138 Scourge wrote:If they make a Popemobile Transformer, do we get a mini-con with a bigass pointy helmet? Little robot pope? I don't know if I'd be comfortable having that around little kids, though.
As for a segway TF, I'm down if he turns into robot Will Arnett.
Done and done.
BWp wrote:Well like Six said, shark-themed nose art is kind of an iconic ‘thing’ with planes, so that seems to be what they’re going for. RTS Lugnut had the same thing going on.
Yeah, but RTS Lugnut was an throwback-style of plane where this is not.
I guess I misinterpreted things, but I was under the impression that Prime/Beast Hunters was the ‘main’ line, being that it had the larger shelf presence and the cartoon support and was part of Hasbro’s big fancy new Aligned continuity thing.
"Prime" is the main line, "Beast Hunters" is an "imprint" if you will, a sub-line. Beast Hunters does not have its own SKU, it runs under the existing Prime SKU series.
To be fair, this was the ‘react to toyline reveals thread’, and my reaction was ‘Damn, Hasbro’s neutering the line I actually like and continuing the one I’m sick of.’ Yeah, it’s self-focused, but that’s the point of a personal reaction; I’m not going to submit my feelings as “Well what Hasbro’s doing with the line doesn’t appeal to me, but they’re making a bunch of stuff that will sell to people who aren’t me, so I’m happy anyway!”
Your reaction was angry that they were extending the line with product you didn't want while running a successful line you also don't want. They're not NEUTERING it though, it was ending either way and they decided to extend that so as to make toys that appeal to kids. That doesn't affect you at all, you're not buying them, so you would have nothing to buy either way, the line is completing its run. Are these upscaled Legends stupid? Yes. Are they taking away from ANYTHING? No. So you're bashing product that doesn't affect you, you're not interested and thus not buying, same with Generations, but none of them have anything to do with what you are invested in. It's like taking the bus and constantly complaining that Subaru is screwing you by not releasing a V6 engine on the BRZ.
Again, you guys are free to like all the Generations and upscales and stuff, that’s fine, but if you’re asking me my opinion, I’m gonna say that I think it sucks.
Apparently you're going to say it loudly, often, and with vitriol.
I’m just saying that if they were needing to make new Minibots, Cosmos was less in need of a new toy than, like, Tailgate (who I think is the only Minibot at this point who *doesn’t* have a new toy). Or they could’ve made a random new dude, the comics these are based on have plenty of those.
Why is this "less in need/more in need"? It's not a bread line, it's not about who has had it last. Tailgate is getting a toy, but where's Brawn? He's more recognizable from the G1 cartoon, but since he's not in the comics, no toy. Oh, right, he had another of those shitty Legends that nobody could find and wasn't very good. Here's a crazy idea, why don't they make characters that the majority of fans might want to buy, regardless of when they came out or how popular they are. Cosmos is a figure many fans want to own in modern quality, this is not a complicated recipe for success.
Twinstrike works fine as a Legion figure, but it’s a piece of shit when scaled up and sold for $13. To try to cite the upscales as a legitimate expansion of the line when they’re clearly cash-grabs by Hasbro running on intellectual fumes just reeks of dismissal. Ditto for the legion-class repaints. “You’re not hurting for new stuff, you’ve got overpriced knockoff-style crap and repaints of five-dollar toys you bought last year. Now quit whining and agree with us that Generations is awesome.”
That would be the list where I was listing product in your wheelhouse from all of 2013, I wasn't specifically citing the upscales, just the characters that are either on pegs now or coming soon which fit with your "something different" demand.
They're not DISMISSING you because you aren't their main customer base, the line is ending and there is plenty of product from it you can buy, both now and in the future, which fits your "cars and planes are so passe" complaint, you have access to plenty of stuff that isn't upsized Cyberverse, just not as much in the 2nd half of the year. I don't give a good golly fuck if you like Generations or not, but complaining loudly that Generations is continuing on while Beast Hunters is extending slightly past its planned ending with lame product is crybabyism - they don't have anything to do with each other. There's a year of product from a subline, that's SOP for Transformers. Once the media support goes, so too goes its brand.
