welcometothedarksyde wrote:You know the movie generations toys being marketed to collectors seems suspicious so far. The stuff that Takara is doing is homaging differing elements of the franchise from the past e.g. Dispensor, G1 Grimlock, stuff that younger fans might not know about. Meanwhile Hasbro's toys are no different than what we've been having for a long time. Does anyone think that Hasbro is just saying that the toys are marketed to collectors, meanwhile knowing that most kids are just going to buy them anyway. I mean is we hadn't been told that it was marketed towards collectors that wouldn't have been anywhere close to my first reaction. Really makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes.
I think Hasbro's doing 'movie accurate' decos and the part about catering to the adult collectors on Hasbro's part has more to do with the fact that they don't use the same over-simplified transformations as the other movie lines (the flip changers and 2~3 step changers etc.).
I agree that Takara is doing a
better job of catering to collectors by homaging past generations of toys/characters, but in my opinion, Takara has pretty much always catered more to collectors than Hasbro, but I think that has more to do with the market in which they compete where many,
many adults buy toys and the competition is a lot more fierce, particularly when it comes to transforming robot toys (how many lines of transforming robot toys does Bandai currently have active in Japan right now?).
To be honest, I kinda like the wild colors on some of Hasbro's AoE Dinobot offerings so I'll probably end up getting both versions or just Hasbro's (gotta see more of Takara's to decide whether I'm getting theirs at all or not).
Now, as for the main meat, good ol' Ultra Magnus. It looks like Takara has surpassed my expectations in most respects, though I agree with one comment about the legs. I wish there were a panel to cover up the inner legs of the MP-10 base figure, however if they color it so that it matches the rest of the leg/panel, then it probably won't stand out too much (hopefully), and I'm guessing that's what they did/will do.
Either way, I'm glad I didn't bite on what KFC was selling (not that I really liked the look of it anyway, as there's a lot more wrong with the look of that thing's bot mode than just the head) because Takara appears to have yet again created a true 'masterpiece' and I believe that once the color shots of him start to show up, I won't be staring at another version of Ultra Magnus or another Ultra Magnus toy. It will BE Ultra Magnus
.