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...

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