I don’t like Beast Hunters because it’s Beasts, I like it because it’s *different*. Remakes of a handful of dudes from a cartoon from nearly twenty years ago, most of which aren’t exactly hurting for decent toys, would just be another step backwards in the range that I’m saying is what I dislike about Generations right now.
They're not really all that different, there have been similar products since this brand began, they're just a new expression and some new names, they're not even in the primary media at this point. They're just not the same recent thing, and that's true of BW Generations figures as well.
Stuff like Beast Hunters and PCC shows that Hasbro *can* innovate if they want to, if it could actually make money. But people like you who only want cars and trucks and boxy guys from when you were kids are way more numerous and line-driving than people like me, which is why we don’t see that innovation. And I get that. I understand that I’m in the minority and I’m not going to see things I’d like in the line. I’m just trying to articulate that as the reason why I’m coming off as disappointed and unhappy with the offerings that were revealed at BotCon.
Aaand by "innovate", you mean revisit concepts from G1 in modern dress. "Predacons, never had them before." "Combiners, that's new."
Sooo, the TOY LINE whose sales are 75% kids, those kids are people like me who grew up with the boxy guys from 30 years ago? The reason a toy brand is successful is kids, at least as much as collectors, they are the ones responding to the classic Transformers tropes. You live in this fantasy world where it's "us vs them" but it's not, we're all consumers and Hasbro is creating products they believe will appeal to the most people across the most age ranges. BW Megatron won the fan vote for Hall of Fame this year, there are new incarnations of Beast Wars characters, a line that created the phrase "trukk not munky". So don't go blaming GeeWunners for the brand being what it is.
Toy technology and advancements in engineering aren’t what I mean by ‘innovation’, I mean what the line *was*. Kenner took over and totally reinvented TF around Beast Wars: New altmode style (realistic beasts, which we’d never had before), new factions with new symbols, new characters, everything. Then a year later, that was reinvented itself with TransMetals and Fuzors, also things we’d never seen before. Then they reinvented themselves again, Transmetals II, basically riding the coat-tails of the McFarlane lines that were popular at the time, but still unlike anything we’d seen in TF at that point. Then BM rolls around and the line gets *radically* reinvented, moving the setting fully to Cybertron, swapping out Predacons with Vehicons (which turned into truly ‘alien’ vehicles with anthropomorphized features, still something we’d never seen before in the franchise), gave both factions new symbols, and reinvented the very aesthetics of the series. Then RiD was brought over, and even as a stopgap that came across as another ‘change’, with the good guys being ‘Autobots’ for the first time in years, but fighting ‘Predacons’.
They tweaked the existing zeitgeist of the brand while playing into its core components but they didn't reinvent the wheel. They extended the robo-beast concept a little further than it had previous gone. Transmetals wasn't innovation, it was backsliding - haven't seen robotic beasts before, not with the Insecticons and Dinobots and so forth, nosiree. This is all cyclical, BM is an example of that, they took the existing BW concept and the existing G1 concept and mashed 'em, this wasn't innovation it was 270-degrees into the full circle.
Then Armada brought it back to Autobots and Decepticons fighting on Earth, but we still got a third faction of Mini-Cons introduced, shaking up the dynamics and changing the way TFs ‘worked’, with each guy coming with an additional figure that activated some characteristic feature. Energon had it so half the line were interchangeable combiners, and Cybertron went nuts with varied aesthetics spread across the concept of Transformers who evolved on different worlds, with a system that also harkened back to the ‘characteristic features’ thing of Armada.
Never seen Minicons before that came with figures and caused different things, not Powermasters or Targetmasters, nope. Energon had combiner swapping, haven't seen that in Scramble City, not at all. Cybertron mixed vehicles with beasts? Wow, haven't seen that since... Beast Machines.
Then the one-two punch of Classics and the Movie happened, and Hasbro discovered the way to loads of sales was remaking G1 guys and having Autobots fight Decepticons on Earth while turning into vehicles, and we’ve been stuck in that rut ever since.
