PowerTown’s Steve Rosenthal Speaks on Remcos, Path Forward & New Licenses & Investors

I spoke with PowerTown’s Steve Rosenthal earlier this week, hours before Terry Allen (Magnum TA) appeared on the Fig Guys live stream.

We spoke for a little more than an hour. Rosenthal covered a lot of the issues the company ran into with its last three pre-orders, which still haven’t been fulfilled. Rosenthal once again reassured that the figures will be produced.

In fact, Rosenthal claimed the Remcos have been manufactured at the Lucky-Yeh factory in China.

“Everything is packaged, ready to go, and our intention is, now that we’ve reestablished our financial objectives, to get these things on the water ASAP,” he said.

So why didn’t they ship before? Rosenthal claimed that Powertown’s internal production team quoted him a September time frame, but that was off by around five months.

The delay paused PowerTown’s business model, which required pre-orders every six-to-eight weeks to generate operating revenue.

“We had to come to a complete stop because we weren’t going to continue and not be able to ship what we had taken orders from,” he said. “By stopping the pre-orders, which was our sole basis for any type of revenue, that put a major, major pressure on the company.”

At the same time, the money taken in was being reinvested in the business, Rosenthal said. Those investments included
Tooling for multiple lines – Remcos, Ultras, TNA – as well as acquiring new licenses inside wrestling (Masked Republic) but also outside of it (Bruce Lee and Bigfoot);
The rights to the Galoob and Official San Francisco Toy Makers names;
And the rights to use the Hasbro name, “retro logo” and “current logo on all wrestling figures” as part of a licensing deal.

“We paid a substantial amount of money to Hasbro to make that deal, and it’s a long‑term deal,” Rosenthal said.

And then the tariffs on imported goods set in, adding extra pressure.

In the years since the pre-orders were taken, PowerTown has taken on additional investors, selling equity in the company, Rosenthal said. He added the company is now in a financial position to deliver on the initial pre-orders.

“We just had to take a step backward and reevaluate our finances and where we were going to put our money,” Rosenthal said. “And as we recognize the fact that we have all these new licenses and all these new opportunities, any other opportunities, by the way, a lot of its retail.

“That’s when we said, OK, let’s put together an investment position,” he continued. “Let’s offer some of our equity and show what we can do over a period of five years. We got a lot of interest, and it took us a good year to get to a place where we found basically the partner that we wanted to be part and parcel in this.”

Rosenthal is aware people are going to be skeptical that PowerTown will deliver.

“I’ve got a major investment in this company, so we are not going out of business,” he said. “We are going to ship everything that was ordered to everybody who has not canceled. I say that now, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it to whoever asks me.”

Rosenthal also addressed the departures of Magnum TA (Terry Allen) and Greg Gagne from PowerTown. He described the split as amicable, which Allen corroborated on the Fig Guys stream. Rosenthal said the cloud hanging over PowerTown put extra pressure on Gagne and Allen, so they decided to part ways.

He also discusses the status of the TNA license, the expiration of PowerTown’s deal with MLW, the lack of communication, the company’s various names, royalties for talent, refunds and much more in the Q&A below.

Note, this transcript is long. Rosenthal opened with a 20-minute recap of PowerTown’s history and some new information. It’s been edited for clarity.

Steve Rosenthal: I want to start at the beginning, because I think it’s very, very important to understand that I was totally retired in ‘21. I really retired in ‘17 and ‘18. Back in the ‘80s, I was really the guy that was the first to market. That doesn’t mean that I thought of it first. That doesn’t mean that Jackie Friedman of LJN, who was a dear friend before he passed away, didn’t think of going to Vince McMahon before I did. But I was the first to approach Vince McMahon. And the short of that was, Vince, you could shake Vince’s hand, but it doesn’t mean that anything you shook on would come to fruition, OK. So I did have a deal with them, and we did start to build the line around Hulk Hogan, and then Galoob stepped in, and LJN stepped in, and eventually Galoob was knocked down, and Jackie Friedman getting the deal with the LJNs.

I, in turn, believed so much in wrestling that that’s when I approached Verne Gagne. Did some research. I wasn’t really a wrestling aficionado, but I learned real quick, because I realized it gave me a very, very profitable sector for my company at the time, and met with Verne, we did a deal, and I was able to turn around figures in, like, literally, three or four or five months to get them into retail before LJN.

We were successful for three or four or five years. Fast forwarding to 2021 after I retired, I started to realize just kind of surfing, especially during COVID, that the figures that I was selling at Walmart and Target and every retailer in the United States and, for that matter, worldwide, where wrestling was popular, were being traded for almost $2,000, which I wouldn’t pay $2,000 for one of my figures. And by the way, I didn’t save any. Can you imagine? I did not save any. I think I had some Road Warriors. I had only two Road Warriors and Rick Martel, [Nick] Bockwinkel – OK, which I don’t even have anymore.

