Revisiting The Jabba’s Court Denizens 4-Pack

With Last Figure Standing in full swing right now, we've been talking a lot about backgrounder characters. For this year's events, the hopes of the tertiary character fans hangs on Arleil Schous. Will he make it to the semi-finals? You'll have to tune in Saturday to find out. As we've been discussing, backgrounders are, in many ways, the lifeblood of the line as far as keeping hardcore collectors engaged. This is critical for the overall health of the line. The flip side is that these type of offerings are not always brick and mortar viable. Fortunately, the emergence of Fan Channel and Pulse exclusives have given a path to market for such figures without relying on Walmart and Target. Perhaps the best example of this is the soon-to-be legendary Pulse exclusive Jabba's Court Denizens 4-pack, but how did it fare?

I would say it's a bit like The Shawshank Redemption, which had a mediocre performance at the box office, but became a classic once it hit the home video market. The 4-pack was neither a hit nor a failure. Despite limited reach as a Pulse exclusive, the set managed to sell through without having to go to "outlet" (i.e. clearance). That's a pretty big deal for such a niche product. The same can't be said for many other Pulse exclusives:


When the set didn't sell through quickly, I initially said I would no longer publicly push for such product. But that was under the assumption that it would eventually be heading to clearance. That fact that it didn't, changes things. I think it shows that, under the right circumstances, such a product can be viable. If it only breaks even, there's value in it to Hasbro if it either keeps fan engagement high, and/or it can be used to prop up a larger, more profitable item, such as a HasLab. Instead of relegating backgrounder multipacks to dust bin of history, we should analyze why the Jabba's Court Denizens only did okay. To me, there are two closely related things that had a cooling effect on the sales, and they can all be summarized in one image:


The price per figure was already high for the set at $18.25, which likely indicates a low production run. But the inclusion of Ree-Yees, which had already been re-released once before, was deflating for many customers. A majority of the fans who would be interested in a set of backgrounders would have already owned that Ree-Yees figure, meaning it offered zero value to them. This pushed the effective price per figure for the three wanted ones to $24.33. It's encouraging that even at that high effective price, this set still sold through, but perhaps it could be done better. Instead of a carded 4-pack, a Special Action Figure set of just the three new items probably would have done better. I absolutely love having a carded Taym Dren-garen and Velken Tezeri, but I would have survived if I didn't have them. Plus, I still would have wanted an unopened set, so in my case, the sales would not have been impacted by the lack of individual cards.

I'm confident that if there are to be TVC 2.0 grails, one or two (and maybe three) of them are going to come from this set. I feel bad for anyone who passed on this, and is now experiencing FOMO. The most recent Ebay sale of a carded Taym went for $65.

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