I dunno man, but...JediTricks wrote:Yeah, it could be that, but why would they paint a shark on a character that used to be a bird?
Those look like teef to me.
I clearly just bore too easily.That's simply not how it works though, budgets don't cross lines that way, the brand keeps such things segregated. Also, you are in a deep, deep minority when it comes to Generations. Hasbro knows it, they milked the crap out of that at the panel. And even after all the setup milking it the audience still lost its collective shit when we got to the Generations brand title slide signifying product they cared most about was coming.
The fact that they barely ran it for a year before cutting it off and running on fumes and upscaled crap for this last stretch pretty clearly comes across as "You weren't supposed to get interested or invested in this."They're not telling you anything of the sort, they ran the BH line to conclusion and probably then came up short when they had to change gears for the next thing.
There's *some* stuff, certainly, but it's still drowned out by the majority of samey stuff that the other fans apparently want. I mean, like Shockwave pointed out, Cosmos jut got a new figure a few years ago, you can hardly cite him as an example of innovation. Metroplex looks cool, but as much of a centerpiece as it is, it's *one toy*, and not one they could make a whole line out of, or would want to (a whole line of TFs turning into different little battle bases and turrets and docks and so forth, able to connect up to build a huge 'city' out of them? How cool would that be?!). Most of the other stuff that you mention that I should be happy to be tided over with...isn't super-compelling.BTW, you realize you're griping that they're doing more Autobot cars in a year when we're going to get a new Waspinator, new Rhinox, tons of new Beast Hunters characters, Cosmos, a giant citybot, and a whole new line of constructable figures. THAT is what comes off a little self-centered when you only focus on hating on the stuff other people like, even over focusing on the stuff you like. "Other people like something that doesn't agree with me, noooooo!"
Legends stuff that already came out, all remakes of 80's guys. They're not bad, but they're hardly encompassing-enough to make up for the GI Joe-itude taking over the line elsewhere.Twinstrike, Hun-Grrr, Hardshell...Abominus...Blight...Windrazor
Repaints, whee.Vertabreak...Skylynx, Darksteel
As good as Rhinox looks, I just pray this isn't a precursor to them spamming BW remakes on the same level they're spamming G1 remakes. That line is even less in need of a second pass.Rhinox, Waspinator
Look, believe me, I *KNOW* I'm in the minority in wanting back the variety and constant innovation that TF had in the late 90's/early 2000's, I saw PCC tank the same way you did. In that respect I probably should have expected Hasbro would cut off my Lord and Savior Beast Hunters the way that they have. But just because I see and know that that's the way it is isn't going to stop me from thinking that it fucking sucks.
Mostly I'd want the guys with the unique, interesting mix-n-match triple-combiner gimmick with the aesthetics that are wildly different from anything we've seen in TF before. Like I said, THOSE are something I would want. Go Takara.Wait, I'm sorry, you wouldn't mind getting some of the GO figures? Would that be the car, or the jet, or the beasts that are the wildly different stuff you've been bemoaning a lack of?
I'm saying I would buy the shit out of a bright pink Blitzwing repaint.Actually, I'm not seeing the joke there at all.
This was actually a point I meant to bring up here too, anyway. It's all a kind of circuitous, in that you would expect popular characters to get new toys and also win vote-offs by fans, so trying to argue which precursed which isn't really worth anything.And how surprising is it really that characters worth of the hall of FAME are getting reused regularly?
You mean I have to listen to these people for like six more months?!There's a good chance we won't see the slide at SDCC, that's what they did last year, the Botcon preview slides didn't get brought to SDCC so Botcon would feel special.
Weird, I was surprised and impressed by how substantial and complex Twinstrike was compared to other Legions I'd gotten. The head storage and involved leg transformation are stuff I don't expect to see at that scale. The necks look fine to me, but I don't exactly scrutinize the specifics of my made-up robot monsters.To me, he looks like ass, he looks worse than figures from 15 years ago. He looks cheap and simple and suffering needless cost-cutting measures of one-sided molding with hollows on the opposite side of major pieces, the articulation and transformation look uninspired at best and suffer from odd ball joint cost-cutting choices like whatever the hell is going on with the beast mode necks. So to me, that's why he looks like ass.
This brings me to another point I wanted to make: That I find it interesting that the majority of Hasbro's TF action figure product for the next year is based on one of the least 'kid-friendly' comic books ever put out by the franchise. First thing I thought of was the 'success' of the Spawn line in the 90's, and wondering if we weren't headed for another go-around of those days.Toys in the '90s were in the same boat as comics, and most of those ended up in the "not at all" territory. If the toy industry is at a point of flux, they are either going to cast out kids in favor of collectors a la the '90s, or vice-versa where collectors are cast out wholesale a la Armada. Which one do you think will work out better, repeating the days of collectors sinking their kids' college funds into Spawn figures, or Armada where toys were kept on the super cheap and appealed to a younger audience and took off?Comic started to get good in the 70s (maybe late 60s). But, there was still learning curve up to the early 90s, where the industry did a huge backward stumble, and then came back even better. Hopefully, toys will do the same thing (as painful as this next step will be). The best way to have dealt with most 90s comics (and there were exceptions) was "not at all". Of course, the 90s were a chance for smaller companies to get in on the game, which provided more competition for the big 2.
I know this was aimed at Dom, but it genuinely surprised me too. I had no idea that toy collecting had that sort of audience, it always seemed like a pretty niche, sidelined thing; a group with little influence or say that most brand managers and what-have-you rightfully treated as an afterthought. It's interesting to hear about a visible statistic to the opposite like that.Comic-Con International is the largest geek convention in the hemisphere, with over 135,000 fans streaming through the doors, and the reason there aren't more is ONLY because the San Diego convention center is not legally big enough to hold more people, so the fire marshal prohibits it. Of the exhibit hall space with over a thousand exhibitors and dealers, the company with the most exhibit booth space year after year is Hasbro and Hasbro Toy Shop. The Hasbro Toy Shop collectibles line is so long that it has been closed repeatedly by the San Diego fire marshal in the past 7 years, and now has to use a raffle ticket time system to let people into its line. Other top exhibitor space users include Mattel, LEGO, Bandai and Sideshow. And there are tons more companies at the convention, all catering to adult collectors. The idea that there's no excited market is just wrong.
Wasn't it innovation and crazy new ideas that brought people into the franchise back when it was practically dead in the mid-90's? Remember that?That's why we keep getting cars and planes and tanks and Soundwave and cassette minions and triple-changers and mouthplates and Seekers and little guys and arm-mounted fusion cannons - it's not because Hasbro's lazy, it's because that is what makes Transformers "Transformers", that is the recipe that keeps bringing folks back to the brand, old and new.
