Mattel (2014-present)

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Mattel
It's fangtastic to see that Hasbro's bitter rival is now a completely useless company that doesn't care to HiT's other franchises and is terrible as a television production company.
Predecessor: HiT Entertainment (television, absorbed in 2016)
Founded: January 1945 (as a company)
March 2016 (as Mattel Creations)
February 8th, 2019 (as Mattel Television)
Industry: Entertainment
Founder(s): Ruth and Elliott Handler and Harold Matson (company)
Unknown (Mattel Television)
Headquarters: 333 Continental Blvd El Segundo, California, U.S. (Mattel)
Somewhere in the United States (Mattel Television)
Key people: Fred Soulie (GM and SVP)
Divisions: Mattel Films
Mattel Television
Mattel Digital Games
Subsidiaries: Fisher-Price
Mega Brands
HiT Entertainment
American Girl
Notable works: Bob the Builder (2015)
Thomas & Friends (seasons 22-24)
Welcome to Monster High and Monster High: Electrified
Polly Pocket (2018)
Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go!
Fireman Sam (since 2017)
Masters of the Universe: Revelation
Website: http://mattel.com/

Mattel, Inc. is an American multinational toy manufacturing company founded in 1945 with headquarters in El Segundo, California. The products and brands it produces include Fisher-Price, Barbie, Monster High, Ever After High, Polly Pocket, Enchantimals, Hot Wheels, and Thomas & Friends. In the early 1980s, Mattel produced video game systems, under its brands and license from Nintendo. The company has a presence in 35 countries and territories and sells products in more than 150 countries. The company operates through three business segments: North America, international, and American Girl. It is the world's second-largest toymaker in terms of revenue, after The Lego Group. In 2019, it ranked #575 on the Fortune 500 list. On January 17, 2017, Mattel named former Google executive Margo Georgiadis as CEO. Georgiadis stepped down as CEO of Mattel on April 19, 2018. Her last day was on April 26, 2018. Ynon Kreiz is now the CEO of Mattel.

In this page, we will focus on Mattel's involvement in the television industry through their subsidiary called Mattel Television, Mattel Television is the television production division of Mattel, Inc. The division is headed by executive producer Adam Bonnet, It was formerly known as HiT Entertainment and the American Girl content creation team in Middleton, Wisconsin. This page will also discuss the problems that the company had before its downfall, as well as its toys.

