>>11845479>I enjoyed the 2002 MOTU revival a lot but think it worked on me because I had a passing familiarity with the original. I think that was the case, more generally: it brought in older kids who weren’t going to buy toys but liked the show anyway.That seems to be broadly the case from my own experience, fans of the original embraced it in a way they didn't embrace New Adventures, but they were all adults by 2002, and not enough of them were buying the toys to keep the line alive, while for whatever reason, it didn't really do any better than New Adventures in creating a new generation of young fans. The toys overloading on He-Man and Skeletor variants and other characters being difficult to find didn't help either.
>Not sure about GI Joe, what exactly happened there?The 1980s line finally ended in 1994, and during the same time frame as Transformers getting G2 and Beast Wars, GI Joe got Sgt Savage and then GI Joe Extreme, both were in larger scales with less articulation, and none of the 1982-1994 characters carried over. Sgt Savage only got one cartoon episode on a video packed with one of the figures, while Extreme did get 2 seasons of cartoon and 2 comic miniseries, Hasbro seem to have pulled the plug on the toys before the cartoon was done.
After that, Hasbro largely retreated to aiming GI Joe at the now-adult fanbase in the late 90s and early 2000s, but then relaunched with the GI Joe vs Cobra line in 2002, backed by a new comic and some CGI animated movies and had some success, but then shifted to bigger scale figures and an anime-style show with Sigma Six, and again the older fans didn't support it and it didn't bring in enough new fans. They went back to the usual figure scale for the Anniversary line and the movies, and were doing reasonably well until the 2nd movie getting delayed for a year basically killed the toy line, most retailers just didn't order the later waves after Hasbro wanted them to return the first wave figures they'd ordered.
