>>10215192Ever look at how things say Trademark/Copyright pending? Do note copyrights also has to do with the character itself too, not just the name.
IT can take two years for shit to be reviewed and approved. And if something doesn't pass, it takes more time to resubmit. So in the meantime, they just still release shit like normal.
They want things to go smoothly, but they will take a different avenue when trying to push shit through the media. There's a wealth of characters and they want sure things are on the up and up, so they'll go with the strongest characters they have available. No one wants to go through the bullshit Superman/DC/WB/Seigel/Shuster went through, that kept getting the movies delayed.
Since movies sometimes take decades, the characters they've chosen is based on what they can use when it was decided in 1999 (im bullshitting on the dates here), so when its finally released in 2008, all that shit that appears is based on what could have been approved in 1999.
You also have Sigma 6 using Heavy Duty too, because they were using characters based on what they have those rights to (up til 2006). Animation is a little more simple, as you can pass shit around from channel to channel that always need to fill up time slots. So it gets produced as fast as it takes to animate it.
So by the time the GI Joe movie came out, Resolute was produced and now Roadblock is a main character again. So whatever legal hurdles they were jumping through were resolved by 2008.
It's all complicated shit and you can literally see when behind the scene shit is fixed.
Like Superman, they never stopped making comics or toys, but you can see when they feared they were going to lose certain rights when they started changing the costume.
Also, you can't expect me to remember a random nobody of whoever is the managing brand lead that changes every year. Even toy design is rather boring, with 66 different people making just a single character after focus group testing