Why They Are Completely Useless Now

  1. Primarily, the management of many of their franchises is quite poor, often resulting in overexploitation or total degradation of the brand.
    • It doesn't help that when they bought out HIT Entertainment, most of the franchises owned by them just got butchered, milked, or ruined by Mattel due to their poor ways of handling the franchises.
  2. They often reboot classic franchises, resulting in unnecessary remakes that fail to capture the original's charm and end up being disappointing.
  3. Unlike HIT Entertainment, they have zero care at all for the franchises they own, and they like to pretend that some of the shows that HIT Entertainment owns don't exist.
    • In some cases, they just do nothing at all with some of HiT's franchises that they now own:
      • The only thing that has happened with Wishbone after Mattel acquired it is the show being taken off-air from any remaining PBS stations in the United States of America.
      • Rubbadubbers has been completely silent since 2005 with no signs of it returning.
      • Kipper has been given little to no attention since its last United Kingdom episode released in 2000.
      • Pingu has also barely got much attention after Pingu in the City aired its last episode in 2019. And for no given reason, that reboot was canceled as a result despite everyone who grew up watching Pingu or having been a longtime Pingu fans has wanted Pingu to come back into modern-day television. However in 2024, Mattel announced a third revival series with Aardman Animations.
      • Whilst the Bob the Builder reboot was thankfully canceled in 2018, the cancellation of the reboot caused the entire franchise to be put on halt. Aside from releasing the Can-Do Crew Pack DVD in 2020, which was the first DVD release of the original series since 2014, Mattel would completely ignore the franchise until 2024, when they announced an animated film of Bob the Builder.
    • The classic seasons of Fireman Sam, Thomas & Friends, and the original Bob the Builder receive limited acknowledgment beyond their availability on streaming platforms and sporadic episode uploads on YouTube. This has led to the newer iterations of these shows becoming more recognized among children.
      • In addition to this, they made a very stupid decision to private every single video of the original version of Bob the Builder on its YouTube channel, which was a terrible decision because it made it harder for children to be able to watch the classic series. As such, much like what happened to Fireman Sam, the reboot seemed to gain more recognition than the original to the current generation.
  4. In contrast to HIT Entertainment, which generally managed criticism well and sought redemption when its shows faced backlash from parents, critics, or fans, Mattel has a notorious reputation for poorly handling negative feedback. For example, when the Bob the Builder reboot faced negative reactions from audiences and long-time fans, Mattel disregarded the criticism, producing three seasons and a special titled Bob the Builder: Mega Machines: The Movie, until the show's cancellation in 2018. Similarly, with Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go!, Mattel did address the controversy but dismissed it with the rationale that the show was "made for kids," indicating a disregard for the original fans' sentiments and an unawareness or indifference to the increasing backlash.
    • In fact, the massive backlash with Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go was just a rehash of the situation with the Bob the Builder reboot, except much, much worse, mainly due to the Thomas & Friends fandom being much larger than the Bob the Builder fandom. It also pretty much showed that Mattel did not learn a single lesson from the last time they butchered a well-known franchise.
  5. Speaking of acting ignorant and intolerant towards criticism, they show no respect for the intelligence of their customers in general. When they "apologized" for the poor quality Thomas Wood was given back in 2017, they responded with an article page from FOX Business stating that all teenagers don't know how to manage money, even though that's not true since not all teenagers are irresponsible to the point they would not know how to manage money.
  6. On November 15, 2017, they rejected Hasbro's takeover offer that Hasbro made on November 10, 2017, even though Mattel's worth at the time was $5 billion, while Hasbro's was about $11 billion.
    1. Speaking of Hasbro, Mattel is indirectly responsible for some inaccuracies in toys based on the Transformers movies. Sideways' car form only transformed into a license-free approximation of an Audi R8, Sideswipe's RPMs/Speed Stars toys resembled an Aston Martin rather than a Corvette Stingray since Mattel secured semi-exclusive rights to make 1/16th-scale Stingray toys for their Hot Wheels line (with the back package description even dissing Transformers), and Dino could never get a toy completely faithful to his Ferrari 458 Italia mode (excluding fanmade bootleg toys) since Mattel had exclusive rights to make Ferrari toys.
  7. Back when the Thomas Creator Collective YouTube series was a thing from 2015 to 2019, Mattel didn't pay the people working on the videos and made some people sign non-disclosure agreements when they were too young to do so, which is illegal and could even be considered child exploitation.[1] Worst yet, they got away with it and didn't even get sued for it.
