Welcome to our look at the Star Trek: First Contact toys, or “how Playmates killed the Star Trek action figures.”
I admit to being frequently critical of Playmates Toys’ for its handling of the Star Trek line from 1996 onward, and here is where I think they went wrong.
With the eighth Star Trek film on the horizon, Playmates liaised much more closely with Paramount this time around, trying to avoid a costly fiasco like the incorrectly-costumed toys from Star Trek: Generations. When Paramount made it clear that the crew of the Enterprise-E would be wearing new uniforms, perhaps Playmates worried that the public would refuse to buy yet another new variation of the same cast of characters all over again.
So they changed the scale from four inches to six inches.
This had a drastic effect. The new First Contact figures were now incompatible with all of the accessories made for all of the previous toys. It was a real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation – the public still didn’t buy into the new figures as the manufacturer hoped.
Worse yet, the new uniforms were adopted by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine…and Playmates suddenly had to choose between the four and six inch scales. It took the latter, and thus fell the Star Trek action figure line.
Issuing only a handful of six-inch figures, including a Jem’hadar, Chief O’Brien and Captain Sisko (both in the new, First Contact-style uniforms), and Seven of Nine, Playmates brought the premature death of the generally well-regarded Trek action figures by shifting to a new size with a higher price tag, and a threat that fans’ large collections of the four-inch toys would no longer be supported. Seven of Nine became the only Voyager character in the six-inch scale, and thus was two inches taller than the toy versions of any of her crewmates.
There would be no Ezri Dax, General Martok or Female Shapeshifter figures in either scale…because Playmates’ decision to consign the original four-inch toys to obsolescence lost them their loyal customers.
Playmates abandoned the Star Trek toy license at the end of 1999. Perhaps in the next few years, a new manufacturer will pick up where they left off…and perhaps they’ll do it right.
