You know, I would have argued against this as recently as last year. But two things have happened since then.

1.) I was in a store where a family was browsing Batman figures and the mom asked one of the two boys if he wanted the Batman figure that came with the motorcycle. The boy said: "No, Ma! Tavon has that one and when you take him off his bike he can only stand like this..."

At this point the boy was squatting bow legged in the middle of the aisle.

So his mom said: "We'll what if we get this one and the one that's standing straight up?"

And the boy grabbed a six-inch Batman and said: "I want this one, cause he can stand and sit on a motorcycle. Tavon showed me."

To which his mom immediately replied: "Nuh-uh, that figure is more than ten dollars and I know any motorcycle he can ride is gonna be more than twenty. Come on. We're gonna go look at the DS games."

2.) After witnessing this exchange, I went home and asked my seven year old, who has played almost exclusively with JLU-style figures to this point, if he really liked the figures he played with. He took a break from playing Lego Batman on our X-Box and told me he didn't like playing with any of his figures anymore because they were boring. So he was just going to play with his Legos and X-Box games until he was old enough to play with the kind of figures I play with.

This actually made me sad, and I immediately started parting out customs I could make from fodder for him.

we watch a friends kid from time to time, who basically said the same thing, he looked forward to being old enough to play with toys like the ones i have. Made me kind of sad.

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No, Mattel makes you and your boys sad. Mattel are the trolls of the toy industry.

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Of course 5 PoA figures are boring compared to the full motion of a GI Joe.

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When I was a kid, I had already been playing with Micronauts for about 6 months before Star Wars figures came out. I remember back then being slightly disappointed with the SW figures only having 5 POA. When Action Force originally came out (more on that this weekend ), I was disappointed again with the 5 POA. Then ARAH came out. I was in heaven, even being in my mid-teens by then. ("What's the point of beingt grown up if you can't be childish sometimes" - The Fourth Doctor) Figures were fun again. I could even get some of the Joes in my old Micronauts vehicles. I could pose them without looking like they were doing a Nazi salute. They could hold guns. I guess all that has coloured my attitude to articulation.

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LOL!

Spin, my son is 5 and he has already gone through some of that. Now, he's enough of a Star Wars fan, he'll play with those a lot, whether or not they are ultra articualted. But for anything else, he only wants it if I made it. I've made duplicates of many of my Bat-verse customs just for him. And even at 5, he puts the ones I made in a separate case from the others when he's done playing with them.

And he also loves Lego and the Lego videogames. I think the videogames (and the high end licenses) made that line something special. As I think you've pointed out before, Hasbro/Joe could learn a few lessons from that. and I don't mean via copycat building block toys. I mean marketing via high quality video games as a means of getting the toys to sell as well.

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I was thinking fix the hips but yes these would be quite helpful.

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Armored Superman?
http://toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=10&itemid=19543

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Well... One armored arm, anyway. The rest of the figure is largely identical to the other Supes, but in red.

I guess it might be neat for those among us who're skilled at hacking detailing off bad figures to transplant them onto better figures... Maybe as some Cobra La armor bits or something...
But beyond that, bleh.

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