  8. They tend to assign blame when it comes to Thomas & Friends. Misrepresenting stock and sales figures is one issue, but blaming the original 1984-2020 TV show rather than their merchandise for the decline in Thomas & Friends' popularity shows their bitterness. The BWBA era of Thomas & Friends was initiated due to falling sales. However, as the series began to see improvements by season 24, the situation worsened when the decision was made to cancel the long-running series instead of renewing it, opting for a reboot by Nelvana—a company with limited knowledge of the Thomas franchise. This reboot was not requested or desired by the audience. For a corporation as large as Mattel, such actions are astonishing.
  9. In 2015, they announced that a reboot of the hated Angelina Ballerina was being worked on by Mattel Television and 9 Story Media Group and would be released in 2017, but they never made them.
    • They also announced a Barney & Friends reboot in 2015, promising it would be released in 2017, but it never happened. However, on February 13, 2023, they finally announced that a Barney & Friends (Barney's World) reboot would be coming in 2024,[2] literally 9 years after the reboot was announced in 2015. That seems like a long time to work on a series, and it's unknown why it took so long.
  10. Much like HIT Entertainment when they decided for the show to switch to CGI when season 6 was greenlit due to taxation rises in the United Kingdom, they did very little to improve Fireman Sam.
    • In fact, the only improvements they've done to the series are hiring a better animation team in season 11 (as well as massively improving the animation in season 13) and making the rescue scenes much more satisfying than they were before, but even then, that's not much.
    • In fact, they made it even worse in season 13 by replacing the voice actor for Trevor Evans, David Carling, with Gary Wilmot, as well as the voice actor for Mandy Flood and Helen Flood, Su Douglas, with Ayesha Antoine, and Lily and her mother, Mrs. Chen's voice actors Su Douglas and Tegwen Tucker, respectively, with Siu-see Hung, which was a bad move as it panders towards unnecessary political correctness. They also made the series blander and turned Helen Flood into a firefighter, which doesn't suit her since she's meant to be a nurse who cures people and helps them with their injuries or body problems, which outright ruins the character.
  11. They prevented some characters from Thomas & Friends from returning in the CGI era, such as Hank and BoCo (who were meant to return in season 22) and also Lady the Magical Engine just because "there were already too many male characters" and they wanted to "focus more on bringing in new female characters".
  12. Much like Nintendo of America and Paramount Global, they handle their copyright systems poorly and often abuse the system by tending to private or block videos to an extreme:
    • They blocked The Unlucky Tug's video Why the Thomas 2021 Reboot is Doomed to Fail for using footage of the trailer in it, even though the trailer for the Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go! was still up on their website at the time (it has since been removed from their site, but still).
    • They were most responsible for taking down ThomasHDClassics's YouTube channel despite the model era Thomas episodes being uploaded under fair use! This was most likely done because the classic era (seasons 1-7) of Thomas & Friends is available to watch on Prime Video officially in the United States. At the same time though, the HiT model era (seasons 8-12) is notably hard to access officially in the United States, as some episodes were not released on DVD and were only aired on TV through PBS, but with reruns of the show being taken off PBS, the episodes have become rare in the United States.
    • On July 7, 2021, they took down several Thomas & Friends fan games on Roblox, Although most of the games that Mattel had taken down weren't even making any money, they even went as far as to send a cease-and-desist letter to one user just for making a Thomas fan game! Not even HiT Entertainment would stoop this low.
      • Thomas & Friends games are not the only games being hit by Mattel either, games based on Uno and Apples to Apples were hit by Mattel as well, and were forced to make heavy changes to avoid any more copyright blocks.
      • Thankfully a few Thomas & Friends Roblox games such as Cbr3, Take on Sodor, Take-N-Play Along, Thomtoys Land, TTG Reloaded, CBR3's Narrow Gauge, and a few others are still there, although a few other games like Golden Galaxy were later taken down in early 2022 due to drama involving Speedy Skip, the creator of many Thomas Roblox games.
    • They once even went as far as to take down a video from the official Thomas & Friends channel, which is utterly stupid since they own all of HiT's properties themselves.
    • In February 2022, Mattel abused the copyright system by striking and terminating reviewers who reviewed figures based on Jurassic World: Dominion to avoid "Spoilers for the Movie" even though the toys were already released at the time.[3]
      • In Mattel's eyes, they think that the reviewers are at fault for reviewing them, even though it is technically their fault for releasing the figures too early.
  13. For some reason, they've decided to shut down a bunch of websites that were owned by HiT Entertainment for seemingly no reason at all.
    • The most notable example is when they closed down the official Pingu website for no reason at all and made it redirect to their website.
      • Luckily, the Japanese website is still up as the rights are handled by Sony Creative Products in the country, but the same can't be said for the United Kingdom and United States websites.
  14. All of the current Barbie films based on the current Barbie TV series such as Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures for example often suffer from repetitive and formulaic plots, showing that Mattel doesn't even care for their number one property that got them on the map.
