Fit For Natalie

At least its several colours. The japanese exclusive vac-metals are forever either completely silver or completely gold.

The rarest non-proto Transformer toy ever - Chrome Leader Optimus Prime David would love that chrome and Leader Prime in that colour scheme, I'm guessing.

Altogether now: Fark you, retailers. FARK YOU! That's what they get for underestimating (and thus underordering) Transformers, and over ordering crap like Spidey 3 (which is rather hurting Hasbro), Pirates 3 and Star Wars that's rotting on shelves. Transformers has now passed Pirates 3 in the US box office, and its unlikely Harry Potter will be able to catch up. Both of those films royally kicked TF's ass internationally, though.

Happy Birthday! May your cake be eaten through tyranny. I don't know what I just said, either.

I should note that, if true, the reissue of Sky Lynx is an extremely... odd business decision. One of their last oddball reissues, Star Convoy, was a poor seller that was eventually clearanced for 2000 yen in japanese stores. Not sure about Omega Supreme, but anything's possible. I believe Takara still has the Trypticon tooling, as they last released it (albiet slightly retooled and missing most of his parts) as Gigastorm in the 1998 Beast Wars II toyline, and it was produced again for their South Korean partner Sonokong in the early 2000s. Takara still has the Fortress Maximus tooling, but it highly unlikely to reissue it, given that Brave Maximus didn't do very well and they tried to get rid of excess stock as Robot Masters competition prizes. Back in 2002-2003, Hasbro reported that they investigated Metroplex as a possible alternative to Fortress Maximus, but discovered that the smaller city failed drop tests as well, so presumably, the Metroplex tooling is in reasonable condition. Wreckage was originally a movie concept character that was dropped early on. Hasbro picked up and elaborated the design further into a toy (same goes for Arcee, though she got much farther down the design track). Wreckage's scale is bad, but not too horrible. He's a Stryker ICV, a variant based off the Mowag Pirahna LAVs, so they're not exceptionally large vehicles. Distribution is a 2 way street. Blame retailers for understocking Transformers toys.

I don't care either way if he has scorch marks or note or if he's too light in terms of hull shade. I'll get whichever version is cheaper in retail cost. I do wish they would one day do Masterpiece figures of Movie characters.

Well to most toy companies, more paint the toy starts being unprofitable, though I'm not clear on when Hasbro is allowed to go all-out on repainting a toy, like they did with Energon Galvatron and Cybertron Galvatron who were absolutely covered with more paint than usual. At the same time, I think a problem with Prime is most of his silver parts are tied into transformation, so if they were to paint those parts silver, they'd be painting parts of parts so the paint doesn't scrape or chip off. They rarely do 'chrome' vaccum-metalised plastic anymore because it costs more to do (of course) and because that type of plastic is brittle like fark. Voyager Starscream kitbash idea - take FAB Starscream's arms.

Can somebody mirror the pics from the person's auction? They aren't loading for me EDIT: oh wait, never mind. Its working now.

Classics are hybrid and faked up vehicles based upon real-world designs. Animated is half and half - some are entirely made up, while others are based (vaugley) on real world vehicles, all with cartoony proportions. I'm not sure if they bothered getting the license for Masterpiece Starscream. No idea, the first half (I believe) of Infiltration is the start of the story, which then goes into Stormbringer (hence Searchlight telling Prime that there's a situation on Earth for Prowl's detachment), and of course, by the end of Stormbringer Prime goes to Earth where he arrives at the end of Infiltration in his shiny new Earth truck form. Perhaps they meant 'the second volume of trade paperbacks'.

Is it just me or is Animated Starscream a cartoony YF-19? What does that mean? All that says is they redressed an old tank prop which I was well aware of. Besides, adding a bunch of guns to a tank is not outside the realm of plausibility, given the real-life things like the Maus and Ratte.

I know. His main gun barrel does light up, though. Hasbro probably left them unpainted so they're more obviously a feature. On the green tank, they light up green. Wasn't Phyrox beef that the sub turret on Brawl's main turret made it look overgunned and thus childish or something? Disguise - at the same time, Transformers are still kids toys, that's why they make money. The thread of Stormbringer's storyline continues in Spotlight: Galvatron.

They light up. Internet Toy Fan Insult #3,654: 'Fisher Price' Used to describe a toy and/or its intended audience's alledged lack of maturity merely because one personally does not like an aspect of its appearance. See also: Neon, Playskool, dumb, lazy, gay, Hasblow. Seriously though, its not even a real tank - in real life its a truck with a faux tank body and treads. I would consider the sub turret anti-aircraft cannons, which the original Brawl did feature and for a Decepticon, extra firepower is always good, especially for Brawl who likes to blow stuff up. The current IDW G1 comic books run concurrently with each other. Stormbringer was set during the same time as the events happening on Earth in Infiltration. That's why Stormbringer seems so short and abrupt - the story continues on in the Infiltration-Escalation-Devastation main comic as well as the various Spotlight one-shots. Yeah, its kind of an annoying way to get you to buy every comic they make. IDW's G1 continuity itself is brand new, Dreamwave's continuity (The War Within, DW G1) has nothing to do with it, though I recall IDW saying that they would like to finish it up once the legal mess brought on by Pat Lee Mania is resolved. If anybody is wondering, IDW's Beast Wars comic book mini-series are from the Beast Wars cartoon continuity, which has nothing to do with IDW's G1 continuity.

