Emerje wrote:Skritz wrote:I gotta admit I'm curious to see if Optimus will get a retool into somebody else, as his truck mode this time around is very clearly some pure G1 Optimus through a slight techno-filter. Unless the entire front cab/torso is retooled, whoever gets made using this mold would just look way too much like a recolored Optimus.
The thing is this line features a second Optimus-esque mold which is similar visually but clearly a separate mold: Ultra Magnus' cab. So then who could be the retool for Optimus? Or is he simply not getting a retool because Hasbro is making shorter lines with less need for 'filler'?
Hasbro will still try to get as much use as possible out of molds because it helps pay for the work put into making them. Even a shared transformation like Hun-Gurrr would be cheaper to produce even without sharing parts simply because of the reduced development costs. What we'll probably see more often thanks to the shorter line runs is mold reuses being spread out across more series rather than retained within them.
Ultra Magnus is a very obvious potential pre-tool of RID Ultra Magnus, there's no mystery there. Optimus could become Thunderclash, that's usually the popular guess, but with that large part on the top of his truck mode that just hangs off his back they could turn the torso around and make the back the front with a smaller part coming off the top like the g1 figure.
Emerje
...I really don't think they're going to repaint Ultra Magnus into another Ultra Magnus. They already pointed out his alt mode as a shout-out to the RiD fans and a fusion of the two character designs, it would seem kinda redundant to then repaint it minutely and release it as a second Magnus. Plus, a big part of this line seems to be the narrative associated with it, both from what Hasbro has said/shown with the poll and from all these secret messages on the posters, and having two different Ultra Magnuses (Ultra Magni? Ultra Magnus's?) with the same alt mode running around at the same time in one continuity would kinda detract from the narrative Hasbro seems to be wanting to establish.
I think there are three separate discussion topics posed here:
1. Who do we think the planned repaints/retools are for the Siege figures we know of so far,
2. How many of those do we think we'll actually get in Siege, and
3. Are retools/repaints considered "line filler" in Hasbro/Takara's eyes?
Personally, I think the answer to that number 3 is both no and yes. We clearly still get retools/repaints in the shorter lines (Novastar, Cutthroat, Elita-1, Rodimus Unicronus, etc), but we haven't seen the level of mold reuse that we did in CW since that line ended. Now whether that was because that was just a CW thing, because of the length of the line, or because they learned and made a conscious decision not to do that again is debatable, but I think they know that repaints/retools get stale in excess. That being said, we're still going to get SOME retools/repaints, as we already have teases from posters towards a tentative total of three Seekers and at Red Alert, all of whom are virtually guaranteed to be repaints.