  15. In the States, they took all the shows they aired on PBS in 2017-2018 and moved most of them to Nick Jr., a cable subscription-based channel. They also stopped releasing DVDs of their shows. These were very stupid decisions, as the shows have been doing just fine on PBS and they simply made many of their shows much harder to watch. This would not be a big deal if they kept releasing DVDs of these shows in America, but they didn't, which made it very difficult for American audiences to watch their shows.
    • Fortunately, a few of their shows were handed over to Qubo, which did not require cable. However, this channel was rather obscure, and the Mattel shows on Qubo were not very well advertised, so not that many American viewers knew that they could watch Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam on Qubo. It also doesn't help by the fact that the channel was sadly discontinued in February 2021.
  16. They have had various very poor, if not atrocious moves into the video game market:
    • Their first attempt was the Power Glove, an NES accessory that was received very poorly due to it being unresponsive and not working properly.
    • They then tried to start a publishing unit by founding Mattel Media in 1996, which would have done fine - if Mattel hadn't tried to expand by purchasing The Learning Company in 1998 for $4.2 billion. Needless to say, this was doomed from the start, as before the merger was completed in May 1999 and the rebranding of Mattel Media to Mattel Interactive, Mattel lost $82.4 million in 1998, and lost a further $184 million in 1999, leading to Mattel's CEO resigning in February 2000, and the company announcing to tell TLC in April 2000, only eleven months after the merger. They soon sold TLC and Mattel Interactive to Gores Technology Group in September 2000, and since then, have licensed their properties to other game publishers.
    • They tried once more to get into the market with the HyperScan in 2006, a video game console that attempted to cash in on the trading card game craze (and possibly also replicate the success of the infamous Barcode Battler), It is the third worst-selling console of all time (tied with the LaserActive if the latter is counted), with estimated sales of just 10,000 units, though reportedly most of them had to be returned because it was prone to be a critical failure.
  17. They also supported Autism Speaks, which before they dropped the cure statement in 2016, used to be a scummy organization that believed autism was a "curable disease" even though it isn't and that there is no cure for autism at all (now they think this way). They have likely improved since and they're decent now, however.
  18. Their newer toys have been downgraded in quality from older ones, as many of them can easily be broken apart and have poor paint quality.
    • The main examples are their newer Barbie dolls, which ended up very plastic-like, cheap-looking, and inferior to what they were before, and the recent Bad Robot toy based on J.J Abrams' studio mascot from the logo looking very cheaply made thanks to the robot's awful design and cheap look. It is made even worse given by the fact that it doesn't translate well to 3D structuring due to how complicated the logo character is to replicate in real life since it was mostly black and on a 2D plane, which results in the toy looking hideous and falling straight into the Uncanny Valley.
      • Mattel had almost screwed over many girls' lives through anorexia nervosa thanks to the original Barbie's slim proportions in the past. A study once proved that when girls have to reach original Barbie proportions from obesity, they have to eat only 3 apples each day, drink only three glasses of water a day (instead of eating a pack of nutritional lunch), and run around the city and back three times. What makes this worse is that the original Barbie's body's size is less than 1 in 100 thousand, and thus, her body proportion is extremely impossible. However, they have improved in modern times. They also announced a Barbie doll with Down syndrome on April 25, 2023.[4]
    • Another infamous example is their newer toys for Fireman Sam. They suffer through poor painting, look creepy overall, and have been reported to break within 40 minutes of a kid playing with them. To make matters worse, it costs $40 or more to produce those toys.
    • They made toys based on bad shows, like the 4Kids One Piece dub, Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go and Teen Titans Go!.
    • Their Naruto, One Piece, Shaman King, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Zatch Bell! toys were also of very poor quality and would fall apart easily. The only good ones were Zabuza and Sanji while the rest are completely rubbish.
  19. They made NFTs based on the Hot Wheels brand. This says something due to their large environmental impact (only if used with Ethereum or Bitcoin) as well as having lots of recent scams which led to a decline in the popularity of blockchain technologies. And by the way, this is directed towards children.
  20. In March 2019, they shut down the servers for Fuhu's Nabi tablets for no reason other than the fact that the products were getting "too old", thus making the tablets completely useless as of said date, which isn't fair to the people who have them. Why can't they just put the servers back up so that the Nabi isn't just a paperweight?
  21. For all the bad decisions they have made from acting ignorant when it comes to criticism, to insulting the intelligence of their customers, going full Paramount-mode, and mistreating their employees much to their unapologetic and cruel nature, it's safe to say Mattel has become a corrupt shell of its former self. It's not only money they care about more than the franchises HiT originally owned or that they own themselves, they care far more about immediate returns and business practices and nothing else.

