We knew going into last Friday's livestream that we needed to set our expectations low. At seemingly the last minute, the launch of the next Vintage Collection HasLab was delayed until a future date. Having this insight going into the event should have provided some armor for our feelings, but...it didn't. The community is at its lowest point since 2020. I think part of the problem is the inter-scale rivalry. The Black Series certainly got a lot of love during the stream. It was hard not to be jealous.
But if we wind the clock back a little bit, Black Series fans were feeling pretty low. TVC was getting some exciting reveals and pipelines, such as the E-Wing and Blurrg, while TBS was getting a rock for Halloween. Do you remember when Black Series got a sad pipeline of a 2025 Thrawn retool, and then shortly thereafter Vintage Collection got the news of an upcoming HasLab (which is something that definitely triggers the bigger scale collectors)? It actually had some TBS fans on social media saying that TVC has leapfrogged them into the position of Hasbro's favorite child:
Of course that hasn't happened. As John Miko provided in THIS ANALYSIS, TVC is definitely riding TBS's coattails. In actuality, the reason for the poor showing of Black Series in live streams earlier this year is likely due to the media shuffling. TVC was probably going to get one or two Skeleton Crew figures at the beginning of the year because that's all we get. But that still left all the standard repacks and retools to reveal. Conversely, TBS probably had an entire wave of 100% all new from the ground up and from the head down new new new "we could probably get away with some retools, but [expletive deleted] it, our tooling budget is so huge we might as well blow it on some unnecessary 100% all new" figures from Skeleton Crew. When that media got delayed, it left a huge void which was felt hard by the TBS community.
Hopefully that's all we're collectively experiencing right now in the TVC community. Maybe the HasLab delay left a huge void for us the way the media delay did for TBS fans, and we're all feeling it. Perhaps that HasLab is going to be supported by a big ecosystem of product and synergistic releases that will wow us, and the delay created a huge vacuum that is sucking in our spirits. What I'm saying is that we can't really pass judgement until that HasLab is revealed (which can't come soon enough from a morale standpoint, Hasbro). If it's supported by a lot of other product that shows true investment by Hasbro, we can relax. If all it turns out to be is another opportunity for us to fund our own product with minimal risk on Hasbro's part, then we can get our Irish up.