Mykltron wrote:(I'm glad I proof-read this, because I missed out the word 'not' in the third sentence)
So, no cull, then? Ah, well...
budmaloney wrote:I am so thankful for generations figures. I'm so thankful for Masterpiece. But look at Masterpiece now, they're hardly even limited anymore. These companies, as much as we love their products, they don't give a damn. You express a single interest in one character...they see that....they will drench you with that character. They will plaster him/her in every nook and cranny. You like Optimus? Here! Optimus black, Optimus red, Optimus underwear, Optimus repainted, Evil Optimus......just buy our stuff please. Screw your backyard, you want this truck don't you? Fish? naaah screw them, no one eats them. That problem is far away anyways. Plus my top researchers are saying it's not a problem you should worry about. Optimus? It's not like ocean currents are connected and science clearly tells us that....you want that Optimus don't you? Here I have made 10 different version. Collect them all. Oh wait. I just had Yoshi from design make up 50 different more characters so you can collect. and so on.
That was the closest you came to addressing this point:
Yotsuyasan wrote:Also, from a financial standpoint, if the hardcore collectors all stopped each buying their own figures and started trading a few of each figure between themselves, we'd become a much less important part of the market then we already are. Hasbro would have no need to cater to us at all. Goodbye, Generations. Goodbye, Masterpiece. Goodbye, any high end collectable figures. Hello to a bunch of simplistic stuff marketed purely to the kiddies.
...which, curiously, didn't show up in your quote of my original post.
I'd be curious to have you address this more directly. You say you love Generations and Masterpiece. How would you feel if those lines went away because only a few of each figure were being bought and traded amongst the hardcore collectors? And these are two toylines that don't see the same characters being hashed to death.
Do you see hundreds of Optimus Primes in the Generations line, for example? No? I didn't think so. In the nine years since it started with the Classics line in '06, we got the original Voyager mold, the Deluxe mold, a couple of Legends, one Deluxe each as a tie-in for
War for Cybertron and
Fall of Cybertron, another Deluxe (Orion Pax) and the new Combiner Wars Voyager. That's a total of (assuming I've not forgotten anything, as I am doing this from memory) eight Primes in nine years. Less than one a year, and often not figures that would overlap within a collection. (You're not going to put a Legends Optimus, for example, in with your primary Autobot display as that collection's leader.) Yes, there have also been repaints of some of these molds, but those repaints have typically been distinct characters (in Optimus's case, usually Ultra Magus), for foreign markets or as con exclusives.
For distinct characters, as long as they make sense for the mold, I don't begrudge Hasbro that one bit. Molds are expensive, if they don't reuse them creatively, there are many characters we won't see. In either of the other two cases, a collector going out of their way to acquire more expensive foreign toys or con exclusives is hardly going to be the kind of collector to allow those toys to end up in a landfill.
Compare and contrast that to the more kid-centric lines. How many Optimus Primes came out for each of the Michael Bay films? It seems like each size class got at least one Optimus Prime mold, and those molds typically had at least two (if not more) repaints that were
still Optimus Prime. (And don't forget all of the Bumblebees!) Or the new
Robots in Disguise cartoon. I'm not following that, so I did have to look this one up: looks like there are four different molds for Optimus Prime scheduled for release this year, according to the TFWiki.
And that is just counting transforming toys, and not the plethora of other character merchandise associated with the films or the cartoon shows, something that you won't find (or will find much less of) associated with Generations or Masterpiece.
Not to say collectors don't also buy from those toylines, but the movie or cartoon based toylines are primarily geared towards children and the mass market, not to collectors. Asking us to stop buying them will likely make at most a negligible dent in Hasbro's sales. Meanwhile, the kids -- who are the ones more likely to throw out toys eventually -- will keep buying. So how does asking the collectors -- who will keep and treasure their toys,
not throwing them away -- to stop buying them help?
So then we come back to the Generations and Masterpiece lines. Not to say that kids don't also buy those, as Hasbro would go bankrupt if they focused
only on collectors, but if there is one area where I feel we are more of an intentional focus, it is there. But what if we stopped buying? What if the collector's market only ever bought, as a whole, a few of each figure which they then proceeded to rotate around amongst themselves? What would happen would be that Hasbro would cease giving any kind of damn about which toys we might wish to buy, and those two lines would die overnight. The Transformers brand would no longer have higher end figures of fan favorite characters. Instead, it would be nothing but toys barely better then what you find in a Happy Meal, and nothing but Bumblebees (or whoever the current "kid favorite" character is) as far as the eye can see.
So congratulations, the collector's market is now dead. And if the Transformers brand then continues forward at all, it is nothing but kiddie toys. Nice,
disposable kiddie toys, destined to end up in that landfill someday when those kids get tired of playing with them.
If you want to improve the ecological footprint of Transformers, asking collectors to stop buying them is
not the answer. We are the one market that
won't throw our toys away. Not to say there isn't the rare exception, but for the most part if we get tired of a toy, we will either just put it into storage or sell it to make money for the new ones we wish to get, letting the toy move onto a new home with a new collector that will treasure it.
The two things that should, perhaps, be concentrated on are as follows:
1. Packaging, as mentioned in my original post.
2. I saw someone else propose producing the toys using biodegradable plastics. This is something I could get behind, although I do have concerns I would want addressed first. This could be great for those toys that
do end up in landfills. But if I plan on keeping my hypothetical biodegradable Titan Class Trypticon, will the materials it is produced from have the same long term survivability as it would if it was constructed from traditional plastics? Having it break down in the ground is fine. But having it break down on my shelf? It better be able to be just as strong five, ten, or twenty years later as it was the day I bought it.
Also, how will biodegradable plastics help with metal screws or springs? Or will these hypothetical biodegradable figures be held together only by glues, and not able to have more complex joints requiring the tension a spring provides in some cases?
To sum up: I really think the toys themselves are not an area to concentrate on. Collectors aren't going to throw them out, and your message will have no impact on the kiddies. Making the packaging more eco-friendly I could get behind. Beyond that, perhaps try to increase recycling efforts in general (not just focused on Transformers) so that when things
do get thrown out,
including Transformers, the materials they are made from can be partially or completely repurposed rather than discarded to litter up our planet.
the now infamous tfanboy iirc.
wink wink.
