Toy Season Is Here, Sort Of

You may not know it, but you're in the midst of the big toy season for 2009 already.

The big Holiday Aisle Resets are going to start pretty soon-- as such, lots of new toys are already hitting some stores. Target's resets should be coming up in July/August, and Wal-Mart... is Wal-Mart. Nobody knows how the Hell they function, other than new stuff seems to magically appear on pegs from time to time. Hasbro is shipping out scores of new Star Wars merch, Playmobil's about due for some new shipments any day now, LEGO has a ton of recent new Agents and Star Wars releases, it's good times.

It's also clearance season, depending on where you shop. You might be able to snag some good bargains as stores drop dead weight-- so yeah, you're on your own there. As an added bonus to all these new toy shipments, Comic-Con is in July, which basically means everything you could possibly want to have announced, minus most of your wildest fantasies, will be previewed in San Diego shortly. I'll be going with my corporate overlords at Entertainment Earth to report for their blog and podcast, as well as on 16bit.com and GalacticHunter.com as always.

The next big line to drop is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which will be this coming weekend. In that line, the biggest toy will be The Pit playset, which I got a glimpse at in New York for Toy Fair. It's huge. Hasbro has suddenly found religion when it came to $100+ SKUs after the success of the Butterscotch Pony and, I can only assume, the AT-TE and huge Millennium Falcon probably helped.

The other giant mofo out of Hasbro this year is Constructicon Devastator, a $100-$150 gift set with six vehicles which become limbs of the large mega-bot. Interestingly, each limb cannot become an individual robot. Even more interestingly, Hasbro and Takara-Tomy are releasing a miniature 7-piece Devastator which features all robots with individualized robot modes in addition to the vehicle and combined mode. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Oh, and I'll be seeing Aziz Ansari tape his next special this week, or at least I got tickets. Watch Comedy Is Dead for more on that unless there's some wacky gag order.

Target Revises Scanners

While on my travels today, I am going through different cities and made a fun discovery for toy fans-- Target now has updated price scanners. There are two models you may have seen-- one with a tiny LCD screen, and another with a larger screen and number buttons 0-9. The latter allows you to punch in various codes to check the stockroom.

A new third version has shown up, and here's the kicker-- the screen is positively huge, and it lets you search for things. Like, I can punch in "Transformers" and it will show me every DPCI with Transformers stuck to it. No joke. I was trying to find the as-of-yet unseen Transformers Combiner gift sets, but was not able to do so-- but you will be able to find Hasbro Wolverine toys and some other stuff I haven't yet seen talked up much.

So this holiday season, be on the lookout for this. Given how much data is leaked via DPCI, like new names and new secret products, I can't imagine a greater gift to the toy collector and rabid consumer this holiday season. Thanks, Target, for reminding me why you get more foot traffic from me than other plastic retailers. (And "thanks" for having those very expensive exclusives showing up today.)