It was announced at Toy Fair this past weekend that DC and Walmart have a new collaboration: exclusive blind-bag packaged Batman: Black and White mini-figures!
Produced by DC Collectibles, these are scaled down, preposed figurines based off of their evergreen Batman: Black and White statue line. DC Collectibles is also selling these figures in a seven piece box set that will feature a non-Batman character exclusive to that set. That set is not available at Walmart. Only the blind bag packaged figures are available there.
Series one features Batman as illustrated by the following talents:
-Amanda Conner
-Darwyn Cooke
-Jason Fabok
-Patrick Gleason
-Frank Quietly
-Dick Sprang
The fun thing is, these are out now! Walmart will get a new series every other month. So since series one came out in February, two will debut in April and three will rise in June.
I found a box of these tonight with each figure retailing for $4.98. I’m not a huge fan of the blind bag/box gimmick. I get why companies love it but it can really suck for consumers and absolutely eliminate their interest in a product line when they can’t get what they want with a modicum of reasonable time and effort.
The one benefit of blind bag/box items is when companies include a marking of some kind on the package so you can figure out what’s what inside. Among others, Mattel does this with their blind bag Imaginext figures (DC and non-DC flavors) by putting a different number on each figure’s bag so that you can…wait for it…actually know what you’re getting and get what you want! Boy howdy, satisfied customers; what a concept, huh? Sadly, DC Collectibles has elected to not follow that path for this line.
Going back to what I found: I thoroughly looked over the first bag I picked up (the box looked to be full, I surmise I was the first to look at it) and saw nothing to differentiate one package’s contents from the other as far as a marking anywhere on the package. So I threw a Batarang of Chance and picked three figures: all of them were the Frank Quitely Batman. Oh well. They’re nice.
So…this is a neat line that I wanted to spread the word about. DC Collectibles would have been so much wiser to put a small number or letter somewhere on the package so people could know what they’re getting and easily pick up the set. Again, I understand the marketing/thinking behind
blind bag/box merchandise but it’s nice to easily get a hold of what you want to without buying a bunch of duplicates, especially at $4.98 a figure.
Again, these are exclusive to Walmart, so go get 'em! Good luck in getting the set =)
. Would like to find Jason Fabok in this series.