I've never been to big into tracking and hunting down all the variants, but I was kind of curious. Does hasbro (or any other toy making company) make the variants on purpose? Like to encourage collectors to buy more (like comic covers)...or are they accidents in production? How do you know whether it was an accident or not?

I think most are accidents, some are where they've changed their minds on certain details or points mid-production, & yeah, some probably are deliberate.

I think that the intentional variants are by far the smallest in number. Accidents are probably the middle sized group, since most of them are known as "errors" instead of variants, unless there is a fairly large number produced that way - and most of the time, QA or QC will catch any foul ups before many get shipped.

I could be way off, but this seems to make sense to me...

Some are, but usually to fix errors like Roadblock's neck length http://www.yojoe.com/action/03/roadblock9.shtml
or change Halo Jumper's name to Sgt. Airborne
http://www.yojoe.com/action/03/sgtairborne.shtml

But most are just errors and quality control. I mean, look at that flamin' HAS 6-pack :rolleyes:

In the case of Duke v1's arms tho, the mould to make his arms broke
so Hasbro had to do what they could I guess...

More of this story at the bottom
http://www.yojoe.com/action/83/duke.shtml