o.supreme wrote:But what about all the kids whose dads are not fans like us? ...they are into their *whatever kids play with these days*....if they have any interest in Transformers at all, it would be RiD.
Or, if they're into Power Rangers, they could take notice of these CW toys and think, "Hey, these Transformers things combine into bigger ones like Megazords! I want 'em!" and get into them that way.
Sigma Magnus wrote:Sabrblade wrote:Hasbro simply isn't as obsessed with meticulously matching the 30-year-old cartoon's look as Takara is.
Personally, when it comes to G1 Classics stuff, I just want a quality, accurate, fun toy of the cartoon incarnation before they do reinventions of the character. In the case of Computron, now that we have the Unite Warriors box set, which is all three of those things, I'm fine with them doing re-imaginings of the Technobots (such as the CW box set).
Another example...Fortress Maximus. If we had gotten a Titan-sized Fort Max, that was, in terms of appearance, accurate to the cartoon(s), and in terms of engineering, basically the G1 toy with more articulation (and with all of his accessories), I would've been totally fine with the Titans Return toy (I still have that one on my shelf, mind you, but I'm getting all the upgrade kits, and I'm still a bit disappointed with it).
...does that make sense? I'm terrible at explaining things like this...
No, I get ya. I too want what I saw on TV/in comics/in movies/in video games/etc. first and foremost, and then the reimagined designs to come later. It's just that it seems that the MP line is primarily where the fiction-accuracy stuff comes out the most, which makes for a pricey endeavor in acquiring the closest matches to what we see in the fiction in toy form. When the Classics line first came out in 2006, I willfully skipped the majority of the line since, at the time, my reasons for skipping those figures was "They don't look enough like the characters they're meant to represent." And the 1980s G1 toys also looked too different from the fiction, so I didn't want those either. It wasn't until we got more fiction-based sculpts in the subsequent Classics-style lines that I started collecting more of those kinds of figures.
But even with that personal preference of mine, Hasbro doesn't seem to share it and prefer instead to do newer and reimagined takes on the characters instead, which from a business standpoint is perfectly understandable. But Takara, however, resides in a culture that is very reverent of the past and is of a mindset that their products must be as respective to the source material as possible, regardless of how inaccurate the Hasbro-designed molds are sculpted (i.e. - Takara slapped a G1 cartoon-based deco on an IDW-based Springer mold). This is where Hasbro and Takara differ, with Hasbro looking towards innovation and newness, while Takara looks towards replication and faithfulness.
william-james88 wrote:But that assumes kids read the comic, which was not as popular as the tv show. Am I the only one who watched the show but didnt read the comics?
In America, the show might have been the more popular of the two, but in the UK, the comics (according to James Roberts) were viewed by many UK readers as the definitive version of the two, with the comics having a huge fan following and the letter pages routinely citing the comics as the "true" version while claiming the cartoon was an inaccurate representation of the story (save for the movie, which
was given tie-in comic material exclusive to the UK).
As for me, I too saw the cartoon first, but only because of the following reasons:
- I was a child of the 90's, so I didn't grow up in the era when both the cartoon and comic thrived.
- I was an avid TV show watcher as a kid and strongly disliked reading.
- As I'd gotten into Transformers via Beast Wars and Beast Machines, I wanted to see what the "Autobot and Decepticon" series was like that the two Beast Era cartoons had referenced, and because Beast Wars and Beast Machines were both TV shows, I assumed that their predecessor was likewise a TV show and nothing more.
- Back then, I didn't know that there even were Transformers comic books, as I thought the only real fiction the toys had were the shows.
- I didn't see the G1 cartoon until circa 2002-2004, when Kid Rhino put it all out on DVD.
- It wasn't until I discovered fansites on the Internet in the early 2000s that I learned that Transformers comic books existed.
- Back then, I didn't know where or how I could read the Marvel Comics as I had no means of accessing them (or even the then-current Dreamwave comics, besides the pack-in ones that came with the Armada and Energon toys).
- It wasn't until 2010 when I finally got to read ALL of the Marvel Comics in full thanks to torrents of scans (this was before IDW started their most recent series of reprints, which I immediately began purchasing once those came out).
Kurona wrote:and there's a whole slew of Marvel-exclusive characters - whether they have basis in toy or not - that we remember and love from just the Marvel stories like Impactor, Scrounge, Bludgeon, Thunderwing and Straxus. All of which have later gotten official toys.
Though, Thunderwing and Bludgeon had already had official toys in 1989.
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Waiting one week to see if TR Soundwave hits...
(It's only the second time I had to pay custom fees since I started importing TF toys but stil, the timing sucked).I'm glad I have him but somehow my enjoyement of this set is slightly diminished with all the additional fees that came with it.
But again, it's only the second time I had to pay such fees importing.
