Hasbro's Marvel Legends Brand Team Attempts To Dance Around The New Non-Plastic Packaging Problem

Last week during Hasbro's Marvel Legends live-stream they showed off the packaging for their Spider-Man 60th Anniversary subline of figures which no longer contained any kind of clear plastic windows that allows you to see what is inside.



This "no-plastic" packaging initiative is something that clearly was handed down to these brand-teams from the top of Hasbro's corporate structure and was originally announced back in 2019 as an effort for the company to be more "environmentally friendly".

Now to be fair, from an environmental stand-point, removing plastic from the packaging isn't a bad thing. Product packaging is something most people just throw away and the plastics even when you put the garbage in a recycle can is often said to just end up in some landfill. Landfills that are filled with plastic is definitely not good for the environment. I point this out because I've seen on more than one occasion people try and say why does it matter if the packaging has plastic when the figures themselves are made of plastic? Well the difference is most people when they buy an action figure don't actually throw away that plastic action figure, and therefore it doesn't just end up in a landfill some place.

Anyway getting back to the issue at hand, saying many collectors weren't thrilled with the idea of no longer being able to see whats inside the box with these new Spider-Man figures is an understatement. Last week whether it was Marvel Legends Facebook groups, message boards or other places on social media, many fans quickly took to the net to express their dislike for the new packaging. Honestly I think the new packaging had more people upset than word of the recent price increases.

There are two main and legitimate reasons why collectors are fearful of not being able to see whats inside the box before buying an action figure, at least when it comes to items one buys at physical retail stores.

The first reason is that they want to see the product they are buying in order to check it for quality control issues. Now when we say quality control, this can include anything such as paint blemishes, crooked eyes or a figure having two left feet. Being these things are mass produced at overseas factories where it's near impossible to check every single product before it makes its way to the retail shelves, having a figure pop up here and there with these kinds of issues is not super uncommon.

The second reason and probably the most important one is making sure the figure you are buying hasn't fallen prey to the dreaded figure swapper. This is when some pathetic individual buys a figure, takes it home where they then carefully remove the figure from the packaging and replace it with some old figure no one wants.They then return it to the store in order to get a refund. Because most retail employee's who work those return counters at places like Walmart and Target have no clue whats really supposed to be inside the package, they just except the return and eventually the product is put back on the shelves to be resold.

So if you have packaging where you can no longer see what's inside, not only can you not really check the item for possible QC issues, you don't really know if your actually going to end up with the figure you think you are buying. Now if your buying your figures online neither of these things are really an issue, and when it comes to the Spider-Man figures shown last week, those are part of a sub-line being sold as Fan-Channel exclusives which means they are primarily only sold online.

So the big question remained, would Hasbro be moving to this completely windowless style like we saw last week for all their Marvel Legends releases? Initially I thought the answer would be no. While I felt they would remove the plastic, I did not think they would completely remove the windows. I figured they would adopt a similar style of packaging as we have seen them use for other lines such as their Transformers Legacy figures or Fortnite.



While the windows are smaller and have no plastic covering them, you can still tell what is inside so at the very least you don't have to worry about if a figure swapper as gotten to them or not.

Then I started listening to recent interviews the Hasbro Marvel Legends brand team was doing with various YouTube influencers this week where they were asked about the packaging dilemma, and the answers they were giving as they tried to dance around the issue were not all that encouraging.







In the Dan Who interview the topic comes up around the 10:20 mark. In the erivera94 interview the topic comes up at the 15:00 minute mark. In the Xmanny87 interview the subject comes up much sooner at the 2:33 mark.

From these interviews it does sound more and more like the plan is to go completely windowless with most of their figures by next year with perhaps a few exceptions like the Retro Cardback stuff.

Now listening to the Marvel Legends brand-team members trying to stick to their corporate talking points in addressing the questions about the packaging knowing full well how upset many in the fandom have become over this issue is somewhat comical if not sad to watch. On the one hand you can't help but feel a little bad for them knowing they don't have a lot of control over the decisions handed down to them from above and now tasked with the job of trying to go out and sell this as a good thing to people who know it's not. Never-the-less, at the end of the day it looks like it is the customer who will have to be inconvenienced the most by these decisions if Hasbro truly does move forward with removing all windows from their action figure packaging. I'm just glad I buy 98% of my action figures online these days and I open most of my stuff.