AdrienVeidt wrote:
Were UK sales that poor? They never got enough of a presence Stateside for that question to be legitimately asked, imho.
Well, I have a friend in the UK with whom I trade figures with a lot. Recently I asked him if he could get me another Into The Dalek set, and he was able to do it for under 10 pounds. I also managed to get a bunch of Spacesuit Docs, a second Mutant Scoop Dalek, and some other sundry characters which were on sale at TRU.
I still think they sold fairly well in the US at the locations that had them. By the time TRU here was forced to clearance them all that was left were Zygons. (at least at the three TRUs in my area). Walgreens sold out of all of the daleks almost instantly, and by the time *they* went to clearance, it seemed to just be Amy Ponds and the odd 12th Doc here and there. Barnes & Noble sold theirs fairly quickly at the locations near me. (They had the green-coat Doc/Gold Dalek wave). WhoNA has had no problem selling *most* of the figures, but they also have a few that seem to be sticking around.
So I don't really know what the story is. I think the main problem is that the BBC refuses to give the toy company any of the designs ahead of time, so by the time we got figures from a given episode, it was often more than a year later. They really should have pre-made them and dribbled them out as the season progressed, but the Beeb is just too tight-fisted. It's hard to know the real story because nobody says anything. Al Dewar is gone from twitter, and really I was shocked that CO responded to my tweet. They showed stuff more than a year ago that we've never seen, such as the black Dalek Patrol ship and of course 8th Doc and Missy. There was also the prototype console room time zone which never materialized (no pun intended).
I have a feeling that they will go back to the occasional release in the wrong scale (aka 5.5") and that will be it.