One of the big stories last week in the collector world was the appearance of two Mattel Masters of the Universe Classics figures at a single Southern California Walmart.  As reported… everywhere, an endcap of first issue Robotos and Gygors showed up at the Walmart in Moreno Valley, at prices lower than originally offered on MattyCollector.com.

Naturally the internet exploded with this news and all have been asking Mattel for some answers.  There was some discussion about it here on AFi and we discussed it this week on the latest episode of the “Geek Shall Inherit” podcast.

Answers came yesterday in the form of Scott replying to this question on the MattyCollector.com message boards.  Below is the original question:

By now you may have heard that someone found Roboto and Gygor inside Wal-Mart for $16.97 and $24.97. Is Mattel planning on selling remaining CS stock to Wal-Mart and why is there only one sighting of this? Why does only one Wal-Mart carry these?

Can you give us some insight?

It took a few days to track down the answer, but yesterday Scott responded:

It took us a few days to get to the bottom of this one. Bottom line is these items were not sold to WMT. They appear to be at only one single location and this WMT acquired them on the secondary market from a third party. Mattel did not set up this end cap or this promotion. There are no plans for MOTUC to be distributed at retail at this time. Maybe the toy aisle manager is a big MOTU fan. Not really sure, but this is not a Mattel program. That I can confirm.

So, as you can see this was a fluke and not any new imitative from Mattel to dump product or to put MOTUC at retail.