A rut that also included Animated, the live-action movies, and now Prime & Beast Hunters. The rut you are complaining about IS the brand, it is the core of Transformers. Your very username is "Beast Wars Prowl", how do you not see the cyclical irony of a BW character named after a G1 character? Optimus Primal had Optimus Prime's face and coloring, Megatron had Megatron's bucket head and name. Metroplex was a Gigantion in TF:Cybertron. Jungle Planet was ruled by Scourge.
WHHHHHHHHYYYYYYY do you hate the colorwheel?!?
I dunno, why are you so attached to it?
Unlike you, I do know why. It's because the human brain finds certain color combinations appealing while others are repugnant. A product that drives consumers away is bad. There's a reason Pepsi doesn't come in blue, red, and green. Colors that add to a character subtly are appealing. Sacrificing aesthetically-appealing colors in exchange for quick cash grabs at very young eyes is not character integrity or design integrity or innovation, it's just trying to sucker little kids who like bright shiny things - that's the only reason a toymaker uses it, not because it enhances the character or toy in any real way.
This is the second time you’ve mentioned BH Prowl and him being worth getting excited for. I don’t watch the cartoon, is he really cool or something? Looking at the Legends versions, his color scheme at least doesn’t stand out terribly much from Smokescreen.
He's not on the show, it's just a very cool mold, it's a remold of Smokescreen who is complex and exciting to look at, but as a cop car which is also an exciting thing on its own. The Deluxe's robot mode is painted much more dynamically than the Legion, and it has a new head.
Wow, really? I threw on ‘Autobot Spike’, first episode of S2 on Netflix the other week while I was eating dinner, and was shocked at how…not good it was. Putting aside that fact that this show clearly was never meant to be viewed in HD, the voice acting and presentation and production values were just…well they weren’t on the level of Batman TAS, let’s just say that. If this was really ‘better’ than what else was on at the time, I shudder to think how bad that other stuff WAS.
First off, not every episode of G1 is the same quality, there were a lot of different writers, some were from soft sci-fi backgrounds and some were from other areas. The government had JUST removed the restriction on cartoons about toys, so the quality of cartoons was a lot lower as they all rushed to get out there and pioneer the airwaves. There was no money yet in the industry so no money was put into it, Asian animation for American shows was still in its infancy but was considerably cheaper. Compared to the cartoons of the '70s where money had gotten really tight and taken the craft entirely out of kids programming, TF was something different. And keep in mind, they were trying to appeal to kids with some lofty ideas. Batman TAS was a decade later when money had gotten good and older kids and even adults were now watching cartoons. And all the old '70s crappy shows were still heavily in syndication, we were still being fed "Wait 'Till Your Father Gets Home" for god's sake.
To be fair, I know we’ve mentioned here a few times here how unfortunate Rhinox’s toy was. Silverbolt and Waspinator aren’t bad at all, Silverbolt mainly just suffering from a lack of color. No idea what your problem with Depth Charge is, he’s got the disc gimmick, yeah, but the rest of the toy is fine.
Waspinator is not good: he's simple in sculpt, his deco is thick and lacking all subtlety, his alt mode is awkward and has problems staying together thanks to the robot legs while his robot mode arms are just sitting underneath, he's a very static creature, his robot mode is gappy and floppy around the chest, he's got too much kibble, and he's pretty basic in transformation.
Depth Charge is a disk launcher with Transformer parts bolted on, there is way too much compromise and he ends up with the wings as shell stuff standing straight up.
One thing I’m coming to realize here is that I can put up with Transformers being samey across fiction and toys so long as it’s…good.
Says the guy who doesn't watch Beast Hunters but is complaining that it's disappearing. Beast Hunters is not good, but it's your line. WFC/FOC are good fiction, RID and MTMTE comics are good fiction and certainly not remotely the same G1 story over again yet you dismiss them outright merely because they're cars and planes.
It might be that the non-show characters don’t have anything to be compared to. Cheetor’s original toy has an atrocious Beast Mode, and has the misfortune of being associated with an annoying character from the show. K-9, on the other hand, is just some cool-looking cipher who turns into a dog, and a decent-looking one at that.
