>>6571518>What happens to molds when toys are no longer in sale?If the toyline is popular the mold will most likely wear out. Steel molds cost a shitload to tool up, which is why companies tend to do repaints of the same toy. It offsets costs. After a while the mold starts getting distended by the constant hot plastic poured in. It grows by a fraction of a millimeter and then the toy that comes out becomes loose and floppy. You tend to notice this on toys that have used a often used mold.
This cannot be reversed. The only way to fix it is to re-cut the mold. This means another huge expense. This is what happened to Super 7 when they took over the MOTU Classics line from Mattel, and those molds are less than 10 years old.
If the toyline is not popular the molds are often smashed. A property that is for all intents and purposes dead is just a bunch of unusable metal to the toy manufacturer, and they junk it. They also do this with some molds that are too worn out to use. In very rare cases a company is prescient enough to rescue the molds from oblivion, but that's rare.
Of course today, since toys are digitally scanned (or even sculpted digitally in the first place) there might be digital files that allow the mold to be reconstructed, if anyone is willing to pay the big cost of making the steel cut again.
