Joe News for 2015.

Hisstank recently posted a couple of stories about what might be coming at us this year from Hasbro concerning our beloved GI Joe brand.  The biggest news concerns information the GI Joe Collector's club scooped that GI Joe has been given a new brand manager, Mark Weber.  His most recent post with Hasbro was the brand manager of Transformers, which has undergone a renaissance over the past decade in both media and product.  Here are some of his words:

"For the most part, our biggest plans will be centered around future entertainment - the kind of stuff I can't talk about just yet. We are finalizing our 2015 plans and expect to deliver a lineup constructively similar to 2014 - with popular characters and vehicles, as well as a few NEW Surprises. If things go as planned, we will have an update to reveal at JoeCon in Springfield."

"Finalizing Plans" sounds like this means we have another upcoming 'limbo' period with no product until late summer.  I think this is likely.  However, without being clairvoyant about how things have been working in the background of product development I'll just speculate that Weber's influence won't be felt much this year.  It is my belief that the 50th Anniversary was always intended as a multi-year effort to put product out and Weber just stepped into the plan and will be merely be fine-tuning.  For some reason, this strikes me as logical given the controversial choice of Charbroil in the first wave.  I think his selection was a random inclusion of a significantly larger pool of scheduled releases rather than some calculated entry.  Why else would they re-release a mold we've seen twice recently except as 'wave filler' with a mold that was just probably readily available. 

Most noteworthy in this quote is the mention of new surprises.  I think for GI Joe to be considered a 'living' property it has to be moving forward.  If all that is ever done is a constant re-release of Snake Eyes, Beach Heads, Dukes, with the Collector's Club focusing on filling the more obscure parts of the ranks, I could not describe this as a state of a 'living'.  It would be more a state of curating over the brand's stagnation.  This news probably means that they are going to once again reach into ARAH looking for inspiration and give us a few second-line characters, and maybe that concept case Gung-ho from a few years back along with a few re-released vehicles.  I guess I would welcome that in the short term, but I hope that new characters, vehicles, and elements to the GI Joe universe would factor into Hasbro's plans at some point.