So recognizing that there was a collectible aspect to what I did back in the ’80s, I contacted Greg Gagne, and I said, ‘Greg, we’ve got to take advantage of this. But let’s do it maybe one shot out of the gate, or do a Kickstarter. Let’s go out and get a Baron von Raschke and some of the guys that we did back in the ’80s, and I’m sure we can generate a couple hundred thousand dollars, very, very profitably. And maybe do a second one.

What happened was, because Greg was so well-respected in the marketplace – and he got Magnum TA involved – that we ended up signing in a very, very short amount of time over 200 wrestlers. And that goes all the way back to Gorgeous George. OK, so we were really coming at this as a totally retro-style figure even going to do, and again, I’m really bringing the behind the scenes, we were going to introduce Remcos. But one of our partners who was handling the design, basically the digital sculpting, every time he sculpted it – I mean, his sculpts were fantastic – every time he sculpted a figure, it got close to an ultra as opposed to a Remco.

So we made a decision that, OK, let’s move ahead with Ultras. We ended up doing six Ultras. And, we had an incredible, incredible social media promotion that we did. And I couldn’t believe it when we opened up Shopify. The number that we did in the first 20 minutes boggled my mind. It really did. I don’t even think I even did that kind of number in retail. What that catapulted us to do after Ultras 1 was basically to get involved with a lot of the other different associations, from MLW to TNA to Masked Republic.

We introduced the Ultras in September of ’23. Pre-orders were in September of ’23 and the first figures that I had in my hand were available in January of ’24 so you’re talking five months with tooling, with deco, with approvals, etc. And that’s when I made my appearance at Cardona and Myers, one of their live broadcasts. And everybody flipped. And it was after everybody’s flip that we found out that we had a problem, because one of the legs was breaking and it was a design flaw.

It wasn’t meant to be pushed back all the way. When you push it back all the way, try to do a full leg kick, it popped off and couldn’t be popped back on. So it was at that point that I put my money where my mouth is, and I re-manufactured 1000s and 1000s of pieces. I certainly wasn’t going to ship a defective, so I felt it was best to re-manufacture the goods, which took us about another month.

When the goods were received, everybody loved them. And I’m bringing that up because that’s the way I like to do business.

From there we went from Ultras 1, then we took advantage of the next item out of the box. We did a Diamond Collection on The Iron Claw. Again, very, very successful. It was a deco change. But we had the girls, Kerry [Von Erich’s] daughters, they did the forward. It was very, very touching. And that also was extremely successful.

From that, we went into the Cardona and Myers collection. And when we finally shipped that, although we were late, OK, both Matt and Brian said it was the best figures they ever saw of themselves. Not saying it was the best figures they ever saw, necessarily. But I mean, we hit everything from Matt’s tan to his face. And we really, really, really took our time, which was one of the reasons why instead of taking five months, it may have taken eight or nine months.

From there, we then went into our plan at that time was we were going to do a pre-order every six to eight weeks. Every month. And what happened was after Cardona and Myers, we did the Remcos, which were 10 figures. After the Remcos, it was TNA, which were four figures. And after TNA, we did Ultras, which was another six figures. Now as a businessman, I was going to stay in this for a very, very short amount of time, because I’m not a young guy. Like I said, I’ve been in the business for 40 years, but I’m young at heart. I love the toy business, and I’ll probably always be in it.

And it was at that point that we decided to basically get very, very, very aggressive with the company. So what we did is we started acquiring all of the retro – all with the exception of LJN – all of the retro brands that were available in the marketplace, from Original San Francisco Toy Makers to Remco and Galoob. So we own those trademarks, and our plan was to utilize all these different formats.

Now I’m going to make an announcement here that nobody knows, so you’re the first to know this. It shows what I say. We’ve acquired the rights to Hasbro, and that has not been announced publicly to anyone. What that means is that we’ve acquired the rights to utilize the Hasbro retro logo and their current logo on all wrestling figures. And why are we doing that? Because Hasbro deserves a royalty on all of the Hasbros that are out there. That was my approach.

I don’t want to go into the whole plan now, but I think it’s important. Now what people are going to say was, sure you got all these different brands, ship what you got. I get that. I totally, totally, totally get that.

With all that, I just said, we’re not going out of business, OK? By the way, I’ve got a major investment in this company, so we are not going out of business. We are going to ship everything that was ordered to everybody who has not canceled. I say that now, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it to whoever asks me.

