The Energon Pub

The reason that hasbro makes so many Bumblebee figures and puts so many of them per case is because they know they will shelfwarm. So when you walk down the toy isle even if all the good figures are sold out the Bumblebee army will catch your eye and you will know they sell transformers and will check back later. If the shelf were empty pegs you would walk right past it and never notice transformers were sold at that store. Bonus points because he is bright yellow and most people want one in their collection.

(I think they do this with WWE figures too, there is always an army of John Cena figures.)

You'd think that, but it took an image of an entire wall full of iterations of Bumblebee to make Hasbro realize they may have gone overboard a tad. No joke! Ever since then, the amount of Bumblebees has been scaled back, so we won't see endless rows of yellow. We were spared that face with AoE, and RiD 2015 seems to be pretty much free of 'Bees.

Oh I don't know - RID seems pretty keen on hyping Bumblebee still and to a only slightly lesser extent Optimus. It just doesn't seem quite as bad as they hype the whole team to some degree so rather than JUST a sea of yellow (which still applies in the bigger scales).
You see the same few Characters over and over and over.
Grimlock, Optimus, Bumblebee, Strongarm & Sideswipe.

They chuck the odd Drift and Steeljaw in there - but it's not like they thought how about instead of a 5th 3 Step Bee how about a 3 step white Sideswipe or a G1 colour Grimlock or even a new mould like Quillfire or Jazz.

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To address the Movie Bumblebee issue - the repeated refrain there seemed to be from parents was for those kids who bridged the gaps between 2 or 3 Movies they are told "You already have a Bumblebee". so I think for that reason it's foolish to not make more toys of characters unique to each movie - like they did with Jetfire or Sentinel Prime.

WreckerJack wrote:The reason that hasbro makes so many Bumblebee figures and puts so many of them per case is because they know they will shelfwarm. So when you walk down the toy isle even if all the good figures are sold out the Bumblebee army will catch your eye and you will know they sell transformers and will check back later. If the shelf were empty pegs you would walk right past it and never notice transformers were sold at that store. Bonus points because he is bright yellow and most people want one in their collection.

(I think they do this with WWE figures too, there is always an army of John Cena figures.)

Definitely, I know people who aren't transformers fans and definitely don't collect the figures and still they usually have at least one bumblebee figure floating around, I think he's basically the easiest to sell with Optimus at a close second. Still doesn't keep me from feeling tired seeing the same trasformer over and over.

I really liked the 1960's and 1970's Bee Bodies and both of them have barely any toys made of them.

Heck they didn't even make Legion class for AOE so there isn't even a tiny black 1960's Bee yet - I hope they fix that for the TLK line as what with it being the 10th Anniversary of the 2007 Movie soon they have plenty of excuse to fill some product gaps in.

One of the 1st places to start is Legion class toys of the AOE/TLK characters.

These days I see Grimlocks, Strongarms, Steeljaws, and just about any One-Step Changers shelfwarming more than I've seen any Bumblebees shelfwarming.

Though, Leader Skywarp has become the latest of particularly noticeable Leader class shelfwarmers, with the torch having been passed from Leader Armada Megatron.

Thoughts one step changers are pretty nasty, although, the Sideswipe who opens like a butterfly knife is my sons favorite toy, between us we have about 10 RID2015 Bumblebees of various classes, and a couple of old ones i held onto over the years. :p