william-james88 wrote:I am more curious about what you guys think about the actual toys. What I dont get is that so far in all of the most recent animated series (cybertron, Animated, Prime) the toys were made to reflect what the characters looked like on screen. Or more specifically (especially with Cybertron) the characters on screen were made to look just like the toys. So what's with this line where the simpler design makes the toy and screen character quite different in appearance? Steeljaw and Strong arm have this giant back kibble for instance.
Well it's more been a thing since Beast Wars season 2 with the character models being made to look like the toys (with Beast Machines being a notable exception due to some miscommunication between the toys and CG models being designed independently of each other), with RID 2001, Armada, Energon, and Cybertron (as well as the Japanese-only Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo, and Go!) having their toys made first and then the character models being directly based on the toys (in Cybertron's case, sometimes right down to even having the
screw holes included in the CG models).
Starting with the movies, however, the design strategy switched to first having the character models made, and then having the toy designs being based on the character models. This was done for the first three movies, Animated, WFC, Prime (pre-Beast Hunters), and FOC.
But starting with Prime Beast Hunters, Hasbro switched back to the older method of making new toys first, and then having the character models (like for Predaking, Optimus, Darksteel, and Skylynx) being based on the toys. Though, the character models for these four (and especially for Darksteel and Skylynx) took more liberties with their designs than sticking closely to the look of the toys.
But as for why the most recent installments of AOE and RID 2015 have toys that look sorta like the character models but not as close as past installments, the way I see it, it's because of Hasbro's recent desire to simplify the complexity of the toys so as to make them easier and less frsutrating to transform and play with. And, perhaps, maybe they just don't feel as committed to making the toys and character models as closely match each other as they used to. After all, this is a different design team from before, whose first TF toy creations were the 2014 simplified Beast Hunters Deluxe and Voyager toys. But, we have seen that they are capable of maintaining a fair level of advanced designs, as evidenced by all the cool stuff they've made in the current Generations Thilling 30 line, as well as the Generations Combiner Wars toys coming next year. So I guess they just feel that the target demographic for the new RID line--big kids--won't care as much about toy/media synchronization as we older fans do, and so possibly put more effort into the Generations line us than they put into the RID line for kids.
Don't quote me on this, as it's all just a guess.
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