On June 29th, the 9″ Yeti from Park 8 will be released as an online exclusive. With an edition size of 1000, it will retail for $74.95. (Park 8 LE Explained page)
This is the second time we have seen the outrageous price tag of 75 bucks for a single 9″ figure. Price aside, let’s talk about the creature it is based on.
Expedition Everest opened on April 7, 2006 at Disney Animal Kingdom park at Walt Disney World. When completed, the mountain of steel beams and imagineered rock work stood nearly 200 feet tall. Here is a great article from Popular Mechanics Magazine with a peak inside the mountain. To me, the best part about this ride is the most detailed queue line at the Disney parks. Every inch of the path onto the train is fulled with treasures and artifacts from a journey into the Himalayas. It may be a bit of a stretch to say this, but I don’t mind avoiding the Fast Pass line now and then to check it all out.
Once on the train, guests are sent up a hill offering one of the best views of the rest of the resort… if one is brave enough to take a breath and look around. The downhills are great and the ride backwards is a thrill, but the star of the attraction is the Yeti… the protector of the imagineered “Forbidden Mountain.”
The Yeti, standing at 22 feet tall, is the largest animatronic the Imagineers ever built. The story of the Yeti is a much publicized one. Dubbed “Disco Yeti”, he now stands motionless with a strobe light on him to simulate movement. Here is an Orlando Sentinel article from 2010 highlighting the issue.
We have a Park 1 Yeti and a Park Starz version, but none seem to capture the Yeti’s ferocity as depicted in the Exhibition Everest attraction as the new 9″ Park 8 does.
This Park 8 version has the straggly fur, glowing red eyes and big dangerous teeth. Where as the other versions depict a more cartoonish Yeti.
The 9″ figure looks to take inspiration from both the animatronic Yeti himself as well as some of the artwork in the queue.
But the big question still remains… will the Vinylmaiton Yeti’s arms move?
Cool figure! Disney will be using their new trickle down economics here. Sell as many as you can at $75, then discount, discount & discount till they are all gone. Expect these to be on sale on disneystore.com like the rest of the higher priced 9″ end up.
$75 AND on the new mold…….I will stick with my Park Starz Yeti. That said, I do like the artwork. If it were a 3″, they could have done a brown variant.
I don’t get why Yeti is 74.00 plus change and Roger Rabbit is 44.00. Does Disney just randomly pick these prices out of the air. Frustrating. 44 plus change is a fair price for a 9 in my opinion. Come on Disney, take pity on us poor, broke, addicted collectors.
I was thinking about getting it but nah not right now. Think it’ll come down to $25 by the end of summer? I would go to my local (local is a bit of a stretch but..) Disney Store to get him at that price.
Way I theorize it, that MSEP Elliott is STILL $75 because a very limited amount have been sold at full price and DS isn’t going to give up that price until there’s a need to get rid of it, like in a ‘fire’ sale. Probably will happen here in this case too – the Yeti seems to be one of the more popular 9″ in P8.
I think they saw how popular it was going to be and so they jacked the price way up. It’s a really nice figure and I would have definitely bought it at $50, but I’ll probably just wait for it to go on sale now. The $75 ELP Dragon is still sitting around collecting dust.