>6487845
Starwars am first small scale figures. It am inspire lines like the 3.75 G.I. Joes. It am also first time to market movie to children's toys. It make playsets and vehicles into common practice in toylines. It could have happen eventually without starwars, but am still important role in evolution of toy.

>>6487943
>one of the first He-man prototypes was a generic hero wearing the helmet and jet pack from a 12 inch kenner Boba Fett

Man to live in a day when you could work at a toy factory and be like "this is one of my ideas. I basically took this Conan looking figure and put Starwars stuff on it."

Shit. Customizers try to make money this way.

>>6491479
>Now, decades later, people were willing to pay 40 dollars for a Darth Vader with a remake of that same cardboard
>willing to pay
Not if the piles and piles and piles of them I see at every store is any indication.

>>6491539
I said "people" were willing. Not "everyone".

>>6486471
There would have been tons more of 1/18 figures. I have an old Sears christmas wishbook full of figures from other series like Battlestar Galactica, the Black Hole and Buck Rogers (with starfighters) Heck it wouldn't have even stopped the development of G.I. Joe as as l the first Joe Buck was designed around a Buck Rogers body.
The difference is with star wars they were actually selling EMPTY BOXES to consumers as they didn't have a lot of the first production run.. EMPTY FUCKING BOXES.. so some fort of demand for action figures from popular series was there.

>>6487929
But there WERE Planet of the Apes figures.
(and Star Trek)
There was a size reduction and 12 inch Joes wern't selling.
- but Action Jackson, Major Matt Mason (earlier) and Big Jim were.

>>6486473
This

Possibly all Star Wars fans would be at this time Treekies or socially active people with good jobs