Opinion: MOTUC - End of line

The end has been in sight for a couple of years now. We all knew it was coming, but 2015 is officially the end of Masters of the Universe Classics.

This came as a bit of a shock since there have always been promises from Mattel that if the 2015 sub sold well then it would continue into 2016, though maybe in a reduced form. Calling it THE END is a bit more dramatic than that and hence people were immediately a bit worried that figures they'd hoped to see in 2016 and beyond would now never been seen at all. It seems, however, that in the big push to get subscribers for 2015 Mattel are simply ignoring, for the moment, anything beyond.

Of course the 'end' claim is somewhat justified, since by then we'll have all the vintage 80s figures updated into Classics. Once the Big Guns were gone, hitting a production minimum was always going to be problematic. I suppose Mattel would rather go out with a bang - 2015 is almost certainly guaranteed to go through - rather than promote a 2016 line and see it fail.

On the Matty Collector forums things have been clarified, at least a little. There are still chances of a 2016 line of some kind, but while Mattel are certainly thinking about how to do that, all they're willing to admit to at the moment is a concentration on 2015.

Today, there's been a new reveal: that as well as needing a minimum number of subscribers for the line to go through, there's also going to be a maximum.

PANIC! SIGN UP IMMEDIATELY BEFORE YOU MISS OUT!!!

Well, actually no. You see what Mattel didn't mention in their announcement is that the maximum is 10% higher than the number of subscribers for 2014. Does anyone honestly think that that many more people are going to sign up for a line in it's dying days?

I'm going to be sad when Classics is over. I'm going to be sad that the New Adventures characters won't be finished off or that some of my Filmation favourites will likewise be missing. But I won't be sad that I won't have to deal with Digital River and international phone calls to do simple things like update credit card information. I won't be sad at the ambiguous and gossip-generating information Mattel gives out.

All good things...