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The horror. They retool for Chuckles, but not for SE v2.
But only the head. To date, MC has not tooled anything but new heads for figures as those molds are simply the cheapest to make. (And they can put multiple parts on the molds which is why figures like Red Dog and Doc have painted heads rather than heads casted in plastic that is closer to their intended skin colors. Only Hasbro has retooled entire figures (Mutt, Lady Jaye (though there was no reason for that since they had the original mold in '97....), Crimson Guard, Cobra Trooper/Officer, etc.) though not all of those made sense since Hasbro found things like the original Cobra Trooper/Officer chest molds after they resculpted it.
In some cases, though, I suspect that it is actually incrementally cheaper to cast a new head (Red Dog) than it is to break out the mold that likely exists. If you're already dropping 10K to mold Mercer and Taurus, it doesn't cost much more to add Red Dog to the mix and that way you only have to put one tooling into production rather than an entirely new mold.
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when they ran a test of the "Iron Grenadier" mold they were sent the test shot and it was actually IG Destro
Which they then didn't use because they didn't think collectors liked the mold and we got the less than stellar CGI Destro that likely cost us a CGI in the TRU 6 pack and brought another Firefly to retail.... Only after collectors complained about how they liked that mold did they brought it back in '06 for Overlord.
I think that if someone had the financial incentive to really seek out these molds (meaning they had the money, gumption and distribution network in place) they could find some amazing pieces and likely produce some high quality figures and offer them at cheap prices. But, I don't know if the market exists for a 20K run of ARAH style figures these days. Done right, it probably does for a few select molds and characters. But, beyond that, the marketplace is somewhat limited unless you're a big box retailer.
