Recon Ravage Heralds The Return Of Mail-Away Exclusive Figures
The new NEST Global Alliance figures have a promotional item associated with them: Recon Ravage. But you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get one. First you buy the Bumblebee/Soundwave set to get the “Mission Guide” booklet, which has spots to attach two additional stickers from other figures. The stickers are buried inside specially reinforced packaging, so it would be very hard to cheat (not that I would).
Recon Ravage is a repaint of Movie Ravage with red and chrome highlights. It’s a nice deco, but not an homage or movie accurate. I’m not a huge fan of this mold, since it has no real vehicle mode, but it’s a limited edition Ravage so I’m drawn to it. The cool thing is that it’s the first Transformers mail-away promotion in decades. I remember sending off for the Omnibots when I was little. It was a thrill to get something rare in the mail, especially at that age.
I can see why we haven’t seen many mail-away promotions in the US though. The logistics of managing all of the entries and sending out all of the figures individually would be daunting. Hasbro mitigated this by outsourcing to another company. Another problem would be the short run of figures. It costs more to produce limited run figures, as we have seen with Botcon exclusives. Recon Ravage will be mass released abroad however, so it’s only limited in the US.
I’m surprised that Hasbro didn’t go the digital route. Every booklet filled out by hand will need to be entered by hand into the fulfillment system to be processed. If they had used unique number codes on each package, then people could have entered their own data online. This might have been open to cheating though, but unique codes have been used in computer software registration for a long time (and there is a lot of software pirating).
The figure should arrive in six to eight weeks. I’m tempted to get another one to keep in the package, since mail-away packaging tends to be minimal when compared to retail packaging. However, it might be easier to just wait and pick up the Canadian retail release on eBay later than to buy another NEST Alliance two-pack for the booklet. I’m sure this won’t be the last Ravage repaint though, since this is a popular character with the G1 crowd.
Similar Posts:
- Recon Ravage Makes History By Arriving In The Mail (2)
- I Love It When Target Restocks Their Transformers (4)
- Transformer Tow Trucks (3)
Recent Comments