Re-Make Impact Evaluation (3rd Edition): Gungan Sub #9499

In this 3rd Edition of the Re-Make Impact Evaluation section I will be focusing my analysis on a set that may not be one of the most noticed or liked by investors and collectors: the Gungan Sub from The Phantom Menace.

If you are even remotely aware of the Star Wars franchise, then you more than likely know The Phantom Menace is considered by a large majority of the fans as the worst movie produced under the whole series. What makes it even... better? is the fact that the ship itself is related to the most annoying creatures in the Star Wars universe: the Gungans. All of these factors certainly don't help this set's popularity with the SW community, but as the target demographic for this set is probably young kids and teens that grew up under the new trilogy, I can't really say that LEGO made a mistake releasing this set. We just have to live with it.

This version of the Gungan Sub is not the first released by LEGO, however, as they did one way back when the movie was first released in 1999. Below you will find a table comparing the most important statistics of both versions:

You can see above that both sets were are very similar in various aspects. Before I forget, the older version retailed for $50 while the new one does for $70.

Let's now evaluate the numbers that will help us determine the impact the 2012 version had on its predecessor from 1999

I think it is pretty clear from the graph above that the impact of the announcement and released of set 9499 had a huge negative effect on the original version. Set 7161 dropped significantly over the past year (around 38%) and I think most of that drop is as a result of the new version. For a set of this kind that I believe it's not iconic at all, the impact of a having a new and greatly improved version is something that will almost always result in depreciation of the older model. When parents and other customers can go ahead and pay even retail price for the better version ($70) instead of paying the secondary market prices of the old version, they will almost always go with the re-make. This has as a consequence a drop in demand for the older set and a drop in price as well.

In this particular case, the older set took such a big hit that was even selling below the market value of the newer version for a couple of months, coincidentally those months with the highest demand for LEGO. So far, this has been actually one of the most extreme examples I have come accross so far when evaluating set remakes, and I think it goes back to the fact that the main buyer of this set are parents getting it for their kids and not hard core collectors. Once the cheaper alternative was released those parents simply shifted their money towards it and forgot about the older version.

7161 has had a small recovery over the past couple of months, but the damage is already done. I don't see this set coming back up to its pre-9499 levels, and the data should serve as a lesson of why holding sets for a really long time can become a very costly strategy.

Thanks for reading!