The Energon Pub

What kind of jobs can a guy get at Hasbro? What kinds of benefits, if any, would it have for a TF collector?

You can be Aaron Archer's beard groomer.

*double post*

... or massage Greg Lombardo's feet

Maybe you can be in charge of scale?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH-no.

Blurrz wrote:

The Dude wrote:What kind of jobs can a guy get at Hasbro? What kinds of benefits, if any, would it have for a TF collector?

You'd get information on their latest and upcoming releases. Unfortunately you'd be prohibited from interacting with any fan communities related to Hasbro products.

That wouldn't be a problem with me. The info is mine, all mine!

But seriously, does anyone know the answer to my main question?

Gotta love message boards, where you can be as blunt as you want.

without wanting to sound mom ish or whatever ive considered applying to hasbro. I thought i'd love to work in the transformers department. A friend of mine told me that he liked cars and because of that he didnt want a career in fixing them even though he could. He said he didnt want to wind up getting board with it or hating it, in other words, ruining his hobby. i think there is some merit to this thought. but that insider info and discounts would be nice! choices, choices

I could see the problem with having direct daily knowledge of all the downsides - the design compromises which have to be made because of time, money, price points, safety, or marketing, for example. Every time someone on a TF board said "Hasbro sux because XYZ toy doesn't have an articulated spleen", an insider might almost feel obligated to jump in and explain why, and how it wasn't really Hasbro's fault, and there were external factors, and OH GOD THE FLAME WARS.

Not to mention that it might get depressing, seeing the mucky side of how things are created. All the great ideas that get watered down. All the cruddy ideas which fail to get shot down before they hit retail. All the potentially fantastic possibilities which never come to light.

Additionally, the more access you had to the creation process, the more out of synch you'd be with the fandom about how 'new' things were. By the time the message boards started buzzing about how great a new toy or episode was, you'd have known about it for weeks, possibly months. The shine could well have worn off.

As a related question: for all thread readers - if you got a job at Hasbro/Polygon/IDW in the Transformers division, working with Transformers toys/media every day in some capacity, would you still collect the toys you'd seen designed, watch the episodes whose creation you'd followed, buy the comics you'd watched drawn, etc? Or might your day job decrease the amount of joy you get from your hobby?

A guy I know was a toy modeler there (3D modeling, so they have a visual reference before the toy is made). He did a couple of the Transformers toys, but most of his work was on other things (all modeling related), so even if you get into Hasbro the chances of you getting into a specific department are small I believe. Companies of that nature tend to like it if you are diverse anyway. I think the only way you'd be pigeon-holed in one place (for a time) is if you were something like an animator, but I don't know if Hasbro even animates in studio. Most places out-source their stuff.

So it's fairly safe to say, if you want to work for Hasbro, be willing to work on all their projects.

And as mentioned, you can't talk about anything you work on / hear of until it's released to the public. For toys I know my friend couldn't say or show off his work until the toys were shown off for marketing purposes. However that is standard with any industry.


@ Geminii - Having gone through college learning 3D animation and having professors from Pixar, Disney and the lot, I can tell you (after seeing and hearing it 1st hand from them) a lot of animators have toys of the stuff they worked on. In fact my Pixar teacher had a desk absolutely covered in Pixar products and he worked there for many years. So it all depends on your personality and how much you like your job. I have no idea if the guy I mentioned at the top of this post will buy the toys he had a hand in making, but he was rather excited to show off the models once the toys were shown to the public, so I imagine he will.

if you want to see what jobs they have you can go here. http://www.hasbro.com/corporate/careers/