And all of the things that I just mentioned to you, God willing, I guess that we re-establish credibility. We’re going to stay in this sector, and our goal is to really become a major, major, major factor.

Now I will tell you this, that our plan is to have the goods in stock before anybody orders. Because obviously pre-orders are a problem because you’re basically taking money, and people have to wait six or seven months. So I get all of that. So the plan is to put together an incredible marketing plan with all of the different trademarks that we own, from Galoob to Remco to Hasbro, etc., etc., and PowerTown, and to have those goods in stock, and having a pre-order type situation where there’s a special price upfront, and then after that time element expires, we will still have additional inventory for people to order.

So we’re really trying to identify what we need to do to reestablish ourselves as a company. We have about 30 figures that we have already created, we haven’t shipped that we put out in the marketplace 30 various different individual talents. And again, we’re not going to let anybody down on what’s been ordered.

What happened was, I mentioned to you, the licenses, the trademarks and all of that. Hasbro is a license. So we paid a substantial amount of money to Hasbro to make that deal, and it’s a long-term deal. And what we did with the other retro brands is we just acquired them through legal means.

What we started to do at that point, as we started to grow, we drastically changed our business model. And by acquiring a lot of different licenses, Bruce Lee; Master of One master one, which is a story that Bruce Lee wrote prior to his death, which obviously was very early. I mentioned that we did a deal with the Masked Republic, and we also did a deal with Bigfoot, because Bigfoot has a digital footprint coming out with a brand new TV show.

We started to create a toy company, of which PowerTown is part of. At this point it really was a full blown, enormous impact on our financials. And then the tariffs came along. Now these are not necessarily excuses. They’re business reasons. And I put more money in. We have now investors. And we are definitely going to right the ship. We are kind of re-emphasizing what we want to focus on, and we’re bringing in new people. We’ve had some changes in our team.

I’m not saying anything at a school here, because TA and I are on the same page. The delays really had an impact on Greg and Magnum. They’re more than just involved in PowerTown. They have a persona. They make a lot of appearances. They have a fanbase. They do a lot of signings.

As an example, TA did a pod with Dale Earnhardt Jr, and the pod was strictly about wrestling and the things that took place in wrestling and the history. He even talked about his accident, things like that. He got a lot of very, very, very positive responses on it, but then people started banging away at PowerTown. It just wasn’t fair to TA.

TA and I are very, very dear friends. We still talk a lot. But that’s the only reason that they left. It had nothing to do with anything else. There’s no falling out.

So I could have said, OK, let’s fold up shop and forget about it. It’s over. I’ll go back to playing golf in Florida, and everybody else will do whatever it is they had to do. But no, that’s not what I wanted to do. This is not the way I want my legacy to be. So we are going to ship everything that was ordered to the people that still have orders in place.

The company is going to be made up of … I can’t say who the Hasbro executive is, but I can tell you that I will share that with you in a week or so. So feel free to buzz me back ten.

We’re bringing in some very, very unique designers from competition that I think are going to be just unbelievable for the company.

One of my other partners is a gentleman by the name of Don Robbins. Don was SVP of International merchandising for Toys R Us, back in the ’80s, ‘90s … He was with LJN, and then Don was with Jakks Pacific.

So we got an incredible team, and that team is going to allow us to move forward in a very, very, very positive manner and deliver everything that we promised we’d deliver.

So that’s my story. I will tell you this: I’m a salesman. Somebody once said that when I first did the podcast with the boys when we opened up PowerTown, and I don’t know whether this is a compliment or not, they said I could sell a strawberry ice pop to a lady with white gloves. Well, that’s not the intent here. The intent here is to be honest and open and understand that we went through a kind of an upheaval by growing the business much too quickly.

But now things are settling down. The dust is settling and we’re going to make things happen at PowerTown that I think will turn that particular sector upside down with everything that we have at our disposal.

Wrestling Figures News: Were the Remcos produced?

Rosenthal: Mmm hmm.

Wrestling Figure News: Where are they then?

Rosenthal: They are at our factory in China, and we are making plans to ship them, very, very shortly.

Simply, I’m sitting here looking at … these are counter samples. This is what I mean about social media, when TA made an appearance [on a live stream], he had his counter samples. And counter samples are what we get sent before we allow them to go into production. So we have the packaging. We have the product. They’re dressed just as if we were going to ship it to our consumers or we’re sending it to Walmart.

So I’m looking at the “I Quit Match.” I’m looking at Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson. I’m looking at Bobo Brazil. I got Tito Santana, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Nick Bockwinkel and the Missing Link, and everything is packaged, ready to go.

