Back when Hasbro introduced the Power Core Combiners and were trying to justify the existence of "Bombshock w/ Combaticons" and "Skyburst w/ Aerialbots", their line of thinking at the time was that the five (or six, in cases like the Constructicons) original team members were not the only members of those teams, so as to say that while Bombshock and his drones are Combaticons, Hasbro did not want us to look at Bombshock combined with his drone and think "This is Bruticus." They wanted us to treat the originals as simply like one squadron within a greater, larger group of Combaticons, or Aerialbots, or whatever other combiner subgroups Hasbro was willing to add to.
We saw shades of this in ROTF in which Devastator was formed by at least seven Constructicons while many more Constructicons (even of similar body-types to the ones who formed Devastator) fought on the ground simultaneous to Devastator's climbing the pyramid to reveal the Great Machine.
It was later in the Exodus novel that the Aligned continuity's Constructicons were revealed to be HUGE in number. In that iteration, the Constructicons were an entire social class, with High Councilor Drivetrain a their patriarch. Anyone who worked in construction as part of the construction guilds was considered a Constructicon, regardless of whether or not they were among the specific seven (yes, seven) who formed Devastator. This suggests that Bulkhead might have once been considered a Constructicon before the war. But during the war, there were vast
swarms of Constructicons; an entire army of them alone destroyed Crystal City. And the Retribution novel would eventually give us the name of the main seven who form Devastator: Scrapper, Mixmaster, Hook, Scavenger, Bonecrusher, Frontloader, and Long (not "Long Haul", just "Long").
The WFC comic (which adapted chapters 12-15 of Exodus) showed us what several of the book-only characters looked like, including the Constructicon patriarch Drivetrain:
And the Covenant of Primus book revealed Devastator:
Also in both the novels and the WFC/FOC video games, an Aerialbot was basically any Autobot who both could fly and had a jet-like altmode. Even Jetfire was considered an Aerialbot (even if he himself did not think so, still regarding himself as a Seeker, but an Autobot one). Same went for the Seekers, who were likewise just flying Decepticons with jet-like altmodes. In fact, according to the novels, all Aerialbots were ex-Seekers who had chosen to side with the Autobots when the time came to picking sides in the war. Jetfire was the only one who actually defected rather than having first gone with the Autobots, though the games seem to have shown him having chosen to remain a neutral for as long as he could before he ultimately chose the Autobots. Though, for the five specific Aerialbots who form Superion, they're all named after their G1 counterparts, even if Fireflight has a similar body-type to Shockwave.
So in a way, with the latest additions of Alpha Bravo and Powerglide to the Aerialbots, Offroad to the Stunticons, and Rook to the Protectobots, Hasbro seems to just be keeping up with this mentality of having a great number of members for each subgroup, whether they're necessary for gestalt combination or not.
Desslok2201 wrote:Also, Alpha Bravo is a stupid name, which glaringly doesn't fit with the rest of the team's names. I mean, you can have the rest of the teams change their names endlessly due to copyrights, and they still seem to fit. And why Alpha Bravo? Why not Charlie Delta or Whiskey X-Ray?
"Alpha Bravo" = "AB" = "
Aerial
bot"
Cyber Bishop wrote:I don't get Hasbro releasing only parts of these combiner groups at a time either I mean Drag strip with two Aerialbots and a possible Protectobot?
It's to force people who want to play with a complete gestalt ASAP to use the gimmick of interchangeable limbs to make the desired complete gestalt, rather than releasing every member of one team all at once and possibly never having the new gimmick realize its full potential if people only stick to rigid combination structures of "only combine the G1-named member of one team and no one else" rather than letting imagination take over and coming up with crazy combinations of all kinds.
Not to mention was Desslok2201 said about all the sameness on the shelves happening all at once, with nothing jets in one wave, nothing but cars in the next, etc.
Agamemnon wrote:Not to keep beating a dead horse, but my previous post might have been missed as it was right at the end of one of the pages (maybe 85? I'll check and edit this post.[edit]End of
Page 87) I brought up Henkei Thrust and Dirge as examples that I think most closely match this situation to show that there is precedence...
Except those are the opposite of the original inquiry, which was about Takara mass retails being sold as exclusives by Hasbro, not Takara exclusives being sold at mass retail by Hasbro.
)
. I'm just trying to figure out what the argument was.
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