One of the surprise announcements out of SDCC 2011 for Mattel was the discontinuation of DC Universe’s distribution to retail in the form of connect n’ collect/build-a-figure waves. No more build-a-figures would be offered at retail and instead the line would shift to more popular character selections shipped on a unique schedule. That left a hole for MattyCollector.com to fill by selling the figures of characters the line had not yet gotten to along with the more obscure character selections that tend not to do well with retail, but are popular among collectors.

  

In theory, this wasn’t a bad idea. Mattel set up a 9 month subscription that would feature nine monthly figures starting in April of 2012. There would also be three quarterly oversized figures and one club exclusive oversized figure as well. The latter, of which, would be decided by online fan poll based on a selection of revealed characters including, but not limited to, Black Lantern Swamp Thing and Shaggy Man.

The linch pin of this subscription, though, was that a specific number of subscriptions would need to be sold to make it viable. Mattel setup a thermometer to keep track of the relative number of subscriptions on MattyCollector.com to give people an informed view of how close they were to the goal.

Read more about the state of the subscription after the jump.
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Take a deep breath, MOTU fans. Apparently, MOTU Classics Roboto’s shoulders are backwards. And they’ve been like that for months and noone noticed until today. Today, being 4 days before Roboto is set to go on sale at MattyCollector.com.

The images in this post are comparing pictures from SDCC 2010 to photos of the original Roboto figure, on which, this Classics figure is based. The Four Horsemen, who sculpted the new figure, are known for their attention to detail. Based on this, the way this quality control error was found was by the mismatching of the circuitry.

Now that we have established the facts, lets take a moment to reflect. This happened once before on the first release of He-Man, the first figure in the line. I pointed out the differences in the video comparison I made of the original release and the corrected re-issue. Many who bought the original figure swapped the shoulders themselves. This won’t be possible with Roboto because the arms are not removable from the new torso.

Some of the Club Eternia subscribers are very upset because they were asked to blindly pay for figures without knowing what they would be getting. Now they are being forced to accept a figure with known quality control problems. Many who chose not to subscribe and instead to purchase their figures individually on the site have stated that they will be skipping this release due to the newfound error, in addition to the statement that Roboto’s reissue will have both hands removable (though I cannot find where this has been stated). In the MattyCollector “Ask Matty” forum, someone suggested bumping Roboto to a later month to fix this error and to use one of the bonus figures to fill the slot in the meantime. This is the scenario exactly described for the existence of the bonus figures. It seems pretty late in the game for that though. I’m sure that these misassembled figures are already in Digital River’s warehouse waiting to be shipped to subscribers. If comments in forums and blogs are any indication, many subscribers will be returning their Robotos to make it clear to Mattel that this is not acceptable.

On one hand, noone noticed it for over three months, on the other, that second detachable hand sure is a neat incentive to wait for the reissue.

Source: He-man.org [via PoeGhostal]