And our intention is now that we’ve reestablished our financial objectives to get these things on the water ASAP. I’m not making a promise here, but depending on what kind of strings I can pull, I may even fly it in because I feel we owe that to our customers.

It doesn’t mean anything because nobody’s seen it.

Wrestling Figure News: What was the reason that the Remcos didn’t ship in October?

Rosenthal: Everything had to do with our financials.They basically were not in production at the time. They are in production now. And we had to make financial decisions to pull back, reexamine exactly where we were going, what we were going to do, knowing that at some point we were going to manufacture and ship the merchandise.

So these were all financial decisions. Nothing was based on, I mean some of the things that were said on social media, there was no scam.

I love the business, and it was all a matter of financials and all of the various different things that we ended up doing, the different licenses we ended up taking, the amount of money that we were spending in order to build a business, to grow the business.

I’ll just give you an example. I really don’t like to quote numbers, because that will be misinterpreted by other parties. But we have fully at our disposal right now, upwards of a half a million dollars [in tooling]. And that’s because basically our figures were one-off and and that goes for TNA, which is pretty close to being in production. Likewise with our Ultras 2.

We’re reusing certain bodies, but all new heads, all new feet, in some cases all new arms. We put a lot of money into this business. So it’s not like you get these pre-orders, and, OK, the money just gets divided with the partners. All the money has gone back into the business.

And by the way, another point is … and it was a poor business decision on our side, OK? And in a couple of instances, I’ve been told not to say this because it kind of degrades our ability to make the right decisions. But our production team, when Remcos went on pre-order, I want to say that it was either April or May, maybe even June, I was quoted by our production people that we would ship this merchandise in September. And I said, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ September of that year. And I asked again. I said, ‘Are you sure it’s going to be September of that year?’ Absolutely, no problems. Well, he was only off by four or five months.

Now, what did that mean? Having announced September, we could not continue to do the pre-orders that we wanted to do. Remember, I mentioned that we were going to do it every six-to-eight weeks? That was our operating revenue. So we had to come to a complete stop because we weren’t going to continue and not be able to ship what we had taken orders from.

By stopping the pre-orders, which was our sole basis for any type of revenue, that put a major, major pressure on the company. So I hope that kind of clarifies it a little bit. We had never pointed that out in the past.

In all honesty and all transparency, we really misquoted the availability of ship date for Remcos. We really did. And it’s past. All I can do is make up for it.

Wrestling Figure News: What has changed with PowerTown or the company’s financial situation?

Rosenthal: It’s all outside investors. Because we’re growing the company in a direction that is beyond simply wrestling figures, and knowing the background of some of the team, we have investors that are investing in us.

LikeI said at the beginning, this was going to be a really short-lived thing. I’m telling you, really honestly, I never expected to go back to work.

Like everybody else, I thought I would just enjoy my retirement years. Although I love the business. It’s like The Godfather when he said you try to get out, you get sucked right back in. Well, that’s what happened with me, because this has become a passion again. And we decided that if we were going to grow the business, and we weren’t going to self fund it, let’s get outside investors to invest in the company. Give them a piece of the equity. And that’s the direction we took.

The half-a-million dollars that I quoted is basically an asset that the company has, because we own all this tooling. We have the tooling for Ultras, we have the tooling for Remcos.

And when you do a Remco, even though it’s one body, there are so many other pieces to the puzzle. Remco, I think, was 28 tools.

Ultras was close to $200,000 in tooling to make the type of product that we wanted to make.

And then again, I put more money back into it because they were re-manufactured. And again, these are not excuses. They’re reasons.

Back in the ‘80s, when I was selling retail, we had hiccups. We had days that we couldn’t meet with Walmart. But it was a different time, a different place, different product.

I get back to the social media thing. I could talk to the buyer and get his blessing to ship later, or to do this, or to do that, or let’s run an ad to make sure that it’s late. Can’t do that here.

This whole pre-order thing is black and white. Put the pre-order out there, you take the orders and you’re expected to ship it. We didn’t do that, and we didn’t do that. And I’m not begging, I’m not groveling for anybody’s forgiveness. There are problems that we caused, but we’re going to make up for it in a lot of different ways.

Wrestling Figure News: So just to clarify, Remcos have been produced. TNA will go into production, and Ultras will go into production, but have not been produced, correct?

Rosenthal: Correct. We still have some approvals that we’re going to need. I’m just not satisfied with some of the heads. Bodies are cool. But we’re real close now, really close.

