TF Views

Dominic wrote:No. Hasbro dropped the pilot figure gimmick.

SWTF started bad, and just got worse.



Dom
-at least it is easily skippable.

Well that bites. And it's kinda stupid.

Shockwave wrote:

Dominic wrote:No. Hasbro dropped the pilot figure gimmick.

SWTF started bad, and just got worse.



Dom
-at least it is easily skippable.

Well that bites. And it's kinda stupid.

Frankly I'm fairly annoyed that the whole line didn't just feature known TF characters who turned into SW vehicles with SW pilots. How cool would it have been to have a Starscream that turned into a Tie-Fighter with a tiny Vader pilot or something? The whole "giant robots with SW faces" thing was terrible from the get-go.

Ursus mellifera wrote:

Shockwave wrote:

Dominic wrote:No. Hasbro dropped the pilot figure gimmick.

SWTF started bad, and just got worse.



Dom
-at least it is easily skippable.

Well that bites. And it's kinda stupid.

Frankly I'm fairly annoyed that the whole line didn't just feature known TF characters who turned into SW vehicles with SW pilots. How cool would it have been to have a Starscream that turned into a Tie-Fighter with a tiny Vader pilot or something? The whole "giant robots with SW faces" thing was terrible from the get-go.

I agree, they shoulda gone full crossover. I actually had designed Star Trek Transformers at one point with Starscream transforming into a Romulan Warbird. I'd love to find model kits of the various ships small enough to kitbash something together.

Shockwave wrote: I agree, they shoulda gone full crossover. I actually had designed Star Trek Transformers at one point with Starscream transforming into a Romulan Warbird. I'd love to find model kits of the various ships small enough to kitbash something together.

See? SEE?! Now that would be awesome. I'm not into Star Trek toys at all and I would probably buy a few of those.

If you're gonna do a cross-over, just do it all the way. Half-assing leads to failure.

Now that I think of it, I remember I was coming up with new characters for them (assuming they were new members of the existing Autobot and Decepticon armies). I had the Enterprise D that was two that merged into a single larger one. Warpcore was the engine section and Phaserbank was the suacer section and together they merged into Stardrive.

Shockwave wrote:Now that I think of it, I remember I was coming up with new characters for them (assuming they were new members of the existing Autobot and Decepticon armies). I had the Enterprise D that was two that merged into a single larger one. Warpcore was the engine section and Phaserbank was the suacer section and together they merged into Stardrive.

Even that's fine, since their still Transformers, and not just giant robot Star Trek characters.

Ursus mellifera wrote:

Shockwave wrote:Now that I think of it, I remember I was coming up with new characters for them (assuming they were new members of the existing Autobot and Decepticon armies). I had the Enterprise D that was two that merged into a single larger one. Warpcore was the engine section and Phaserbank was the suacer section and together they merged into Stardrive.

Even that's fine, since their still Transformers, and not just giant robot Star Trek characters.

One of these days I might draw them up again and post them to see what you guys think. I do remember that I had the saucer section's head looking somewhat like a Cybertronian Picard but it was only loosely based on him. And the drive section had a beard ala Riker. I think the merged form was 100% Cybertronian though.

The argument against SWTF being TF characters is that the licensed product takes a back seat, they become tertiary in their own universe. How are you going to convince someone who has put decades of effort into developing characters that the only thing the licensee is interested in is the vehicles, and those vehicles will play second-fiddle to the robot characters? It'd be TFSW, not SWTF. I think that'd be a very difficult sell from a business perspective.


On another tack, it'd be painfully easy to have Decepticons as Imperial vehicles, although you'd have to accept a serious scale problem - Megatron is a Star Destroyer while Starscream is a TIE Interceptor? - but the Autobots wouldn't have it so easy, as the Rebels don't have much in the way of vehicles. They don't have walkers, cool shuttles, or exciting capital ships (sorry Mon Calamari, but your ship designs are boring), they're a rag-tag fleet of a couple varieties of capital ships and just 4 single-pilot fighters, the rest is whatever they can lay their hands on. Optimus Prime is going to be an X-wing, or a landspeeder? No.

And the prequel universe is the same problem, the Separatists have crummy designs (and their most common fighter ship is already a Transformer) and most of them are droids, not vehicles. The Republic forces get all the cool stuff again, very one-sided.

I can certainly see that from the business angle, but I think that particular model would work better with having the SW vehicles be new characters rather than using existing ones. Hence the Star Destroyer would be someone not Megatron. Like the Millenium Falcon could transform into a single robot and maybe his name is Hyperdrive or something.

Shockwave wrote:I can certainly see that from the business angle, but I think that particular model would work better with having the SW vehicles be new characters rather than using existing ones. Hence the Star Destroyer would be someone not Megatron. Like the Millenium Falcon could transform into a single robot and maybe his name is Hyperdrive or something.

That gets complicated too though, you want to sell recognizable characters to kiddies, the vehicles alone at this scale Hasbro claims don't sell for crap (I think it's just Hasbro's business model has too much corporate overhead to meet the pricepoint in question, but I've grown tired of fighting that fight for the last decade). And when Hasbro invents new characters, who owns the rights to them, Hasbro or Lucasfilm? Lucasfilm requires stringent approval on all licensed products, so you could go through a lot of process and still get shot down. I think from a business model, Hasbro made the right call in making them character-based mechs (just as they did with Marvel TF), but made the wrong call when they made the products so mediocre, and so CONSISTENTLY mediocre at that.