Luke, the line will change a little, especially in the choosing of the Series exclusive product, if Target happens to be the one taking it. You WANT high-profile characters on the shelf, like Koozebane Kermit, at the same time as Link or Julius. That's why Koozebane was bumped up so FAST. In fact, we may have set a record for tooling and production on that figure to get it out for Series 4. It was not sent to the factory until the other S4 tooling was almost done.
Regarding your other comment. As far as how to plan the line and take advice or suggestions that might be too fan heavy...it's always been give and take in the implementation of any suggestion. You want to throw some nuggets out there and at the same time try to plan the line to be general consumer friendly.
It basically works like this. There are the following factors that go into the planning of the line, in no particular order:
1. What do the fans seem to want to satisfy their unique perspective?
2. What do I want to do based on my own knowledge of the characters and Muppet universe (which has grown by leaps and bounds since S1) and my perspective as a product developer in an action figure market?
3. What do the people I work with want or need to see?
4. What does Henson want to see?
All this then gets filtered together and then factored with timing, budget, marketing trends, stuff like that, and the line is created. A great deal of it is intuitive.
Most of the time you would be suprised how many people say, here and elsewhere, that "This would be cool to see, but it is a little obscure". Most people know on their own whether something would be a smart move or a bad move as far as weighing the line too heavily with obscure stuff. They have their own sense of "development" especially since everyone generally gets to see a lot of inner workings of how lines evolve.
Remember how frustrating it used to be? How people got so mad when stuff slipped on the schedule, got re-arranged, canceled, postponed, altered in some way? But now most people who have been around here since the beginning have recognized that it is a part of the product development process. How long has it been really? I'm talking from way back when the forum here was a Delphi forum and I started posting there.
How do I make a good call as opposed to a bad one? I don't. I've done both with this line in my opinion. But that's life. But as we move forward, you try to learn from the mistakes you might have made, or thought you did, previously and get it right the next time. It's an evolution.
I still believe a Kooz playset would have done well...under the conditions that existed when we made the decision to make one. At that time, the Lab had come out and had been doing very, very well. Then we planned out one playset per series. But then when Animal came out the playsets started dipping in their potential so we had to rethink the playset per series ideology. So what I am saying is sometimes you can make a decision that seems correct at the time and then turns out to be weak under different conditions.
Ultimately? Worked out for the best, as the current Koozebane SKU is pretty tight.
Sorry...didn't mean to turn this into a novel!
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