I’m not sure if you’re aware that the factory that we utilize, which is Lucky-Yeh, you can feel free to look them up online under the Lucky Group. They’re really one of the foremost manufacturers of action figures in China. They have their own factories. They have a compound in Shenzhen, right outside of Shenzhen, and they are really the company that put McFarlane in business. And they were the exclusive manufacturer of McFarlane figures until Todd sold 50% of his company to somebody in Canada.

But they’re fantastic, and we’re still in bed with them. I can’t say that Galoob will necessarily stay there, or Original San Francisco Toy Makers will stay there. Or Hasbros will stay there. Only because those figures are not nearly as intricate as what we’re doing with Remcos and with the Ultras. You don’t have an excessive amount of articulation. Some of them are static figures. So we’ve got a lot of different ways that we can move on that new merchandise.

Wrestling Figure News: So there was speculation that you weren’t working with the Lucky Group or at their factories anymore, that you had lost space there.

Rosenthal: No. Let me tell you something about the Yeh brothers. OK, just so you understand Frankie Yeh and Simon and all of the brothers, we have known since 1981.

When Lucky-Yeh first went into business and became a trading company, Donnie opened them up to be a major factor with Toys R Us.

The Toys R Us stores, every store may have been flipped, but every store is basically the same set. You can walk down one line and know exactly where everything is. But when you walked into a Toys R Us store, the entire left hand wall was basically anything under $9. … And that was all the Lucky Group. And they did a tremendous amount of business with Toys R Us. And Donnie is very close to the family. We all are. We consider them friends. But they’re also our business partners in China.

But anybody who thinks that we’re not doing business with Lucky anymore is 100% wrong. Right now, that’s the only factor we’re using.

Wrestling Figure News: As far as TNA goes, I know that Ringside Collectibles now has the license to produce figures for them. They’ve already produced one. Does PowerTown still have a contract with TNA?

Rosenthal: Yes.

Wrestling Figure News: How?

Rosenthal: Yes, yeah. In fact, I gotta pick up the slack on a lot of this because basically that was being handled by Terry. But I’m going to put together a call because Brian [Myers] has been involved. Brian helped us get the license. We’re very thankful for that. But I hope to resurrect everything that has kind of fallen apart and that’ll be my next task.

That’s on me. It’s not on Terry, it’s not on Greg. It’s going to be up to me to speak to their president and see if I can smooth things over.

The contract has not been canceled. The agreement has not been canceled. We do not have an exclusive deal with them. In fact, very, very, very few deals in the licensing industry are exclusive, other than with some of our talent. And that was done for a certain reason, which was called into question when PowerTown first started.

We do not have a deal anymore with Major League Wrestling because we couldn’t get it out in the time frame that they wanted it to get out.

But we do have a deal with Masked Republic, which is lucha libre. That was going to be the lucha libre is the six figures, which were going to be Remcos. That was going to be the next pre-order but we stopped. How can we have some people put up more money? Can’t do business like that.

Wrestling Figure News: So you no longer have the MLW license, but you are looking to put out Galoobs at some point?

Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. In fact, it’s all done. The MLW designs, the digitals, it’s all done because those were going to be the first Galoobs that we were going to introduce into the marketplace.

Now, is there a possibility of reinvigorating that relationship? We’ll see. But we’e got a lot of priorities on our plate. Our first priority are Remcos, TNA and Ultras. Finish that, get that out, and everything else will be an incredible gift to the collectors.

And by the way, we have our sights set on going in a lot of different directions. We’ve been approached by a lot of people to do a lot of things. We haven’t done an Amazon store. I mean, TikTok store is becoming very, very big.

But the first thing we want to do, and if I say nothing else, is do right by the people that supported our pre-orders.

Wrestling Figure News: That’s sort of the key here is that you’ve got a base of people who are frustrated that there hasn’t been communication, that when they have requested refunds, they haven’t been able to get them. And now we’re two years in from the pre-orders or so, and people are wondering if they’ve lost their money or if they’re they’re going to get their figures.

Rosenthal: Let me say, let me say it this way, they have not lost their money. OK, they are going to get their figures. And I’m not going to talk out of school now, but to everyone, and again, everybody’s going to say, ‘I’m selling.’ I get it. But to everyone who has stayed with us, to everyone who has hung in there, we’re going to do some special things for them. And that’ll be announced at another date, because it doesn’t mean anything right now. It just falls on deaf ears. Get me what you owe me. But we recognize that.

And by the way, if it was me, I would feel the same way they do. Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. And really the most frustrating thing, even though we haven’t shipped, as an example, if we had Remcos in the hands of the consumer now, it would blow them away.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say it’s better than Mattel’s, but I think it is. So I am going to say it. It’s incredible what we’ve done with Remcos. The product speaks for itself. If they had the product and they could see how great it is, even though it’s late, I think their tone would be a lot different. And I think that their tone will be different.

