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At first it was pretty easy to find in NJ, but by Season 2 of the show interest had dropped quite a bit and a lot of the "Vs. The Snake Men"-branded toys were very hard to find.
For Wave One, all the Toys R Us and K-Mart stores had almost an entire aisle dedicated to the He-Man toys, just like the good old days. But then Mattel started short-packing new characters and only shipping tons of He-Man and Skeletor variants, and that killed the line dead. For example, I only have Evil-Lyn because my wife worked at Toys R Us at the time, and only found Ram-Man because my comic book guy grabbed one for me. Scalpers were picking out the one-per-case new characters that everyone actually wanted and immediately selling them on eBay for $30-50, leaving nothing left on shelves but the infinite He-Man and Skeletor variants. When those didn't sell, the cartoon and toy line were unceremoniously scrapped.
In defense of Mattel, they supposedly did tons of market research among children and that research told them that kids love buying a ton of different variants of the main one or two characters. The most successful 90s toyline was probably the Batman Animated Series line, which would reinforce that theory with its "Tons of Batman and Nobody Else" approach, which made Kenner tons of money. But I think Mattel seriously disregarded the then-just beginning Adult Collector market, and failed to realize that 1. People over age 8 buy toys, and 2. They want to actually have a figure of every character, not just a handful. In hindsight, it's obvious why the line failed despite a great start, but at the time Mattel was simply following the market trends. They didn't realize that lines like this may be marketed to kids, but are REALLY for adults looking for a nostalgia fix. That is the standard now, but in 2002 there was still a little bit of "I'm buying them for my niece and nephew" justification going on. By the time they realized that more adults were buying the toys instead of kids, it was too late to course correct.
Real shame. I'm poking around on eBay and thankfully a good number of the ones I'm missing are pretty reasonable, even in the package, so that's good to know.
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