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Well, I bought 'em, I tried to get one of every single figure, but it got to a point where you'd go to Toys R Us or Kay-Bee Toys, and ALL that would be on the shelves were dozens of He-Mans and Skeletors. Mattel completely ruined their own line by not shipping enough of certain figures.
What would happen is, a new wave would come out with a character everyone wanted, like Evil-Lyn, I remember that was a big one, and Mattel would ship the cases with ONE of those figures per case, and the rest would be all He-Mans and Skeletors. And these middle-aged "collectors" would get to the store the second they opened and wait for the stuff to be put on shelves, OR have one of their "friends" working stock pull all the Evil-Lyns or whatever and keep them in the back room for them, and these guys would literally buy all 5 or 10 or however many the store would get the day they came out, and then sell them all on Ebay for two or three times the regular price. So the store would be stuck with just the figures everyone already had, and regular shoppers had to wait for the next shipment to come in, which could be who knows when, OR pay the inflated Ebay prices.
I got lucky, my wife briefly worked at Toys R Us and so she was able to pull a couple for me. Plus, I was friends with the guy who ran my local comic shop, and he'd let me know in advance what days the new figures were going to be shipped to all the stores - like, "Everyone's getting the cases with Beast-Man tomorrow. I'll try and hold one for you just in case." And so my wife and I would go all over to like 5 stores trying to find that one figure. Sometimes we got lucky, and sometimes I'd have to go to the comic store and pay an extra $5-10 bucks.
None of it needed to happen like that, though. All Mattel had to do was ship more than one of those "rare" figures per case. Once word got out that you basically couldn't find the "good" figures in stores at all, people completely stopped buying the line, and when that happened, Mattel cancelled the whole thing and the cartoon show as well.
It sucked. At the end of it I'd go into a (different) comic shop - even my buddy decided ordering them for his store was too much of a hassle anymore, since he'd be stuck with a dozen unsold He-Mans - and see King Hiss or someone on the top shelf for $30 the same day it came out. I was sad, but I just couldn't justify it anymore.
What makes me sad NOW is, realizing how long ago that was since it feels like just a little while ago.
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