Now there’s going to definitely be people that are going to totally, 100% walk away from us, and I get it. Totally, completely 100% understand that. Hopefully maybe in the future, if they see the manner in which we’re handling our pre-orders, which means everything is going to be in stock, you order it, we ship it. OK, maybe we’ll turn them around.

Believe me, it’s frustrating to me, and I said this to TA on many occasions, it’s frustrating to me when I see a lot of the things and a lot of other companies are doing. A lot of them are showing ones and twos. And maybe we bit off more than we can chew by introducing 10 Remcos. Again, it’s not just the body. It’s all the soft goods that goes into it, and that type of thing. It’s also all the video preparation and the promotion and all the things that we have to do to get ready for the pre-orders. So maybe we should have looked at what our competition was doing, and rather than introducing 10 figures, introduce three figures.Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. But II think big. I’m very short in stature. But I think big.

Wrestling Figure News: So you’ve talked about Donnie Robbins. What’s his role at PowerTown?

Rosenthal: He is really our liaison overseas. Once merchandise gets through production, he gets overseas, he goes to Hong Kong, he checks merchandise out. He does over QC. We are in touch with him pretty much on a daily basis when he’s in Hong Kong. Had video calls. For example, with Ultras, he was over there for maybe a month.

He’s been going over there since, I guess the mid ‘70s. He’s our liaison with the factories. He’s behind the scenes. He’s not as vocal as I am, or would not do an interview like this. But Donnie. is brilliant.

For example, Donnie when he first started in the ‘80s, he was the action figure buyer at Toys R Us.

Over the years, I established a relationship with Donnie. And Donnie and I became very, very, very close. And we actually went into business together in the 2000s with our own toy companies. We did a lot of things in Turtles and a lot of other things. We did stuff with the WWE, did a ton of stuff with the WWE. We did a ton of stuff with NASCAR. So we know it has to be done to get to the next step.

But now, with TA gone, Donnie will become a much more able voice in a lot of other things, other than just being a liaison from a manufacturing standpoint overseas.

Wrestling Figure News: So at this point, are you running PowerTown?

Rosenthal: Yes. The buck stops here. I mean, it’s really Donnie and ,I but simply because of my personality, I’m the guy.

Wrestling Figure News: I think it was last April that you all put out the statement about having better communication, and y’all went dark after that. Why?

Rosenthal: It sounds foolish. And again, I don’t know how this is going to be taken. We didn’t know what the hell to tell anybody. We really didn’t. We certainly didn’t want to lie. We didn’t want to make promises we couldn’t keep, which would make it worse.

We were going through this infrastructure change internally. We were going through the financial upheaval of doing things that we had not anticipated doing in the past, and we didn’t know what to say.

We came out with an update – and I don’t think I’ve ever been this transparent in my entire career – because, again, I’m a salesman.

I’ll tell you a side story. When Donnie and I started our first company, we knocked off the foam noodle that everybody has in their swimming pool, right? And what we did was we created something called the Floooodle. The floooodle was basically an inflatable noodle that had about six or seven seams in between.

I went overseas to see Walmart at that point their offices were on Mody Road in Kowloon, and I met with the buyer, and the buyer loved it. Absolutely loved it, and this was our first item. He said to me, ‘I love it. What I want to create is a floor dump with 144 pieces for every store.’ And I had to hit a price point, wasn’t going to make a lot of money on it, but I had to hit a price point. And he asked me simply. He said, ‘Can you meet this ship date?’ If you’re with the buyer of Walmart and you say, ‘no,’ forget about it.

So I just sucked up. And I said, I will hit that ship date. And I did. I mean, we worked 24/7, I think Donnie lived in China for three months.

But what I’m saying is sometimes you have to be aggressive and say something to a buyer to make sure you get the order. Once you get the order, this is retail. I’m not talking pre-orders.

In the case of these pre-orders, we just didn’t know what to say. And we do have a PR agency, and they said, sometimes silence is better than saying the wrong thing. So we were just caught between a rock and a hard place, and we were wrong.

But could I have said what I’m saying now and actually get it across?It was a very, very difficult we just didn’t know how to answer because we couldn’t give you a ship date. We couldn’t go into a 2- minute dissertation like I did with you. But all of that’s going to change. It’s going to change now that everything has shaken out.

We’re bringing in more people, probably going to hire a third-party company to handle our communications.

Every time you do a pre-order, you’re looking at upwards of 4,000 or 5,000 different individual orders, and that’s a lot for a small company to answer.

