What I mean is that all of the guys who haven't come out at mass release during the regular toyline before it was chopped off likely never made it to the mass production stage. I'm sure there's an exact word for when it was halted, but I don't know it because I'm not in the industry. It was definitely after tools were made, that's obvious, but we've no idea how close to production even Arcee and Ratchet made it--for example, I highly doubt they have a warehouse of carded Rodimus Minors sitting around...if only because I think if they *did* there'd be a far better chance of them moving it.JediTricks wrote:You have to be very specific then about your timeline when you say stuff like that. Sometimes Hasbro does produce product and warehouses it when it's dropped right before shipping, but after the near-meltdown in the early '00s, they eased off this.
It's a combination of the two, since *somebody* who was higher up on the food chain than the design team said, "Yeah, that Animated line, that's not going to finish. Yeah, we spent all that money making new tools for some of these unreleased figures--who cares, we have a huge multi-billion dollar movie coming out that we need to shove toys out for. We'll make it back."The issue isn't Hasbro's, it's the retail partners', so Hasbro is working to get those sorts of things worked out. It's not as easy as just releasing them.
My implication is that if Hasbro cared enough about making that money back, they'd have sold at least one more wave of the stuff between Animated's end and ROTF.
The bird 'was' the robot, like Laserbeak. Are you implying Laserbeak isn't a character?Bullspit! It's not like Minicons as weapons where they turn into robots, they go from bird to gun, no robot or character involved. They're TF accessories, you know it to be true.
