I just thought I'd share this message with you from the group regarding distribution frustrations :-) It's a long, long thread, but this message is typical. It's interesting to me how things have changed in the last several years when it comes to toys being plopped around in other countries. For example, I doubt we'd see anything like a finnish exclusive these days, which is a shame.

I suppose we're all nuts ;-) But we eat this kind of thing up.... we've got all kinds of things on the burner.

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Message: 6         
   Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:14:08 +0100 (MET)
   From: Martin 
Subject: RE: Re: My Tribute to the Incompetence of Hasbro & US Retailers


> The Action Man brand is still running strongly here in Europe as well
> though.

Sorry to butt in here, but it's a bit frustrating for me to see, how
people from Europe even *themselves* catagorise local toy selection in
their respective national toy stores to be the exact same all around the
European countries.

I haven't seen G.I.Joe sold locally here for about 15 years or so (LEGO
sells well for apparent reasons), and even though I would agree that
Action Man is doing well, we (the nordic TF fans) have had a long hard
"struggle" with Hasbro Nordic to pursuade them to carry Transformers.

Energon is still on the shelves here in Denmark, but only a select few
stores and only wave 1 and/or 2. We never got the whole of Armada lot, and
RiD never made it; Beast Wars (pre-TM) did fairly well, but came 2 years
after the US debut, and the last we saw of that was 1st wave BM in 2000.

Hasbro Nordic has been very reluctant in releasing the line here,
especially since (at the time) they considered the BW cartoon way too
violent, and therefore there weren't any corresponding marketing from
other media to cross-sell the line for them. Now we have the Energon
cartoon in a dubbed version, but practically no toys for kids to buy...
the line is dying here again.

And because of insane retail prices (almost US $18 for a basic and US $25 
for a Deluxe) it's really no wonder they can't sell it. I haven't bought a
TF locally for more than a year now because it's cheaper to buy them
abroad for me -- I usually always supported the local offerings (in order
to help the line survive in some way), but can't really be bothered
anymore, especially from an economical point of view. Transformers are
pretty much dead outside the US and Japan (maybe not either in Canada and
the UK?).

What also has something to say is that Hasbro Nordic is a direct
subsidiary of Hasbro UK, so Nordic will only have the same selection of
stock to choose from (regardless of toyline), that the UK branch have
decided to sell in their own market. Nordic then supplies the whole of
Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland(?) and Denmark) -- and even
then still manages to release different toys in each of those countries.

Sigh.
Martin, who's used to the TF line dying regularly...

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So much to know, so much to catalog......