Was it right in hindsight not communicating, it was wrong, But if we had put something out there that wasn’t the truth again, it could have been worse. So,that’s the only way that I can answer. I wish I could say something different.

Wrestling Figure News: Is the company in a financial place at the moment to deliver on your promises?

Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. We just had to take a step backward and reevaluate our finances and where we were going to put our money. And as we recognize the fact that we have all these new licenses and all these new opportunities, any other opportunities, by the way, a lot of its retail.

So the order positions would be staggering when it comes to things like Bruce Lee and stuff like that.

That’s when we said, OK, let’s put together an investment position. Let’s offer some of our equity and show what we can do over a period of five years. We got a lot of interest, and it took us a good year to get to a place where we found basically the partner that we wanted to be part and parcel in this.

Wrestling Figure News: As far as the company name goes, it’s changed a few times. I’ve seen Kiddazzle. I’ve seen Boomerang Entertainment. What is the name of the company at this point?

Rosenthal: As far as I’m concerned, it’s PowerTown.

PowerTown never went away. There was always PowerTown. PowerTown was our wrestling figures.

Back in the ‘80s, I did the Karate Kid trilogy. And put together a new deal with Sony for PowerTown to reintroduce the Karate Kid figures, just the way I did it in the ‘80s, with try action, the leg kicks, the arm chops the waist twist and turns and stuff like that. And all of that was going to be under PowerTown.

What happened is Kidazzzle was formed because we were offered an opportunity to become the toy company for a property called Iyanu. And Iyanu was a book series for kids that was introduced by Lion Forge [Entertainment]. It was exciting at the beginning. Never took off. We backed away, basically. And that’s really where Kidazzle came in.

We had Kidazzle. We had PowerTown. And then we wanted a parent company above that, so we put together a company called Boomerang. We still own the names, but right now we are PowerTown.

We own the name Kidazzle. We own the name Boomerang, but that was all part and parcel of biting off more than we could chew.

Wrestling Figure News: So there is a plan to still take some items to mass retail?

Rosenthal: We are going to market the Hasbro property, exactly the way Hasbro marketed it from ‘91 to ‘94, those three years, between when LJN had it, and then Jakks.

All of the cards are going to be the same. All of the color iterations are going to be the same. Because it’s got Hasbro on it, it’s a perfect opportunity for retail.

We’ve had interest from from the Targets and Walmarts of the world, especially on Remco, because historically that was a great brand back in the ‘80s. It would have been put in the retro department, I think in Walmart and Target, that’s kind of the electronic area where they have a lot of the retro product.

We have strong interest in retail, but at the same time, we don’t want to alienate our collectors.

If it’s there, we’ll do it.We do have the brands that I think makes sense for retail.

Wrestling Figure News: We’ve seen wrestlers like Ricky Morton and Jordynne Grace make comments about the situation with PowerTown. How has this affected your relationships with the wrestlers? What’s the situation with royalties? That’s something that came up on this week’s Major Podcast was royalties getting paid to wrestlers.

Rosenthal: I have to look at the contracts, but even on the talent that we have under contract, royalties are paid when the merchandise is shipped. Now, I’m not using that as an excuse, but anything that we shipped, we’ve paid royalties to date.

Whether the wrestler chose in some cases, they chose to take it in free goods because they make a lot more money autographing this stuff than they do on just simple royalties. But the Jordynne Graces, the Mooses, they will all be paid.

And I have intention, because now it’s me, to the best of my ability, reaching out to all if them and make it very, very clear I’m trying to explain to them. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sit face to face with Jordynne Grace, she’d probably kick the shit out of me. But I definitely have intentions of trying to reach out to everybody, including Ultras too, the Marty Funks of the world and some of the estates.

When we introduced Ultras 1, Charlie Thesz, who is Lou Thesz’ widow, I sent her a check. She said it was the single biggest check she ever got. And if Lou was alive, it would have been the single biggest check he ever got his entire career. Now I’m just saying Lou Thesz was the No. 1 figure that we sold, but we sold a lot of Lou Thesz. Some people laughed at us for doing Lou Thesz and Verne Gagne.

But to answer your question, we’re going to pay everybody whatever it is that they’ve earned. That’s not even in question. And I am going to reach out personally. I’ve gotten all the contact information from everybody. TA has supplied that because he really was our talent coordinator and our talent liaison. Now it’s up to me.

Wrestling Figure News: You’ve got a lot of work to do and a lot of people to contact. Why haven’t you contacted the folks in the last couple years? Or even TNA?

Rosenthal: That was an internal decision.

