It’s been over a year since it was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that Netflix‘s The Toys That Made Us documentary series had been picked up for a third season on the streaming platform, but now the long wait for new episodes is almost over. Series creator Brian Volk-Weiss announced the Season 3 premiere today, revealing that new episodes will drop on November 15, 2019.
In a post on Twitter Tuesday, the show’s official account shared a short video announcing the series’ return date with the message featuring an appearance by Walter Jones, the actor who played Zack Taylor, the original Black Ranger in the television series Might Morphin Power Rangers. You can check out the announcement below.
The Toys That Made Us is a documentary series that examines the history of some of the most important toy lines in America. The series, which debuted in 2017, has aired eight episodes thus far and covered Star Wars, Barbie, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Star Trek, Transformers, LEGO, and Hello Kitty thus far. Season 3 will cover Power Rangers, Wrestling, My Little Pony, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
While the season size of four episodes will remain the same for Season 3, there will be some significant changes to the show’s overall format. Volk-Weiss recently told Den of Geek that the series is no longer doing reenactments in Season 3, largely due to a lack of overall fan interest in them.
“There’s a huge format change,” Volk-Weiss said. “We stopped doing the reenactments. The main reason was that no one seemed to care about them. For every 1,000 DMs or Facebook messages we would get, two would be about the reenactments. So we were putting a significant amount of our budget into the reenactments, which nobody cared about. Again, I’ve been doing a lot of personal appearances now, meeting with fans and talking to people. And I asked, I started doing my own internal poll. I said to people like, ‘What do you love about the show?’ Nobody said the reenactments.”
He went on to say that the show was spending a significant portion of their budget on those reenactments as well as elaborate on how the reenactments were impacting the show’s runtime.
“By the way, of the reenactments, if people talked about it at all, the only one people talked about was Star Wars. So, I was like, ‘Why are we spending a significant percentage of our budget on something nobody cares about?'” Volk-Weiss said.
“The other issue, and this was more important than budget, is that Netflix really wants us to be under 50 minutes. Every now and then we go over 50. So, let’s just say it’s 50 minutes, we’re putting 10 percent of our time into a reenactment. Star Trek is 43 minutes, that reenactment is like four minutes. So, the main reason I did what I did was to have more time to tell the story. The budget was probably 30 percent of the reason, 70 percent of it was to have more time.”
The first two seasons of The Toys That Made Us are now available to stream on Netflix. Season 3 debuts November 15, 2019.
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