"REVIEW" Hero Factory Toy Fair 2010 Promo

[Brickthing]

Set name: Hero Factory Toy Fair 2010 Promo

Set Number: N/A

Contents: Foldout with CD

Year of release: 2010

This promotional item was given out to attendees of the 2010 Toy Fair exhibition, as an information pack for the set-to-be-released Hero Factory line. It's probably the first "official" Hero Factory merchandise ever released, but it contains no exclusive pieces or information, so it's not too special. I'm not sure if there are images of this promo's pages elsewhere, so I've scanned it for anyone interested in seeing it.

Front

This is the front cover of the promo, with the well-known image of Furno in the assembly tower. The promo is made of poster-card and when folded is slightly smaller than A5 (126mm x 191mm). You can see a slight semi-circular mark on the right edge that was left by a clear plastic sticker holding the fold-out closed.

Inside

When you open the promo, these are the first two pages you see. On the left is a selling pitch obviously intended for retailers, with phrases such as "great battle missions fighting evil" and "defeating evil villains lurking throughout galaxies" to convince retailers that these sets are going to fly off the shelves. Apparently Hero Factory is just for boys though, even though it would've been easy enough to use "kids" or "children" instead. The background of this page is a standard image of Makuhero City, but the colours have been made very vibrant yellows as if the sun was rising at dawn, signifying a new day (or era of sets).

On the right pages there is a pocket that the CD is nicely tucked into. I don't have and image of the CD, but it's basically the Hero Factory circular logo printed plainly on a circular CD. The CD contains a movie file of the original Hero Factory teaser with Furno being assembled, in a lower quality than the version released on YouTube. This confuses me, because the CD has ample wasted space that could easily have been used to hold a higher quality version of the video, especially when it's for making good impressions on retailers. As far as my computer could tell, there wasn't an autorun file either, so the CD loaded like a data disk showing a single file that it could easily have launched straight into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV-Wxf96h1E

For those who haven't seen the trailer before, here it is. It's a great video, and I already feel slightly nostalgic watching it now. It must be the music.

When you fold out the page with the text on it, you find these two pages, which are bios for each of the 6 Heroes. There's nothing special to note about the descriptions, aside from the decision to change William Blaze to William Furno being made already. The bios suffer from being standardized bullet points, with the last bullet point of each Hero being identical apart from Furno, Bulk and Surge not having communication headsets while the other three do. They have cameras, so do they enjoy showing the mission-tech support exactly how they're ignoring orders they can't hear? The projectiles of Bulk's arm canon are metal pellets, and I realize that LEGO probably wants to downplay the association with it being a firearm, but I don't see how saying it "shoots" rather than shoots helps.

Back

This is the back page of the promo, which simply has a nice Hero Factory logo embossed on industrial steel. Down the bottom is the trademark information, and on the left edge is the mark left by the other half of the sticker seal. It's great if you need an HQ version of the logo, although there are probably vector versions the logo in PDF/flash files now that are better.

Conclusion

Overall this promo is nice to look at, but contains nothing new or essential to a Hero Factory fan, although I believe the bios within it were new at the time it was given out. I wouldn't value it highly right now, but there are limited numbers of it and it was probably the first Hero Factory merchandise ever released. If you're lucky enough to come across one, hold onto it and keep it in good condition, because if Hero Factory becomes as long-running or as successful as BIONICLE was, it could become reasonably valuable!

That's it for this "review", thanks for reading. I can answer questions for now, but they may need to be redirected to The Lanterne Rouge in the future, because he'll be receiving this shortly for winning the recent Hero Factory Mini-Contest that was hosted.

[Lordofdragonss]

Funny thing. We get a little book like this with some Magazines in Poland but without CD.