Other than speaking to Brian and Matt because of various different reasons, I talked to Barb Goodish, I talked to Charlie Thesz., I talked to Kerry Von Erich’s daughters, both of them. But I had very little contact. That was all Greg and TA. We each have a different way of doing things and a different way of saying things, and I want to make direct contact, good, bad or different, , I want those relationships to continue.

I’m not saying it’s going to happen with Jordynne Grace, she’s with WWE but with all of these various different retro brands that we have and all these different types of formats that we can manufacture the product in, we want to reuse a lot of this talent.

We just recently signed Haystacks Calhoun, who really was the first big man. You have no idea how difficult that was to find. We were able to find his daughter in Oklahoma.

We’ve got so much talent and so much opportunity that I have to right the ship.

Forget the monetary aspect of this whole thing, I just love the business. The fact that I started this whole wrestling [action figure] thing. But when I look back on it now, I mean, it’s a multi-billion dollar sector of the toy industry. And I just had a very, very small part of that in the ‘80s to make this thing what it is today. And now I’m trying to get back a little bit to all of these guys, like the Tony Atlases of the world. A lot of these guys had a pretty rough back in the day. I don’t know Tony’s entire story, but he was a guy that was doing really, really well, and … after his wrestling days, things were tough.

We not only want to give back to the consumer, really want to do right by the talent. I really do.

Wrestling Figure News: One of the things that came out within the last month was one of your designers had mentioned that his contract was up. His name’s Hal Haney, and he had also mentioned that he’d reached out to you and was looking for payment for work that he’d done that he hadn’t received. Are you in contact with him?

Rosenthal: Not making excuses. We want Hal to be part of this going forward. And there’s a lot more from what, from what I’ve been told that went into Hal’s frustration and I get it. Hal was very instrumental in helping us with a lot of the sculpts. He’s an incredible designer, incredible freehand designer. So now I’m going to reach out to Hal and try to make everything right, and if right means that he deserves more than he’s owed, that’s what I’m going to do.I really hope that going forward Hal can be part of what we’re building here.

Wrestling Figure News: A lot of the customers have sought refunds, and it’s well-past their ability to receive those. Why hasn’t PowerTown offered those to customers?

Rosenthal: Well, first of all, that’s not totally true. We have done refunds.I can’t say how many we’ve done, how many we haven’t done, because I don’t get directly involved in that. We do have our controllers and our people that handle these things through Shopify. But I think it was just all a matter of communication.I’m not putting it back on anyone else, because the buck stops with me. But that was all part of the communication problem. In some instances, we tried
to salvage and save the cancellation.

Look, if somebody wants to cancel, we will try to contact them to try to see, look, the goods are shipping. Do you want it? Do you not want it? There’s no excuse. It’s just a matter of our lack of communication. There’s our lack of follow up. There were absolutely, positively individuals that did get refunds. How many people didn’t get refunds? How many people actually had cancellations? I can’t give you the number, but there’s also a lot of people that have stood by us and all they want is the merchandise.

And I’m only hoping that when they get the merchandise, that will be the difference between them supporting PowerTown in the future, and walking away from us.

I have absolutely reached out to certain individuals that either follow us or follow the pod, follow this, follow that, whatever the situation might be. And I’ve had some really, really heart-to-heart conversations and again, without trying to oversell, I think turned around a little bit the direction that they wanted to take.

So I enjoy being out there in the public. I enjoy having conversations like this. And by the way, none of the questions that you’ve asked so far have I taken any more than totally respectful. And I appreciate the ask. I really do, and I’m glad I have the opportunity. It’s like this is all bottled up inside of me, because this has not been an easy year, trust me.

Wrestling Figure News: You’ve got a lot riding on this, and like I said, a lot of people are looking for their product or they’re looking for their money. And they want to understand what’s going on. Everyone saw the April note last year and then the communication didn’t come after that. A lot of people are looking for answers and wanting to know what’s going on.

Rosenthal: I hope that a lot of what you and I are talking about today will get to them. Again, some of the exciting things that I’m telling you about, they will say, ‘Sure, that’s great, ship me what the hell I order.’

I get that. The frustrating part to me has been that with all the deals that we have in the hopper, the Hasbros, the Official San Francisco Toy Makers, our talent, we just haven’t been able to do it. We’ve been at a standstill. Now our intent is to revive this thing. We have to revive it the right way. We 100% have to reestablish our credibility.

I can just imagine people are saying, ‘Yeah, here, here goes Steve Rosenthal again.’ Like I said, I can sell a strawberry Popsicle to a lady with white gloves. That’s not the way I want this to be taken at all. At all. So I appreciate you reaching out.

Wrestling Figure News: We’ll be waiting to see what comes next.