My Vintage Collection Cantina HasLab Post Mortem

Another HasLab season is in the books. I always get a little bummed out when they come to an end. For however many days they run, the campaigns become my raison d'être. When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I found myself going to refresh a page that was no longer active. Throughout that day, I had to fight urges to check a count that was no longer incrementing. When I took down the banner advertising the campaign at the top of our home page, it was done so with a tinge of sadness similar to taking down the Christmas decorations on New Year's Day.

Hopefully, and I pray this is true, this becomes an annual tradition, just like the holidays. The wait from the Razor Crest to the Ghost was interminable. We had to frustratingly watch three failed campaigns (Rancor, Ghost Rider, and Reva's Lightsaber) while the fans who were batting 1.000 were forced to ride the pine. I'm already gearing up for the next one. If all goes according to plan, tomorrow's article will be for some suggestions from a source that HasLabs have heretofore not touched. But for today, I want to linger in the present for a tick longer because I have some thoughts that I need to unload from the old cabeza, ya dig, daddy-o?

Get some coffee. This is going to be very, very long. Don't worry, there's one image to break up the wall of text. The bad news is that it's a graph.



The three previous Vintage Collection HasLabs have all been ships, though as my colleague Mr. Nomadscout rightfully points out, the Barge functionally doubled as a play set. With vehicles, the model makers and visual effects experts define how we perceive them. We don't debate what a Razor Crest should be. It's immutable. Lucasfilm defined it on screen for us. The shape of the Crest isn't up for debate.

The exterior design of the ship is the common starting point from which Hasbro must proceed even when the interior sets don't jive with the model (either digital or physical) as with the Millennium Falcon. We all agreed that the Falcon should as closely match what we see flying through space on-screen within reason, and the interior spaces should be hammered into conformity. If you asked 5 fans for their opinion on this matter, 4 would agree with that statement with the lone holdout also being that one dentist who also can't bring himself to recommend Trident gum. There's always one.

With play sets, the inverse seems to be true. If you asked 5 fans what a given play set should represent, you'll get 4 different answers. Play sets are defined by their interior for many of us, but for others, the exterior comes into play. I think Hasbro 100% absolutely nailed what a Cantina play set should be. It's absolutely perfect to me. Others were appalled by the lack of floor, ceiling, roof, exterior wall, fully functioning restrooms, working kitchen with an Easy-Bake oven, and fully addressable LED lighting throughout. It's simply much easier to find common ground on ships than environments.

If you think it gets any easier with the Death Star, guess again, Charlie. It gets worse. To me, a Death Star should just be a collection of the key interior rooms. Others, who may have escaped Bellevue, want a giant gray ball. Finally some want a combination of both with curved walls. That last group must be flat-earthers. You can't perceive the curvature of a planetoid at human-scale. Even if the briefing room abutted the hull of the Death Star, the curvature of the exterior wall would be absolutely imperceptible. For the record, I desperately want a Death Star HasLab. On the floor of the 2018 Toy Fair, a young Patrick was asking fans what Hasbro should do next after the just-launched Barge. Without hesitation, I said "the Death Star".

One final point, play sets require a lot of figures to populate. Fans are going to hold off if they don't have easy access to those figures. We literally had comments here regarding the Carbon Freezing Chamber that said, "I would buy one if I didn't have to spend $50 for an Ugnaught." That's one advantage a Death Star play set would have. A lot of the required figures are army builders, so the volume of unique characters Hasbro would need to bring to market is less.



There are a number of things that suppressed the backer total of this campaign. The false start and the shortened campaign definitely impacted things, but the effect of the Fourth of July weekend is absolutely demonstrable. The trajectory of HasLab backing typically curves upwards during the final five days. The backer total of each successive day exceeds that of the previous day during this stretch. The Razor Crest did experience a slight downturn from day -3 to day -2, however, but the overall shape of the graph is consistent. Look at graph for the Cantina courtesy of John Miko's data visualization dashboard:


It's not a curve at all. It's grotesque. Do you see where it starts to flatten back out? That was the Saturday of the Fourth of July weekend. This hugely impacted everything downstream. Had a normal trajectory been maintained, Greedo would have unlocked either Sunday night or early Monday, and Nabrun by 5PM Monday. That would have all but assured Arleil by midnight.



I said very early on in this campaign that it was mirroring the Giant Man HasLab in its backer trajectory. Giant Man missed its final tier, but it's not because it was unreachable. It was because the clock ran out. The final day frenzy simply came too late. The same exact thing happened with this Cantina campaign. Why people wait until the last minute, almost literally, is beyond me. There is no earthly benefit to it. I feel like the pace at the end was over 100 backers per minute once Nabrun was within reach. It's no exaggeration that Arleil might have unlocked with just one hour of over time. We may have to start beating the "last minute" and "all tiers" backers with bars of soap until their failed logic circuits reboot.

I know the programming on this is a nightmare, but it would benefit Hasbro to not have a hard stop at midnight on their HasLabs. Instead of coming to a complete halt at 11:59 PM ET on the final day, it should enter a count down phase (similar to an auction). The campaign wouldn't end until it goes a full minute without any new backers, or until an additional 24 hours passes (whichever comes first). The latter is needed to make sure it doesn't go on in perpetuity. Hasbro, you will realize a lot more sales if you could make this happen.



One of the things I've always said that I loved about Vintage Collection HasLabs is that for the life of the campaign, the entire community would have their oars beating in the same direction. We all knew that successful HasLabs were good for the line we all love. In fact, it might be the only path for us to "balance the scales". Apparently that was true when the HasLabs interested the selfish segment of our hobby. When we got projects that interested them, the OT crowd joined in out of solidarity for the line. I backed a Ghost even though I don't really want one. When the shoe was on the other foot, they actually worked against the campaign.

Worse still, some are somehow acting like nearly 15,000 purchases of either a $400 or $500 item (definitely over $6 million to Hasbro's bottom line), is somehow a mandate to bring us less figures like the sold out (on Amazon) Episode IV Princess Leia in favor of more figures like Bo-Katan, Fennec Shand, Vel Sartha, Reva, The Mythrol, Kuiil, Ahsoka, etc., etc. If you don't feel like clicking through on those links, they are all 100% (or mostly 100%) newly tooled figures that are still available on Amazon for under MSRP (sometimes well under) more than a year (sometimes a lot more) after their release.

This has changed things for me. I am no longer going to financially support product that I'm not 100% enthused about. I've learned that selfish interests supersede the overall health of the line. If the next HasLab is outside or even on the edge of my collecting interest, there is zero chance that I will back it. But unlike the ugliness the Cantina brought out, I will not campaign against it. We will still advertise it for free on our homepage, and we will provide positive coverage throughout. But the kinship I've felt with the overall community has been damaged. To a dark place this Cantina HasLab campaign has taken us.



I'm still absolutely buzzing about the success of the campaign. After an early start that might have projected to an unfunded campaign, we rallied to unlock two of the three tiers. I'm fickle with what is my favorite display in my collection. Jabba's Palace and the Cantina are always jockeying for first place. The Cantina will forever have a special place in my heart because it represents half of the characters that made up the first ever expansion of the Star Wars line in 1979. And now we are getting the first six 100% newly tooled Cantina figures in TVC 2.0 as part of the overall Cantina ecosystem. It feels like the magical 20-back expansion all over again, only better.

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