HASBRO & JP3 - WHY THINGS CHANGED
By Dan, Friday 28 July 2006 at 11:13 PM :: #304
Forum member 'Triceratops 123' recently posted a very interesting article (written by himself with help from an ex-Hasbro employee) that details just what went on in the days right before the doors closed at Kenner. This in turn lead to the eventual scale issues that we're all too familar with in the JP3 line. Here's what he had to say:
"It all starts with Chaos Effect. Sales are less than expected, and the Night Hunter series is cancelled because of this. The Jurassic Park series becomes "somewhat of a thorn in Hasbro's eye".
In 2000, Star Wars Episode One toys were overproduced. Sales were low and Hasbro had to downsize. The victim was the Kenner department in Cincinatti. 100 people were transferred, 400 were fired. Amongst these 400 was the Jurassic Park design team (not just JP, they also designed Batman amongst other toy lines) , who had just started the very early concepts for Jurassic Park///. Now that there wasn't a design team for Jurassic Park anymore, Hasbro assigned it to their Star Wars people, who scaled the humans to be in size with Star Wars figures, and made the style of the toys similar to the ones from Episode II.
This is, in a nutshell, why the scale and style is so different from 2001 onwards. The employee that I've had contact with is indeed one of the fired people, and he helped me on detailing the story and pointed out few mistakes on my account, but my research results were pretty much correct when I put them together."
So we can all blame it on George Lucas eh? Regardless of how it all came down, it does provide a nice behind the scenes look at just what was going on during that time. We hope to bring you more of these articles in the future and create a somewhat comprehensive look at the history of the Jurassic Park line.