Dr Jones laughs at your anger.

Now, watch them OVERSTOCK Transformers stuff now that its selling well, so much so that they have a bunch of crap left over when the movie's hype has gone and normal people aren't buying them anymore. Then they'll say 'Tranaformers wasn't selling well after all!' So then they won't bother stocking the All Spark Power assortments (post movie Movie line refresh with new stuff like the CV-22 Osprey, the Sector Seven buggie and SUV). Man, retailer-dictated markets suck. Yeah, there's normally a protrusion with three small windshields for the driver to see. They probably decided to not put one there so the head-popping up gimmick runs more smoothly.

Indeed. Walmart's department video conference revealed that they expected Transformers to make $2 million, but it has instead made over $5 million to date. Stores basically underestimated Transformers (and by comparison overestimated Spidey 3, Pirates 3 and the other blockbuster movie lines)

Transformers aren't that well known among the general public man - right now Transformers is as widely known in North America as it has ever been, and before then, by kid fad standards, Transformers never reached the heights of TMNT or Power Rangers. Its a fan perception that one's own fictional interest is far greater than it actually is. In reality, if people know about Transformers at all, about half of them don't realize its still going on ("I didn't know Transformers was still around!"), or they considered Transformers to be kiddy crap. For character recognition, you'll have people confusing Prime with Soundwave and calling Megatron 'that guy who turned into the purple gun' (because there were two gun guys in US G1). As such, even though this movie is predominantly humourous in nature (like a cheesy 80s action movie), its also the first attempt to present Transformers seriously to a wide audience of people who mostly either only have a peripheral knowledge of Transformers (either through their kids, relations or hazy memories) or don't know anything about Transformers at all. As for human to robot ratio, lessen the human impact to Transformers, and you might as well make a CGI animated cartoon. Humans have always been enormously important to the Transformers story, not only for providing the audience with a frame of reference and somebody they can relate to, but in the way the humans influence and change the Transformers, and of course, give somebody the Heroic Autobots to protect from the Evil Decepticons. Frankly, as far as US robot franchises go, until the movie, Power Rangers was probably much more well known, and yet again, until recently, Power Rangers generally beat Transformers in toy sales.

Only if a retailer is interested in them - in today's market the retailers has unprecedented control over what gets sold and where, a kind of opposite to the 80s where the manufacturer told the retailers what to sell. As the former Hasbro excutive in charge of Transformers says, today's situation can be very stifling for Hasbro creatively.

sh002: It was a joke, dude! Not according to Hideaki Yoke, Takara's lead TF designer. From the Transformers wiki (not the Wikipedia): Not always. The other major Starscream (from the Unicron Trilogy) is usually portrayed as a powerhouse fighter, and some of the characters in the movie continuity are composites of other characters of the same name from various continuities. The Allspark's usage throughout the movie was either unwitting manipulation by an inferior species of something they didn't understand (Sector Seven and the Nokia cell phone bot) or accidental (when Sam drops the All Spark after he is hit by the 'socialite's' H3. The All Spark was meant to be used properly as the power source or core of Cybertron, and presumably created life similarly to Vector Sigma in the G1 cartoon, or throguh a process similar to Beast Wars. Perhaps, but at the same time, the Autobots are generally not quite as powerful as the Decepticons they are usually up against. In the backstory, Lord Protector Megatron commanded the armed forces, and when he betrayed the state, he took his army with him. The Autobots, as is tradition, are made up of mostly civilians like a militia - Prime himself was a politician before the war. Okay, you're already a mecha fan. A scifi genre fan. Perhaps even a Transformers fan - you can deal with a concept as patently ridiculous as Transformers easily. The rest of the world? Not so easily. The humans are there to ease everybody into the world of TFs, and humans are always there to ease people into the world of TFs. This isn't Japan where its part of established nerd culture for giant robots to be wandering around and the punters just accept it as something normal in the fictional world. 1. One of the writers, Roberto Orci, said Barricade's dissapearance is a thread for TF2. Scorponok is still somewhere in the middle east. 2. They probably shut down after the All Spark was destroyed. Going by the story, those primal 'beasts' were improper life, while the rest of the Transformers were born properly. 3. I don't know if you realized, but Transformers aren't merely mecha or non-sentient robots They're life forms with what could be considered a living soul (spark), and, like us, grevious injuries can cause shock and put them into a coma (stasis lock) or extinguish their spark, which is what happened to Jazz. Just because they can replace or rebuild their limbs doesn't mean they can handle being violently torn apart 4. Huh? He certainly put up a fight - in fact, next to Megatron he was the toughest of the Decepticons in the movie. Dude, I wrote an article on his character: The Mustache Man. Yeah, that's his character's name accordign to the script. ... how is Bay predictable for something a theory you made up?

