by william-james88 » Thu Apr 28, 2016 10:20 am
- Motto: "'till All Are One"
Desription of Scrounge by Hasbro at Botcon:
SCROUNGE!! – Cosmos & Payload remold, NEW HEAD! Forms a shield to make Computron’s arm more special. The addition of the little space ship gives Computron seven components! They think the ship’s name is the same as before (Later talk at the Hasbro booth confirmed that the Payload redeco is still just Payload)
Q&A from Botcon:
Q: You guys made new hands and feet for Computron, any chance of getting new hands and feet for the other combiners? And since we’re getting both Metroplex and Fortress Maximus, any chance of getting another Titan class Decepticon city besides Trypticon?
John: You mean like Scorponok? The fans voted for Trypticon so Trypticon’s coming and he’s breathtakingly amazing. It’s coming along really, can’t share too many details about it. We know how much people like the other two guys from the poll, in the first place. Those guys are definitely on our radar. It’s one of those things that’s just a matter of when, you know? No plans right now for the combiner hands/feet, but the tool exists, so that’s good. If in the future we wanted to do another series pack, I wouldn’t rule that out, I think it’s a great idea.
Q: For the May Mayhem, is there any chance that Blast Off will actually be in there too?
John: That’s a question we get a lot. No plans at this time, we’ll be moving into Titans Return, so it’s a bit of a weird gray area.
Q: Is there any kind of story behind the release of Scattershot as a standalone figure outside of Computron?
John: Originally, Computron really wasn’t even on our radar. As the last combiner, he has a certain amount of tooling involved with him to do him right. You got a spaceship, and Lightspeed/Lightsteed is a redeco, and Afterburner/Afterbreaker ends up being a little bit of another piece he has to tool up, so it wasn’t until we actually access to a little bit more parts so that we can do Computron right. It ended up creating its own set, but on the short end, we needed a Voyager, we knew that Scattershot was a cool character, and that’s why we created his combiner to be Betatron because the idea is that the beta comes out before the final game, so that’s why that was called “Betatron”. It’s sorta like the precursor to Computron. It’s a unique deco. Keep in mind that it’s not just fans who like to buy these, it’s also kids, so we wanted to make sure that it was a cool spaceship mode, and you guys probably thought so too.
Q: What goes into the decision-making process of things like for the figures’ prime character still having a Superion head versus a few months later Takara comes out with a Generation 1-accurate Computron head?
John: That’s a good question. A complicated question.
Ben: Yeah, I don’t think it’s something we can get into the full details here, it’s something we definitely know and acknowledge for you guys it can be confusing, but it’s a decision we make on, a lot of it is timing-based, what we kinda wanna get on the market certain things and in our stories. And some of it may have to do with what we’re doing outside of toys and video games, you know, stuff that’s influencing and impacting how we approach our characters and our stories, so we often have an eye to the future that the things we introduce here we expect to see that kind of evolution of that character and that look in other spaces. So, a lot of what you see here is an homage to the past, but as John and Eddie have talked about, a lot of what we’re doing too is an eye towards the future of bringing new fans in and kind of giving us a chance to tell a new story versus kinda being chained to only the old stories. Hopefully you guys all see that big part of the new Machinima Combiner Wars story is there’s a lot of story that’s untold, a lot of gray area, a lot of gaps in our continuity, and that’s part of what we see the opportunity to do with the toys. Like, let’s fill in some gaps, let’s do some cool things that kind of open up the freedom whether it’s a comic or animation just to introduce something new.
And for some reason I find the CW cars appealing (more so than their robot or combined modes).
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