First off, let me explain why I say that TPM's merchandising failed. To be honest, TPM generated an enormous amount of merchandising revenue. But as EP2 gets closer and closer you're probably going to see references to TPM's "failure" at retail. In a sense people who say and write that are both wrong and right. If you take your typical blockbuster and see how much revenue it generates through merchandising sources like toys, clothing, etc. you might come up with a number like $100M. (I'm just using $100M as a starting point for my argument. I have no idea what the actual number is.) Along comes the prequels and merchandisers start wetting their pants. Everyone and their mother begins desperately trying to get a piece of the action. Lucas, being one of the greatest if not greatest film maker/businessman Hollywood has ever seee, charges UNPRECEDENTED licesing fees for the prequels. All the merchandisers cave in one after another. They pay the piper and begin rolling out the merchandise in record numbers.

So what went wrong? Remember that $100M number I threw out earlier? I would guess that TPM probably doubled, maybe even tripled that number. So how can a film that generated so much money at retail be considered a flop!? Easy, GREEDY retailers never bothered to take into account what other retailers were doing. They never stopped to consider that moviegoers were only to be able to shell out only so much dough on TPM merchandise. A kid only has so much to spend. If he spends $20 bucks on action figures he's not going to spend another $20 on t-shirts, bed sheets, stickers, book bags, Applause statues, ceramic figures, Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken/Pizza Hut promos. There was simply TOO MUCH merchandise out there for TPM to support.

One area where I do have some level of expertise is SW toys. And that's a perfect example of where things went wrong. Out of a desperate fear of losing the SW license Hasbro gave GL whatever he wanted. Everything from stock to a few hundred million dollars. (The numbers were around $400-$600M.) So when TPM comes around they basically lost their minds. For the year of 1999 Hasbro produced around $700M worth of toys. They sold about $500M to retailers. That's not bad. Oh, who are we kidding, that's PHENOMENAL! There's only one problem with that scenario. Retailers only sold about $350 worth of SW toys. That means Toys R Us, Target, K-Mart, and locally owned comic book shops were stuck with over $150M of UNSOLD merchandise. Hell, most films would kill if they could even generate HALF that in toy sales. Giants like TRU have agreements in place where they can ship unsold merchandise back to Hasbro and get credit on future orders, but smaller retailers don't have that kind of clout. They got stuck with tons of merchandise that to this day they still haven't unloaded. I went by my local comic book shop today and they still have TPM toys from the spring and summer of 99 still gathering dust on their shelves.

By the time X-Mas of 99 rolled around fans and collectors were growing fed up with Hasbro and the lack of new SW toys. If Hasbro had produced $700M worth of new toys then why was it so hard to find a Holographic Sidious? Because retailers weren't ordering any new SW product. Why are you going to order anything new when you still had product on your shelves from back May and June? So people who had been collecting since 95 simply jumped ship. They went on ebay and sold off their collections or just simply stopped trying to buy anything. Some just decided to cut back and buy the occasional figure. I've stuck with it because it's one of my favorite aspects of SW but even stalwarths like me have seen ample evidence of collector apathy and frustration. If you look at toy aisle today you see a much more realistic amount of product on the shelves. And this leads me to why EP2 wont "fail".

Retailers and merchandisers now have some hard sales data to work with. They can look back at TPM sales and order and produce product accordingly. Figure lists for EP2 have already leaked out from Hasbro and you see a much more conservative effort from Hasbro. They'll make fewer figures and retailers will make more realistic orders. Everyone should do much better this time around. This generalization should extend to other areas of SW merchandise.

Before I finish I want to talk about the word "fail" again. Remember, when I say that TPM's merchandise failed I'm not saying TPM merchandise didn't sell well. I doubt any other film in 99 came even CLOSE to generating the kinds of numbers TPM did. What TPM didn't do was empty out wharehouses. (Anyone who's familiar with the Holo R2 fiasco knows what I'm talking about.) That's not TPM's fault. Retailers and merchandisers are to blame for making and ordering too much damn product.

You know there is one group that came out ahead of everybody else in regards to TPM's merchandise; GL and Llucasfilm. Why? They got paid ahead of time. Hell they got paid everytime a cash register rang up a SW item. They're getting paid everytime I buy a POTJ figure. And you know what? I say good for GL. He's not being greedy, he's being a smart businessman. No one put a gun to anyone's head and forced them to buy and produce so much SW stuff.