We've received a number of notifications from the Seibertron.com community pointing out how Jazz, one of the recent Transformers Power of the Primes deluxe figures -
spotted early at US retail - has a surprising Cybertronian print underneath the Autobot logo. The users who first found it on Twitter - you can find a good report on this over at
TFormers, as ExVee was the first to identify it - deciphered it to the slogan of the US presidential campaign: MAGA, or "Make America Great Again".
While there has been speculation as to what happened, and what it might actually mean (Make Autobots Great Again? My Alternate Mode is Also (a car)?),
io9 reached out to Hasbro for an explanation as to whether this was intentional, and received the following response:
It was brought to our attention that a graphic appears on one of our Transformers figures that, when translated from Cybertonian letters to English, spells out MAGA. We investigated the issue, and discovered that one of our vendors inserted this as part of the design without authorization. We are addressing this with the vendor.
We do not intend for our products to carry political messages, and apologize to anyone who was offended by this message.
It seems, if we go by Hasbro's statement, that this was not Hasbro's doing, but that something happened between the final designs being approved and the production of the figure starting. We do not know at this time whether there will be a revised run of the figure, or if the detail will remain on the figure for the rest of the line.
We encourage any civil political discussion to take place in
this other thread, and keep the responses to this story specifically about the toy and the Power of the Primes toyline.