Part of it might be that I was just blown away by K-9 when I was a kid, since his altmode and how his toy was done came so far out of left field. A ‘Beast Wars’ guy turning into a German Shepherd? Crazy! And oh wow he’s not just a repaint of Wolfang, he’s like almost all new parts!
I think another part of it might be that, as much as me and other people like Beast Wars the show, it and its characters have been discussed to death and there isn’t a lot left to ‘think about’ with them. But guys like Sky Shadow and Jawbreaker (and the Deluxe Insecticons, tangentially) have cool looks and cool bios and nothing else, so it’s easy to get caught up imagining what adventures they would get up to.
So you like them because of a response to other people's opinions and because you liked them when you were a kid. What does that remind me of.... ?
The animation has aged horribly, I’ll admit that much. BM actually looks a lot better and comes across as more ‘timeless’, due to the stylization it employed.
It doesn't hurt that it's always dark out and you can barely see any of it.
I still think marketing is what failed PCC in a lot of ways. Had they just marketed the damn things as “Basics with Mini-Cons and power armor/super modes” and not tried to pass them off with the ‘Commbiner’ name, I think fans would have been a lot more accepting of them.
That's not a marketing failure, that's a premise failure, they came into the design intending to create a new line of combiners since combining hadn't been seen in a while, and kids new to the brand couldn't afford bigger combiners, so the intention was to open that audience to a core TF concept. They muddled it and muffed it with compromises.
Like I realized partway through above, I think a major point here is that I could handle the lack of conceptual innovation on the part of the line if I at least liked the fiction driving it more. Maybe we’ll see in the early 2014 go-around when this alleged ‘new’ TF cartoon kicks off.
What's your issue with the IDW G1 lines again? (Not ReG1, just RID and MTMTE.)
AU wrote:For my highschool engineering class I designed this very figure (with "Papatron" being a headmaster) for my final project. Too bad it's lost on my high school's server system and I don't think I could get near it without being branded a pedophile myself, assuming they don't even prune the projects of the kids who graduated.
I think if it's a public school you can get access from a FOIA request, but that's a bit of a to-do. Perhaps you should just ask administration. Sounds like you were lucky your popebot didn't get you in trouble, some areas don't put up with that sort of thing.
O6 wrote:And when they haven't laid off half their design staff.
Sometimes staff changes can be beneficial though, breaking out of old thinking.
Watch the old He-Man cartoon. Watch Gobots. Watch Care Bears.
Shirt Tales, Snorks, Hong Kong Fooey, Laverne & Shirley & The Fonz, Richie Rich, Shazam, Pebbles & Bamm Bamm, Jabberjaw, Mr. T, Thundarr the Barbarian, The original Ghost Busters that the movie licensed the name from, Turbo Teen, Plastic Man, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids. Some of the worst and some of the best that were in rotation in the '80s, and they still all kinda sucked.
Shockwave wrote:He-Man was a far better cartoon than Transformers, for at least two reasons: 1, each episode was self contained and therefore it did not contradict itself and B: in the entire series I've only ever counted like, 2 animation errors. The writing and editing on that and POP were far superior to anything from Sunbow.
First off, Orko is an animation error, it was an error to animate Orko. And they had plenty of animation errors, just different kinds, they were done by Filmation who had a colorblind director so there were a lot of coloring problems.
As for not having continuity, that's not BETTER, that's just easier for little kids to follow. Every episode is the same thing, Skeletor sends his idiot minions to break into Castle Grayskull and distract He-Man by doing something else which requires Prince Adam to transform into Eternia's hero and save the day thanks to his mighty power sword and clear abuse of steroids, everything is set back to normal, nobody is captured or stopped from terrorizing the commoners next week. Cut to next week when an evil wizard or something sets off trouble and Skeletor wants to get in on the action so he starts the whole process over again, maybe the villains and heroes have to team up to save themselves and then the villains try to turn the tables and the heroes turn back the tide. MOTU, Thundercats, Transformers, they all pretty much followed this formula with and without continuity.
AU wrote:This motherfucker right here ain't never seen no MST3K!
Tell that to the episodes where they replaced Crow and Doctor Clayton Forrester, the Sci-Fi Channel seasons. OH THE HUMANITY!
