Hey Snarkie!!! I’ve been DYING to know ever since I found out, but did you happen to have any say at all under the Jakks-Pacific Neopets minifigure line from like 2009? There’s a video circulating around on YouTube of an unreleased Neopets Lost Desert playset prototype from a 2009 toy fair and I really want to know why it never got released and where the prototype ended up. I assume it just was never released due to it just kinda falling through but I just gotta know where it went, if you happen to know at all! It’s so cool that you’re answering all these questions, to see someone really give a look into Neopets like this is awesome! You’re super cool!! 😀
snarkie
Not a robot... probably.
Hiya, daisy!
I had nothing to do with merch (outside of brand approvals) so I can’t really answer most of this question for you, sadly. Except……………
There was a point when Nickelodeon wasn’t doing so great financially overall. (I don’t know what that means specifically. It was as vague to us then as it is now. ?♀️) As a result, for some kind of reason, they pulled back on ALL merchandising except for Dora the Explorer and Sponge Bob stuff. That was the only merch allowed. So we didn’t really have merch for a long time during and after that period and I know a bunch of stuff in production had to be cancelled. (And our merch department even moved on to doing other things.)
I don’t remember at all what time period that was, though, so I can’t tell you if that’s the actual reason this particular toy never made it through. But that might be my guess? It was kind of at the height of the Jakks stuff if I remember right but it’s kinda fuzzy since I can’t connect that with anything we were working on on-site at the time to confirm.
However, I also know a lot of toys didn’t make it throughout the merch history. Just the nature of toys. Too expensive to produce after prototyping, or just couldn’t get the models right, or it just didn’t make the cut, etc. So it may have just been that.
The prototype could have been abandoned with our head of merch (a lot of prototypes ended up with her, like a GIANT Elephante plush that took up most of her desk for the longest time) but for something like that, I would guess Jakks had it. So either someone there happened to keep it or they just destroyed it when it didn’t go through?
Sorry I can’t give you a definitive answer! But hopefully it the merch kibosh thing was at least semi-interesting. Heh. Thanks for taking the time to ask a question!