Additional Images of Voyager Megatron from Takara's Chronicle Two-Pack

yami4ct wrote:Japan and the US have very different Action Figure markets. Where Japan's market is nearly completely made-up of collectors willing to spend more to get nicer looking toys. The US market is made of children and parents who don't care about the minor details, they only care that the price is low. Paint, if you can believe it, is very expensive. Especially when you're talking about the hundreds of thousands of units hasbro is producing. Adding a few small paint apps means adding quite a bit of cost to the entire run. Hasbro could either do two things there. They can either raise the price, which they will not do as it is established the main market for TFs in the US is price sensitive children and parents, or take what might be a fairly significant profit hit. It's likely the paint they give us now is in the sweet spot of enough to make the toys look alright, but still give them a nice profit. As for why they can't do small run collator oriented repaint lines, it's likely the market for that is too small to justify a new production run.

Megatron Wolf wrote:if hasbros version looked like that id actually think about buying it, well on sale that is

Autobot032 wrote:Looks fantastic, but screams "GPS"

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

Swiftknife24 wrote:

Autobot032 wrote:Looks fantastic, but screams "GPS"

'GPS'?

Global Positioning System...?

Gold Plastic Syndrome. It's a rather nasty affliction contracted by toys using metallic plastics, especially light gold or bronze colors. Basically it makes the toy crumble when you even breathe on it. It's especially prevalent in later G1 into G2 toys, but cases have been found well into RiD.

I wouldn't worry about that with current toys however, as Hasbro has tweaked the plastic formula ever since the problem became known, and there haven't been cases since Armada (Super Base Optimus Prime suffers from a design flaw, not GPS).

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

Swiftknife24 wrote:

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

Swiftknife24 wrote:

Autobot032 wrote:Looks fantastic, but screams "GPS"

'GPS'?

Global Positioning System...?

Gold Plastic Syndrome. It's a rather nasty affliction contracted by toys using metallic plastics, especially light gold or bronze colors. Basically it makes the toy crumble when you even breathe on it. It's especially prevalent in later G1 into G2 toys, but cases have been found well into RiD.

I wouldn't worry about that with current toys however, as Hasbro has tweaked the plastic formula ever since the problem became known, and there haven't been cases since Armada (Super Base Optimus Prime suffers from a design flaw, not GPS).

Ahh thanks! I think I know what you mean; my Beast Wars 'metallic' Rampage suffered from peeling...

That's chrome flaking, another unrelated problem. Transmetals and some Beast Machines toys have been given chromed parts, but the paint on it doesn't stick without the proper primer.
With GPS it's the plastic itself that's the problem, to be exact the metallic flakes that prevent it from properly bonding. Because of that, it breaks like a warm piece of chocolate, instead of snapping like regular plastics do.