So you can imagine the ennui I find myself enduring when, after jumping from robots turning into vehicles, to a whole bunch of new guys in new factions turning into animals, to one of those factions fighting another new faction turning into crazy ‘living’ alien vehicles on their home planet, that we seem to have settled back into just ‘Autobots and Decepticons turning into cars and planes fighting each other on Earth’ for the better part of ten years now. Yawn. Where’s the originality? Where are the crazy shake-ups that take the core concept of Transformers (robots turning into shit) and really do something new and original with it? Where are the new casts that aren’t Optimus and Megatron and Bumblebee and Starscream for the umpteenth time?
Power Core Combiners got close, having almost nothing but new characters with toys based around a whole new mechanic. But the toys could’ve obviously used another cycle in development, and Hasbro and retailers seemed to lose faith in the line almost as soon as it was released. Plus, it was still rooted in Autobots and Decepticons turning into vehicles, and I’d really like to see that particular element get pushed out in favor of some truly new stuff.
Over in the HoF thread, Six questioned where you would even go for an ‘original’ TF series at this point. So I’ll throw out some ideas that have floated into my head at one time or another. Indeed, many of these borrow concepts from other franchises or series, but adapting ideas that have worked for other things is one way to err on the side of success when you’re trying to inject some ‘new-ness’ into your brand.
One idea that hit recently was a group of individually-power hungry Transformers landing on a primitive world and, in an attempt to garner resources from it and start spreading influence, each setting themselves up as a ‘god’ of a particular area of the planet, with different tribes and species each dedicating themselves to them and becoming their army. The robots would turn either into grand alien approximations of fantastical monstrosities, or maybe otherworldly vehicles, meant for troop transport. The ‘armies’ could be multiple minifigures that could be loaded in or on the Transformer ‘god’ components to be mobilized into battle, and if the Warhammer influence wasn’t obvious enough already, Hasbro could even design a tabletop battle game around all the various purchasable pieces. With all the designs being otherworldly in the first place, and the minifigures setting a benchmark, they could actually inject a real sense of scale into such a line, with large mechanical gods flanked by their servants, or residing in huge, transforming playsets of bases or mechanical battle transports. There’s also the enjoyable idea that every character introduced at the main size class would basically be a faction unto themselves, maybe with smaller characters, or even troop-buildable Cybertronian drones to fill out a given army.
What about a line entirely of racing vehicles, with plotlines similar to the Velicitron arc of ‘Cybertron’? Characters could belong to different racing teams, with the focus on the toys being tuning and customization, allowing you to swap out wheels, spoilers, engines, and even body pieces for truly individualized toys. There could be little pit crew members in smaller size classes, and large, buildable, customizable track sets. The story could be more oriented in a sporty direction, though moral conflicts could arise with stuff like illegal tuning parts, and shady underground races.
Or going on the sports thing, they could even branch out to more sports-themed TFs. Team buses and planes turning into built-for-the-game Football and Baseball robots. I’d buy the hell out of a Zamboni turning into a Cybertronian hockey player.
Go the other direction and appeal to the video game demographic. Those Skylanders things seem popular with the kids; what about a couple of ‘leader’ characters who turn into plug-and-play video game consoles, with additional characters turning into attachable cartridges to let you play as them through additional missions?
That hilarious-looking Cyberverse TFPrime mech-suit thing makes me think, why not a whole line expanding the concept of cityformers? Armies of Cybertronians waging war on each other from their playset-scale bases, and then when things get really crazy, the cities they’re defending themselves transform and engage in gigantic-scale battles, the winner of these conflicts ‘annexing’ the conquered territory and physically combining with it to become a larger city/base/playset, and a bigger, badder robot.
They could go even larger! Remember War Planets? A whole line of massive-scale Cybertronians turning into planets to do universe-wrecking battle with threats too big to ever be handled before (maybe Unicron’s got himself an army now?)! With transforming moons and rings as extra weapons and accessories!
And this is all just me spitballing! Surely Hasbro has it in them somewhere to do something new with the Transformers brand and franchise. They don’t exactly have to go as crazy as the concepts I’ve thrown out here, just one big change to what’s become an annoyingly constant formula would be nice (we’ve hardly had any Transformers turning into mythological creatures, why not a whole line of that? Or maybe a Combiner made up of both vehicle and animal-altmode guys?). I’d just hate to think that Beast Machines was the last time Transformers was ever going to surprise me. After RiD, I kept waiting for even the *faction names* to change again…and then they didn’t.
Spoiler
Yeah, Kre-O is kind of a step in the right direction.
