The Cult of F5 : More Collecting Online Exclusives
This past week was an especially busy, stressful, aggravating time for serious toy collectors, many of whom sat in front of their computers at carefully designated times and repeatedly hit the F5, or ‘refresh’ button, on their browsers in the hopes of snagging some rare, limited collectible from the internet.
Early in the week, Mattel’s online exclusive entity, Matty Collector, released a handful of new figures which have an appeal to a collector audience, but would probably not survive in a typical retail store. Of these, the most popular figure was that of Moss Man, a character from He-Man and The Masters Of The Universe. The revamped He-Man line has been fairly difficult to collect in general, but this week’s sale hit an all time record pitch of frustration.
Two different versions of Moss Man were released. While both were flocked, giving them the deliciously fuzzy feeling that the original figure had, one had flocked ears, while the other’s ears went tragically unflocked. Because I have a nascent collection of figures that are nature-centric (including a giant Lord of the Rings Ent, a Swamp Thing, and some small designer-type things), I could not resist trying to purchase both. Typically, I’ve limited my He-Man figures to characters that have skulls for faces (and there are three), but my resistance was low.
So, with a scheduled drop at noon (Eastern Time), a horde of toygeeks sat in front of their computers and hit F5 until the little ‘add to cart’ button appeared next to the Moss Men. There was a clock glitch somewhere, the figures went for sale three minutes early, and by 12:02, there was nothing left. It was as if a horde of credit card wielding locusts descended on the servers of Mattel, enduring white screens of death as pages struggled to load, and shrieking loudly on forums when they were not immediately sated. I managed to snag both versions of Moss Man, but many people were left angry.
The hardest part about this whole process is the lag time that happens to websites when they are inundated with requests for information. Mattel has set up the mechanics of their site so that your own browser page will automatically reload every few seconds until the server can process you. Effectively, this places you in a neatly organized bottleneck – but you can’t see exactly where the end of the line is. It’s hard to not conjure images of Temple Grandin and the slaughterhouse. One is very compelled to hit the old F5 button and refresh their activity, reaffirming that they are indeed still waiting patiently and present, though this action is the equivalent of being kicked to the end of the line if you express any doubt about whether or not the line is progressing at all. Any e-dissent will be e-punished accordingly.
Later on in the week was the release of 3AA’s Little Shadow figure, which was paired with a surprise release of the Cherry Shadow & Sanakhete two-pack – a variation on the Shadow figure, and variation on the previously released Boiler Zomb figure. This was announced only shortly before the drop, and was intermittently placed and yanked from the website during the initial, frantic ordering period. If you could actually get your order page to load, and you actually could hit the button at the right moment to score the two-pack, you still needed to wait for the final ordering screen to load and redirect you to payment before anything was actually yours. If someone else’s load time was quicker, the item could just as easily be pulled right from your cart, and you’d have to start all over again.
After about 20 minutes, I finally scored everything I was after. I just like redheads.
Does it sound cruel to allow you to place an item in your shopping cart, only to have someone else swing on by and put it in their own cart instead? Can you imagine any website with a 15-minute load time which people would still happily wait for? It’s a testament to the excitement of the hunt, now that we collect online so heavily, eschewing the madness of gas money and stepping over screaming kids in the toy aisle to take home a little piece of plastic art.

