Qualities That Are Everything

  1. Despite having a side of being a bad television production company, they are pretty good as a toy company when they are not making poor-quality toys.
    • In addition to this, it used to be a much better company before its downfall in 2014.
    • As a matter of fact, they even used to make toys based on anime series, like Naruto, One Piece, Shaman King, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Zatch Bell!, even though these toys were not that great, especially the Naruto, One Piece, and figures.
    • A lot of our childhood toys would not be the same without Mattel.
  2. Although they made some horrible and unfaithful reboots, they do sometimes make successful reboots from time to time:
    • One example of a reboot done right was Polly Pocket (2018) (according to your point of view).
    • They also brought back Pingu with a CGI British-Japanese reboot named Pingu in the City, and while it has one slight hiccup or two, the CGI reboot was still the best they've done with a HiT Entertainment property. Unfortunately, Mattel canceled the show for no given reason after two seasons in 2019.
    • Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures is not as successful, and does have flaws (such as cutting long-time characters Midge Hadley, Summer Gordon, and the iconic mean girl Raquelle Harper, who was replaced with Tammy Wen Bounceaway), but it is generally considered average, with fans saying that there are worse reboots out there. Not to mention that it has become iconic in recent times due to its funny jokes.
    • The Monster High reboot from 2022 was also well-received by the doll community, giving it a 6.3/10 on IMDb.
  3. Aside from a few good reboots, they made some good animated series on their franchises like Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse (which is considered the best-animated series of the Barbie franchise), the Monster High web series, the 2010 Polly Pocket (2010) web series, and the Ever After High web series.
  4. At least they are reviving some forgotten shows:
    • They are bringing back the Monster High franchise in 2022 with a new live-action movie and animated series after 3 years back when the Monster High franchise was canceled. On November 9, 2021, The new live-action Monster High movie was announced with Todd Holland (who directed 50 episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, 26 episodes of Malcolm in the Middle, and the movie The Wizard) directing and starring Miia Harris as Clawdeen Wolf, Ceci Balagot as Frankie Stein, and Nayah Damasen as Draculaura.
    • They also have plans to bring back the forgotten HiT Entertainment series Wishbone in a feature-length movie. However, none of the original crew members are working on the movie, so it is unlikely that either that movie will have the same charm as the original show or see the light of day.
  5. Along with HiT Entertainment, they apologized for the controversy surrounding a page for the Quran being shown in the Fireman Sam episode "Troubled Waters", which caused them to understandably cut ties with Xing Xing Digital and to have DHX Media (now WildBrain) animate the series instead, which was a good decision as they managed to improve the animation for the show.
  6. They and Marc Forster announced a second fully worldwide theatrical Thomas the Tank Engine movie. But as of now, it's unknown when it will get an official release date for United States and United Kingdom cinemas. Other information like the movie's day of getting greenlit and pitched into production has not yet been revealed, apart from the fact it would be a "four-quadrant movie adventure that blends with live-action and animation", and that executive Robbie Brenner has stated that Thomas' story in the film would be told in a "modern and unexpected way".
    • For now, let's all hope that this does not end up with the same fate as the 2010 WWII Thomas movie that was supposed to come out from 2010 to 2014.
  7. Thankfully, they didn't change Thomas or Percy's voices in the Strasburg Rail Road version of the A Day Out with Thomas event nor is the reboot acknowledged.

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Trivia

  • Their Power Glove accessory became an internet meme, mainly through the movie The Wizard, which had a scene where it was wielded by Lucas Barton and he says his quote, "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad". also made another Appearance in 8 Bit Christmas.

References

  1. ↑ https://www.deviantart.com/railfanbronymedia/journal/An-even-darker-side-to-Mattel-862310967
  2. ↑ https://www.tvinsider.com/1081325/barney-and-friends-animated-series-reboot/
  3. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zg2NDBAfVo
  4. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/barbie-doll-with-downs-syndrome-launched-by-mattel

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