gavinfuzzy wrote:Erailea wrote:Vicalliose wrote:If I'm wrong then children of this generation are on a complete mental decline.
That's nothing new. Kids these days have high-tech gizmo's and gadgets and, generally, want instant gratification. Automorphs work with them pretty well with them. Same with mechtech weaponry. Push a button and watch it go, like it's being fired. Done deal. Imagining it being fired or seeing it being fired? Not that hard to understand why kids jump on that kind of stuff
Lights and sounds have always big with the young though, even I was kid growing up in the late 80's, early 90's. We just didn't have the number of mechanized toys they do today so we weren't as spoiled with them. My 2 year old niece only really likes Transformers that actually do something at the touch of a button. She pretty much ignores the others. She likes the Playskool Bumblebee I got her for her b-day, but that's only because she knows Ultimate Bee (she still asks mommy and daddy to make Playskool Bee talk like him).
Seriously, when i got into collecting TFs when i was 8/9 years old, i rarely bought a figure withought a gimmick. Back then, if i had to choose between RID and FE prime, i would take the RID one.
I don't blame hasbro for thinking that way too, especially since they are simplifying transformation to make it appeal to younger kids
Although thats bad news for collectors who will be stuck with gimmicky and simplified TFs.
Then this reinforces an old argument of mine. I was home-schooled, ergo I was different than everyone else. The first series I was majorly introduced to Transformers with was Beast Wars. One time I an specifically remember was when I was playing with Optimal Optimus and found that I didn't like the big annoying block of electronics below his neck giving him permanent nipple cannons. Sure it had lights and sound, but very quickly I came to the conclusion
"I could do without this". Then came the RID series where I hated the entire gimmick Optimus was based around, even worse when I got Omega Prime together I was just plain pissed by all the electronics weighing him down. After all that, then came Armada, o~h lovely Armada. Y'know I will admit that the gimmicks did not keep me from buying them, but I
tolerated it because that's the only thing that was available,
I didn't have a choice. My mindset was
ALWAYS "I wish they'd made it more screen accurate, this stuff it does is kinda boring." For instance, when I heard about the Super-Con version of Prime I was friggin ecstatic to hear they'd at least tried to make
something that sucked less. Anyway, I started reading online reviews more and stopped buying toys as much after that.
Generally I could say that when I was a kid, I didn't like any gimmick that was intrusive, or anything in general that made them less screen accurate in robot mode. I actually really liked Red Alert since his gimmick did not impede his poseability too much, but I never liked the fact that he was ridiculously bigger than everyone else.
Though I doubt this is entirely the case. Kids
have gotten dumber and lowered their standards, I don't really doubt that.
On top of all this. If it has a show, it doesn't matter if it has a gimmick to draw you in. The audience is going to buy it, pure and simple. In fact, as I stated before, the only reason
I bought gimmicky crap was because I had no other choice.