Black Hat wrote:Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.
Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.
On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.
I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.
Let’s travel back to 2001 when takara was primarily in control the brand. We got the Unicron trilogy. We got toys that purposely pulled back on articulation like knees and elbows and such with Hasbro asking for certain things included and ignored by takara. Hasbro had to tell takara they wanted Unicron included and takara refused until they final gave in. That was a Hasbro thing. Hasbro is the reason we got that ginormous Unicron that turns into an actual planet and holds all the Minicons.
Let’s talk about animation. Again the Unicron trilogy. Takara was in control and wasn’t wanting to work with Hasbro. The animation was a huge step back and to boot was just sending them episodes without scripts. The American team had to figure out what the hell was going on half the time and rush to get them dubbed and put out. Same thing happened with Energon and is regarded as the worst cartoon ever made becuase of how awful it was done with bad animation and story telling. Again takara not communicating or even sending scripts. Get to cybertron and takara just full on ignored Hasbro and made the show a non continuation of Energon. They just made it a new show which forced Hasbro to add animation of Unicron debris throughout to make it a trilogy and explained stuff.
You really wanna say it’d get worse with Hasbro in control? After the Unicron trilogy we got animated and the aligned universe. You know what takara did to those? They made animated a continuation of the live action movie and turned Bulkhead into Ironhide from the movies and omitted pivotal episodes out becuase japan doesn’t like western show lengths.
Same with prime. Takara just gave up in Prime. Season three and predacons rising was never released so the show in Japan legitimately ended with the autobot base being destroyed and Optimus looking like he died and the autobots lost.
Really wanna day things would be worse with Hasbro in control? Some of us went through takara leadinng the charge and it wasn’t a fun ride.
)
were to acquire 
I could totally see them releasing only one version of their figures for the entire world for cost cutting reasons. And that would blow immensely. 
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