You seem to be latching onto a post that I explained was a joke for no apparent reason. His Car Thing was relevant because people here proclaimed the movie TF designs didn't look like Transformers at all, while others suggested getting Kawamori in to design them for the next movie. It is a joke on the fact his latest Car Robot design doesn't look like it even turned into anything. My point was that a revered japanese mecha designer who contributed to the Diaclone mecha toys that became the basis for the early Transformers doesn't automatically make him a good Transformers designer for today's franchise.

From what I said, people only mentioned the 6-inch Titanium line being booted, so I assumed the 3-inch line survived. If I am incorrect, I apologize. Based on a scene - it doesn't really work as well in vehicle mode... but should make more sense in robot mode. That's a common goof in the movie - the robots can look scratched to poo yet shiny in vehicle mode.

My original post was called 'a joke', going by his latest Transformer design (being Starscream if he was a Valkyrie and not a Transformer) and his latest Robot Car design, which is relevant because people, including people here, kept going on about how the movie robots didn't look like they could transform into their vehicles when somebody of Kawamori's caliber designs a shapeless blob that doesn't look like anything. Of course, to be fair to him he was designing by the car company and their ad agency's orders. As for his most recent TF design before MP Starscream, it wasn't a great reinterpretation of Masterpiece Convoy, given how bad the truck mode was. He contributed to some Diaclone toys, including what became Optimus Prime (there was no one designer for that particular toy). Its just a rumour. Even Roberto Orci said was an interesting theory. Of course they can always retcon it now or later to say it was Starscream... after the other pilots forgot he could turn into an F-22. Maybe he can fly with only one engine and has backup panels to cover Scorponok's absence? Here's a screencap of Scorponok's ejection I made for the TF wiki:

Alternators did better than Binaltech, but it wasn't to retailer satisfaction and expectations from a Transformer line. You know the big bubble packaging? That design was largely down to retailer demand for something more eye-catching, allowing one to more easily inspect the vehicle mode. Alternators Rodimus will be an SDCC and Hasbro Toy Shop exclusive. They made toys of some of the game characters, including Swindle (the Chevy Colbalts), Dreadwing (the fighters), Longarm (towtruck based upon the one in the film), Payload (armoured truck), Dropkick (Silverado pickup). You have it back to front - the 3" Titanium line is evidently faring better than the 6" line did, which is why that segment of the line appears to be continuing. If, as you suggest, they are lame and unprofitable, then who keeps buying them?

Nope we're in Macross World. A YF-19, YF-21, VF-0S, VF-17S, VF-11B, Koenig, etc aren't shapeless blobs. Something similar to a YF-21 Battroid would have looked better for Starscream as a movie design and toy. I take it you did not see that weird silver mech he designed for one of the japanese car companies a month or so ago for their ad campaign (where the the SUV turned into a robot thing to walk over traffic)... and you somehow misread what I said and countered with unrelated designs? The stuff on their hips is in reference to his redesign on Masterpiece Starscream. Shapeless blobs is that weird mech.

At the time when they greenlighted to Fun Publications Thundercracker, Dirge and Thrust, Classics wasn't going to continue as a line. Remember, Classics only existed to plug in the product line gap that occured when the movie was moved from November 2006 to July 2007. What do you mean shooting yourself in the foot? Classics was not a collector line - its a line sold to the mass market that has collector appeal, and there was no guarantee that flogging all six fighters would mean they would sell. Its instead highly likely you'll end up with shelf warmers after the collectors had had their fill of seekers. The market could only support so many variations of the same mold and don't mention shortpacking as a solution to shelfwamers, because then collectors would start threatening to burn Hasbro down for daring to shortpack X favourite character. It doesn't mean its impossible for Hasbro to EVER use the Ramjet and Starscream mold again in G1-ish colours for those three characters, just not anytime soon, and they have a bunch of new toolings for the new Classics line that they would rather release instead, and indeed, retailers would rather stock instead. That's rubbish. They do enough for fans considering we aren't the most profitable market to make products for as evidenced by the retailing failure of several 'collector' lines. Why was Alternators cancelled? It wasn't selling very well and Takara was steadily losing interest in the line (and Transformers in general) due to the fact that Binaltech was doing even worse and they were in the midst of a merger with Tomy. You can't expect Hasbro to continue investing money in a line that retailers don't want to stock anymore. And it was an expensive line to do. The same goes for Titanium 6" Cybertron Heroes - retailers didn't want them so they cancelled the line (and that Shockwave toy looked awful.)

He'd just stack their kibble on their hips or make them shapeless blobs like that Mitsubishi thing he designed we saw last month I believe Hasbro handed those Bee-yotch air freshners out at Botcon 2007, and they'll probably hand them out again during the San Diego Comicon later this month