Spelling and grammatical errors on packaging is nothing new in the toy industry, nor new to Masters of the Universe fans.
Masterverse collectors specifically grew very accustomed to all kinds of text errors in their packaging.
Oddly, silly mistakes and grammatical errors especially in Masterverse bios felt easily avoidable with a simple proofread. Pushing what feels to be careless mistakes aside, these errors fortunately never seemed to cause any serious uproar in the Masterverse collector community. It seemed mostly chuckled at, and then moved on from.
While these occurrences in packaging errors in Masterverse seemed dramatically reduced or dare we say eliminated in the past year or so (which we enthusiastically applaud), apparently this hasn’t been the case in other Mattel toylines. And this most recent mistake was a costly one.
Mattel has pulled thousands of ‘Wicked’ dolls off retailer shelves after consumers realized an adult website was referred to on their packaging.
Yes, if your child received a Wicked doll and joyfully logged on to the website listed on the packaging, they would be directed to a porn site. (Instead of Wicked.com, Mattel should have printed WickedMovie.com.)
Here is a statement from Mattel:
"Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the U.S., which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page. We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children. Consumers who already have the product are advised to discard the product packaging or obscure the link and may contact Mattel Customer Service for further information."
It is reportedly unclear if Mattel will reprint new packaging with the correct web address or simply have them covered with stickers. Either way, as the new Wicked movie comes out this November 22nd, Target, Walmart and Amazon have all removed the “Wicked” dolls from their online storefronts due to this very, very costly mistake.
Thanks to our fantastic community member @elder for the initial news.
We’ll see you next time.
Universal: This makes me very angry. Very angry indeed.
NOTE: universal owns DreamWorks
Oh no. We need them to let Mattel use She-Ra in season 3.
Mommy! Daddy! I went on the website! Why are the witches kissing each other with no clothes on! 🤣
I went on the website and it is pretty tame. It could have been a lot worse.
Its because they changed it (probably) because of the unintended attention incl. those of minors. When the news broke they still had half screen filling embedded previews looping that left nothing to the imagination.
@lurker-man They quickly removed the He-Man parody they were selling.
@asterstar Kinda missed that one? I only skimmed it out of curiosity but did not went deep into there plus most links seemed to require some kind of registered sub anyway.
That makes sense. I wonder if sales went up for Wicked and the mistake was good for business.
I like industry news like this. Keep em coming.