If you have walked down the boys action figure aisle at your local
Target store recently, you may have noticed something missing which is
Hasbro's 6" Marvel Legends figures. If you look on the discount shelf you might still find some
Eternals figures, but otherwise it is seemingly the same story across the country. New
Marvel Legends figures are no where to be seen.
To make things even more interesting, some have noticed the latest
Target shelf Plan-O-Grams (POGs) have no spaces allocated for
Marvel Legends. If you aren't familiar with what a
POG is, its a print-out used by store employees to map out where all the various products will be placed on the shelves when new stock comes in. Often when a store is resetting their shelves to bring out new products you will see these
POGs taped somewhere on the shelf. See an image of a recent one for a store in New Jersey mapping out the area where
Marvel Legends are normally located. You will notice
Marvel Legends are no where to be seen.
So what does this mean? Is
Target dropping
Marvel Legends or will no longer sell them in physical stores? That is certainly a conclusion some people on the Internet have seemingly jumped to. However before you panic to much, I did some checking with a few folks I know who work at
Target to see if they could shed any light on the matter.
The first thing to know about these
POGs when it comes to the toy sections, they usually get updated every 4 weeks. So the one you see above should take us through most of June. They can differ from store to store, but from what I can tell
Marvel Legends are missing on these POGs for most stores right now.
Second
Target in general is clearly continuing to carry
Marvel Legends. All the recent waves are available for pre-order on the
Target website and
Target continues to get new
Marvel Legends exclusives such as the recent
Spider-Man Black Noir figure.
Also when you check the store inventory system they continue to say
sold online and
sold in store. See the listings below for the upcoming
Marvel Legends Quake and
Target exclusive Thor figures.
However what is missing is any indication one when any of these will actually start arriving at physical stores. The only new
Marvel Legends figure that seems to have a physical store arrival date is the
Spider-Man Black Noir figure which says 7/20. That date however can vary from store-to-store and can also change.
Now the folks at
Target I checked with about all this did admit to me that not seeing any
Marvel Legends on the store
POGs was unusual, however these are unusual times we are living in where we have seen
Hasbro list many of these newly revealed figures with release dates going as far into the future as a year from now.
I don't think
Target is dropping
Marvel Legends, however it may be some time before we see any new
Marvel Legends on shelves at physical
Target stores. Right now it looks like mid-summer could be the earliest we see them return, and that's seemingly best case scenario.