Monday, November 24, 2014

Winter 2014 Starts: Shopping Season Seems Low-key

With Thanksgiving getting ready to start up...
Holiday Hype is really underway in malls & Blackfriday sales (in the USA) are waving the ads all around. A few expected winter things have happened already:

New PJs appear:
Walmart got in (at least) 2 sets of Sonic PJs, one Boom. The Boom set is the first reported incident of Boom clothing at retail. Remember: the Boom news from the start of all that hype was that there would be a selection of themed clothing, so I guess this is just the first to roll out. It's pretty busy/tacky/typical, so it blends in with other usual kids' sleepwear.
Kids Pjs always seem to show up with new merch around the holidays.

Toys R Us Coupons:
If you're on their email or mailing list, expect a few 15s or 20% s to come out. If you wanted a pricey er Boom item, the 'good on any non sale item in the store' coupon can take the edge off it. Usually TRU does 1 or 2 sales a week on a 'genre' of things, like "all Lego" or "all bikes" but Sonic does not have a large enough category to warrant anything like that.

With the Boom game, show & comic already out, the holiday season will just have to show how well it actually does. This will, of course, influence how much stuff gets released & how long the designs stick around for. Buzz on the game is currently not that great, the show is getting good word of mouth but the network may still be mistreating it. Example: if the game doesn't do well & the show is just okaaay, you won't see tons of clothes.

Holiday Shoppers in Minnesota?
If there's Mall of America there, a store (Tomodachi) will have the Sonic the Fighters Arcade cabinet in there. Is the other still in Vegas, or did this place buy it out of there? There is quite the limited number of consoles that contain this game, this long after release. It's 1 .25 per play, which feels high, but it's a captive audience vs a rare game......so they can probably get away with it. Still, it's an interesting bit of news, and plenty of fans may make their way to this largest mall in the USA.

New page:
Boom misc goods: finally got 3 things that didn't fit in with anything else...so new page.

What about Jazwares?
This question is on a lot of figure-fans minds especially with regards to holiday wish-lists. There has (unfortunately) been no info with them since the SBK 2pack. I know people want new characters or something cool to ask for at Christmas, but I also kind of doubt anyone is being allowed to release anything to steal steam from Boom.

Next week:
Nothing really came in this week, so the update was kind of small, and cleared out a couple of older items. (G Sonic book, Bokkun) Hopefully the winter line for clothing will show up soon.