More and more, I'm convinced thath the guys who made the Star Trek line such a fiasco at Playmates back in the late 1990s went to work for Mattel...

http://toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=10&itemid=14806

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Yeah I read that.

I know I'd be pissed if I bought the Convention exclusive set for Gleek only to have Mattel tell me "We never said you were guaranteed Gleek".

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Yeah I was just reading about that art book they sold. One of the guys on the deign team wrote on the Facebook page a supposed explaination for why things were handled the way they were. They claimed that they had to set a limit for the amount of books sold and the price had to be set so that they could have a nice sum of money to donate to a charity they were raising money for.

Ok, that doesn't answer any of the stuff that people had issues with, but then it also makes Mattel look worse. So they have a charity they were raising money for but yet they limited the product they were selling? That makes sense if you are reluctantly raising money and ant to limit how much you donate.

Yeah all around Mattel is just not handling any of their properties well. I don't want and didn't want the Wonder Twins. I'll admit the packaging was cool, but I'm not a Wonder Twin fan. However there are fans out thee that wanted these. It just really makes no sense to have handled that in the way they have.

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That is seriously messed-up. For every step forward, Mattel takes two steps back. It's becoming pretty obvious that Mattel needs some new management that understands the basic economics of business. This is worse than their handling of the 2002 HeMan line.

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(* there would have been a rather obvious killing spree in Mattel-land had I been a victim of the screw-up...)

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I was one of the folks that got "LASER BLAST" out of the Gleek at SDCC. I got in line on Friday (with a fast pass) got up to the registers with one guy in front of me and they announce they are out of the Twins. They say they are bringing up more from the back and I can pay for mine and come back and pick them up later. I say sure, pay for the 2 sets I needed (1 for me, 1 for my comic shop guy) and go to the panel I needed to cover for a podcast. I come back a little over an hour later and ask for my sets. The guy at the booth takes my receipt, gets my boxes of Twins and as he's bringing them to me another guy announced they are sold out of Gleeks. Needless to say I was pissed. I asked if they had any more in their trucks for the next day, they say maybe and check back in the morning or I could get a refund. I come back Saturday morning and no Gleeks AND no refunds. The girl at the booth says "we were telling people that we were out of Gleeks blah blah blah" I say no you didn't, not when I was here and you're full of "LASER BLAST" (basically). I ask if I can get a refund, and this same girl who told me on Friday that I COULD get a refund, says no I never told you that, all sales are final blah blah blah. I use some strong language to express my frustration and leave.

I did go back on Sunday to see if they found any more and was told no they didn't. I was going to make someone give me the ones out of the display cases they had but I was told a Mattel rep came and got the figures out of the case earlier. Then to find out they actually DID have a case of them "buried" (read: hidden by some temp hoping to sell them later) only fueled my anger even more. I'm writing a hand-written letter and sending it to Mattel explaining the situation and my disgust with the way their "employees" treated me and others at the convention.

So not only was I lied to multiple times but I got "LASER BLAST" out of the Gleeks they supposedly had when I paid for my figures but were sold out of an hour later. Like most people, I assumed the Twins and Gleeks were either packaged together or in the same cases or something so when they said they were sold out I took that to mean they were out of both and getting both from the back. But I was wrong and apparently expecting the temps they hire to run these sales booths to have some slight idea what the "LASER BLAST" they are doing is asking too much.

I paid waaaaaay too much for a Gleek on ebay today. So I will eventually have my space monkey but I'm not at all happy about it.

Unless they produce something truly epic next year for SDCC I will NOT be buying from them at the convention. And I'm going to let them know that fact as well.

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So here's a question - what are fans to do about situations like this? Is this just the way that it is and actions like this are just the price you pay for being a purchaser of Mattel products?

If a person was disgruntled about this type of action, what course of action do they have? Write a letter? Post on message boards. Create anti-Mattel websites/Facebook pages? Stop purchasing Mattel products?

I don't know. Just curious. Like C5 said, this reminds me so much of when I was collecting Playmates Star Trek figures in the 90's. I remember how completly aggravating it was to feel like I was being jerked around by them. I mean, all I wanted to do was purchase one of every figure.

I guess my ultimate question is - we live in the information age. Collectors/buyers/fans are connected more than in any other time in history. Is there some way for people to use that to their advantage to see a change in Mattel? I certainly don't see Mattel giving everyone a free monkey, but maybe incidents like this can be changed in the future.

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sue for fraud. they have all that stuff posted online and then didn't deliver through with their promise. it's very petty & lame to do over a toy, but hey if they're going to "LASER BLAST" on people and treat them like that, well that's very unlike Mattel, given how well-articulated their press releases are.

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There are probably enough people who didn't get Gleek at SDCC to form up a class-action lawsuit...

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Here is what bugs me about it. I don't go to SDCC because of the crowds. There are lines for everything. I'm fine with whatever trickles out afterward.

But people who did brave the crowds, who did stand in line, who paid their hard earned money, got shafted for no apparent reason. There was no mention of the attendee bonus figure being highly limited. People who waited in line weren't told their set didn't include the expected bonus figure.

And sure enough, plenty of Gleeks appear on ebay.

Realisitcally a hidden case of the Gleeks wouldn't satisfy everyone who missed out. Unless you paid by credit card, which I don't even know if you could have done for this, ther eis no way to prove you get your set at the con. So Mattel could have put it up on their webstore, had it crash, and still only had a few people snag theirs.

The only way to have fixed the problem was to not create the problem in the first place. Make Gleek part of the set. Problem solved.

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Preach oooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, Brutha Pluv!

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But, that would make sense... and that's banned in El Segundo....

Edit: Hell, they don't even give a damn when people create threads on public forums and rip on them for handling things so poorly.

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