By: Dominic Jones
Hasbro announced that Star Wars will be the latest of their licenses to join the "Hero Mashers" line of figures. The announcement was made to by Forbes who also spoke with Hasbro Vice President of Global Brand Strategy and Marketing Adam Biehl, about the new line of toys. The main feature of the Hero Mashers is that the figures are suppose to be able to be taken a part and mixed in with parts from other characters to create a new character. For example, see the image below for how the Avengers were re-created as one character,
Biehl told Forbes,
"Because kids play over the top in their minds so why not give them some big over the top features to play with? We show these heroes, you know kids see the lighter sides of these heroes in the animation and even parts of the movies, so we’re leaning in to that part of it, where they like to have fun, they like the funny faces and they play like kids play. The research gave us a lot of confidence, and certainly the point of sales results were there, so that inspired us to then say what’s next? And of course what’s next is we want to expand this to the most popular entertainment brand in the boys action space so we launched with Transformers in the Summer and, as you know, we’ll be expanding in 2015 with both Jurassic World and Star Wars."
I think it's pretty clear that this is not really a collector oriented line, and definitely geared more towards the kids. While I likely won't be picking any up, I can see their value for bringing kids into the franchise and if they get kids to be creative with Star Wars (or Marvel, etc.) then that's a good thing!
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