Star Wars Has Officially Lost Its HasLab Bragging Rights

The Star Wars brand was used to launch Hasbro's crowdfunding platform, HasLab. This gave Star Wars bragging rights, and to a degree, ownership of HasLab. It's a Star Wars thing that the other brands are borrowing. We're good sharers. The Holy Grail Sail Barge is that ship that launched 1,000 campaigns. The Razor Crest set the record for the fastest campaign to back, in just over 24 hours, and at the time, set the record for the most backers. Star Wars was the king of HasLab, but not anymore.

Marvel's Galactus dethroned the Razor Crest for the most backers. Then the Black Series Rancor failed to back. The current G.I. Joe Classified H.I.S.S. campaign is going to shatter the record for fastest to back in just under nine hours. Finally, The Black Series Force FX Elite Lightsaber is most likely going to be the second consecutive campaign failure. The Star Wars brand's claim to HasLab is gone. I have now backed as many successful G.I. Joe campaigns as I have Star Wars campaigns, and I'm not even an active G.I. Joe collector (I was once, though).

Since this site focusses on the Vintage Collection, the community here will likely try to blame Black Series fans for the recent Star Wars campaign failures, but that is unfair. We can't fault TBS fans for failing to support things that no one was asking for. TBS fans have been asking for a Millennium Falcon cockpit with the full LED and electronics treatment, an X-Wing, and to a lesser extent, an AT-ST, which would seem to be comparable to the current H.I.S.S. in terms of overall size. Until one of those is tried, we can't declare HasLab dead for TBS. What's bothering me about the last two Star Wars campaigns is that it feels like the motivation was to satisfy some other entity, and not the fans, particularly with Reva's Lightsaber. If I had to guess (and this is purely a guess), it was done to appease the licensor and not for the fans.

If fans are going to fund these things, there needs to be much more of a grassroots feel to them. If my conspiracy theory is correct and the equivalent of inter-corporate politics were at play, that's just gross. HasLab was launched with the promise of being for dream projects. Please note that "dream" does not necessarily mean "big". I'm a little concerned that the two have become conflated. A dream is any product that would never come about otherwise, and there are plenty of those big and small. Star Wars needs to quickly return to a true fan request soon, so we can restore the brand's former HasLab glory.

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