Justifying the WCW Stage's Cost

$400 x 5,000 is $2 million USD
Plus the international fees.....

Just a thought...

$400 for the WCW stage makes sense to me and here's why.

Here is the very first entrance stage Mattel made. It is not in scale. It was mass-produced around 2011 or 2012 and exclusive to K-Mart. I think it retailed for $50. It has a few sound clips from a speaker in the stage that sound pretty bad and some lights in the main tron. It's largely made up of big hunks of plastic with very little detail. It's got some moveable lights on the stage. The main tron is a sticker of John Cena and the mini trons are clear with flimsy pieces of paper with a backdrop printed on one side inserted. The headboard on the top is cardboard. You can barely line the Kliq up along the stage. I personally love this toy, but it's not very wide. This is the entrance stage equivalent to Mattel's basic $20 rings.





Again, that stage had enough inventory produced to ideally stock every Kmart in the U.S. back when K-Marts were all over the country.

The next stage Mattel made was not a store exclusive. It was produced for mass retail and stocked in Target, Walmart, Toys R Us, Amazon, RSC, anywhere willing to give the shelf space for it. I think I got it at Target for $50. It had even less detail than the Kmart stage. The sound feature is gone. It's got a couple LEDs at the base of the mini trons. Even the sculpted lights on the sides of the stage no longer move. Some hokey breakaway features were added for the kids. The mini trons are just blank, clear plastic. No stickers on them. The main tron is a card board picture of Cena. The main feature of this is that you can put a tablet in the tron and play entrance videos from an app Mattel made. That's a pretty brilliant feature. And there's a piece of cardboard on top you can flip around that says Raw/Smackdown on either side. Again, you can barely fit enough figures on this. Both of these toy entrance stages are the same width and nearly the same depth and height, although the second one is slightly shorter than the K-Mart one.





So these previous stages mass retailed for $50. I'm guessing at least a hundred thousand units produced each. They were bare bones. They were fairly tall, but no where near in scale. And they were maybe a foot and a half wide.

Now compare that to the WCW stage from the crowdfund. Loaded to the gills with tons of LEDs everywhere. Spotlights. Fabric banners attached to highly detailed trusses. The detail in the diamond-patterned WCW letters is exquisite. Those letters themselves are massive and taller than the figures. The trusses that make up the entrance arch are highly detailed compared to the trusses on previous entrance stages. There's a little chain-link fence behind the entrance arch with a small, highly detailed WCW Monday Nitro logo. The grating on the floor and ramp looks like actual grating. The entire stage is 3.3ft wide. You could put the two entrance stages above side-by-side and the WCW stage will be wider. The thing is massive and every inch is packed with realistic detail.







Considering that first two entrance stages I showed were mass retail releases that are comparatively small with very little detail, I think it makes perfect sense that the size, the amount of detail, and the electronics being put into the WCW stage earns its $400 price tag for 5,000 units minimum produced. If it's too big for you, I understand. If it's too expensive for you, I understand. But it makes total sense to me why it's priced at what it is even without all the extra figures. If it was being produced at 100,000 units, then $400 would make less sense. But it isn't. It's being produced at a minimum of 5,000 units if it gets funded. The cost makes sense to me.

just pick up one of the 5 similar Hogans they made

so people are wrong for wanting unique Ultimates like we got with the new gen arena

Wrong? No...pretty childish for making such a big deal about what amounts to a throw in Ultimate Edition figure that while similar in design contains a new head scan, new soft goods, new title belt, etc? I'd say yeah

It's a fantastic offering, but one of the things I wonder is how many people balked because of the size. This is something I wonder about with other giant vehicle/Galactus-sized figure crowdfunds, too. How many people don't buy in because they just don't have the space, or have a house full of children and pets that make a huge, expensive display piece kind of a bad idea?