the takara reissues are pretty much the same price as the hasbro ones ($30 on most of them), only you get the better packaging and extra paperwork with the takara ones.

:pfx It's the shipping and handling that kill you, unless you live near a specialty shop that carries them.

isn't there any new news about Hound yet? i hate the the period of intervals between reissues. just before reissue - exciting, after reissue - excited to know the next reissue, in between - boring...

Hound is due out in late July or August.

actually, perceptor might be a Japan-only release due to some of the small/breakable parts on him that couldn't just be replaced with larger or rubber parts (i.e - the shoulder flaps)

I know they're busted on mine :tfsad

Anyone but Wheelie

Wheelie is likely to come along with a second set of minibots. I just hope if he does that he gets along a rumble or frenzy. ;)

I've found plenty of mailorder dealers and places in the US that carry the takara reissues for $30-34 and the shipping for priority mail is usually pretty cheap, especially if you buy more than one at a time.

I was laughing at this a while back, because of the coincidence. When Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, they also bought the Fallen Empires' Curse.

 

For those who don't know, lemme explain (it's funny in a tragic sort of way). Magic the Gathering (a Wizards collectable card game), got amazingly popular just before an expansion called Fallen Empires -- since the last expansion sold out and the stores only got one out of every 5 cases they asked for, when Fallen Empires came out many stores asked for 5 times the product hoping to get exactly the amount they wanted.

 

Unbeknownst to them, Wizards, seeing the huge growth decided to make an intial print-run to meet demand. Heh. So, you can see the problem. Most stores ended up with 5 times more product than they could sell (or maybe just twice as much, given the higher demand).

 

Therefore, there was a massive glut of Fallen Empires on the market, and years later you can still get as much as you want for very little.

 

Back to Hasbro and TRU. I beleive a similar thing happened here. Up to, say Series IV, there were people waiting in line at the stores for opening every day near the release date to sweep these Reissues off the shelves. They sold out constantly. Some more would come in, and they'd be gone within a day. The market cried for more stock. TRU likely cried for a hihger price-point.

 

They got it. But they over estimated. Part of the issue was resellers. Resellers can only make their profit if the market is undersupplied. Once the market is supplied, resellers don't buy in droves.

 

And to the equation that I think that was about the time that resellers started selling direct from HK on EBAY for supercheap (because they saw the same demand -- and closer to the source were able to get them faster and cheaper). This hurt the NA resellers more, and offered another ave for NA buyers to get product early, resulting in even less product flying off the shelves at TRU.

 

How much effect BT/Alternators and Energon had on shifting dollars, as well, I can't be certian, but they may be significant factors as well. Us older TF fans now have much more to spend our money on these days than we had when the TRU G1 Reissues first appeared.

 

So all those factors combined works into a pretty solid reason why TRUs have all these reissues just waiting for the bargin bins.

 

Be well.

isn't there any new news about Hound yet? i hate the the period of intervals between reissues. just before reissue - exciting, after reissue - excited to know the next reissue, in between - boring...

Hound is due out in late July or August.

that late? i thought Stepper is due then.....

Well they used to come out two at a time, so maybe they'll both be released then.

 

-Turbine

Anyone but Wheelie

Wheelie is likely to come along with a second set of minibots. I just hope if he does that he gets along a rumble or frenzy. ;)

Yeah, that might *almost* justify it.

isn't there any new news about Hound yet? i hate the the period of intervals between reissues. just before reissue - exciting, after reissue - excited to know the next reissue, in between - boring...

Hound is due out in late July or August.

that late? i thought Stepper is due then.....

Stepper is due out in August/September now from Takara, and October from Hasbro.