No Content Day - Now With Content!

I was planning to do the next Last 17 Entry for today, but I procrastinated so long that the puck dropped in the Bruins game, and I never got focused enough to do any serious publication. Plus my dog wanted to play fetch. Mr. Wrecker takes precedent over this site one hundred times out of one hundred. So this is one of those days where you need to provide your own content via the comment section, but that doesn't preclude us from doing some meaningful work. There's something I feel we need to check in on.

With respect to recent previous years, what is your optimism level for the Vintage Collection? Are you more optimistic, less optimistic, or about the same, and why? I'm not sure I'm in sync with the community at large. Here's where I'm at:

I'm cautiously, slightly more optimistic, and it's largely a tug of war with pros and cons. The massive pro is that the quality issues that were really weighing me down recently seem to be in the rear view for now. I was mostly focused on the disappearing paint applications. The Poggle the Lesser figure seems to single handedly show that we're back. But the improved quality comes with a higher MSRP, and I'm worried that will cool sales. As we know, sales and tooling budget are inexorably linked.

Finally, if you scout the secondary market like I do, you know that the collectibility of TVC is down (perhaps way down). If your a baseball card collector, you know the phrase "junk wax". I think 2022 through 2024 could end up becoming the junk wax era for TVC due to a combination of overproduction, and character selections that might not prove evergreen. I know many of us are not concerned with collectibility, but it's naive not to acknowledge that it is a factor in the health of the line because it leads to more sales (and thus more tooling).

But like I said this nets out to slightly optimistic for me. The figures keep getting more and more amazing, and I think we'll collectively get accustomed to the new price point. But because the latter probably correlates to lower production numbers, the collectibility will come roaring back. We've only been through this cycle fifty times since 1978.

So that's what I think. What about you? You know what to do.

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