The Energon Pub

Also from the room 29AB at San Diego Comic Con 2018, we're covering the Hasbro Transformers panel presentation, with all of the Hasbro brand team present . including Sean Carmine Isabella, John 'Hasbro' Warden, Ben Montano, and more. Keep refreshing this story as we post updates as they come in!

Publishing, Studios, Generations, Design - and BUMBLEBEE.



BUMBLEBEE MOVIE

Marketing team presenting the #JoinTheBuzz hashtag, promoting new material and products, from personal photos and selfies from the convention floor, and the products themselves:

Razor scooter, Amazon merch t-shirts, Alpah dual sided bomber jacket with Generations theme too.





Consumer products in 2018, from Monopoly to Jada, Herocross, Super Cyborg etc

New retro 80s game Bumblebee Overdrive mobile game (with Budge) - brief video shown in panel

PUBLISHING for Bumblebee, see IDW Publishing panel here.

Actual products being shown, as seen in the Breakfast event story - Energon Igniters, DJ Bumblebee and Power Charge Bumblebee.




Going back to the 19080s with a recollection of G1 cartoon series and toys series. Introducing...

Reissue Series - exclusive to Walmart, due out in Fall 2018 - in G1 packaging, featuring Devastator, Hot Rod, Mini Bots, Starscream.


Target exclusive Soundwave remold with Titan Master Doombox and Bumblebee Showcase Helmet.







GENERATIONS LINE

War for Cybertron: SIEGE

Decepticons as revolutionaries, and Autobots as counter faction, taking over Cybertron - gritty, intense, taking the G1 characters like Hound, Chromia, Prowl, and add lots of firepower.



Close work with Takara Tomy on the line, still quite one sided for the Autobots. For images, see the Siege story from Breaksfast event here!

Hound, weapons specialist, wielding Battle Master Lionizer.
Firedrive Battlemaster with voyager Optimus Prime.
Micromasters confirmed as two packs, weaponized accesories as combination, plus articulation: Battle Patrol, Race Patrol, Rescue Patrol.

Deluxe - Sideswipe.
Removing the gimmick element Prime Wars moved into paying attention to the characters, in terms of posability, articulation and more in the engineering, as the weaponising element of Micro and Battle Masters allow for playability.

COG - Weaponizer: partsforming
Wave 2- Ironhide and Chromia





Voyager Optimus Prime, weapon turns into shield, too

Leader class Ultra Magnus - White Prime cab with armor! RID 2001 inspired vehicle mode.



STUDIO SERIES

VW Bumblebee
Shadow Raidoe, TF3 Ratchet, KSI Sentry, Dropkick from Bumblebee Movie






CYBERVERSE

Writers room containing all fans from multiple areas of the franchise: Bumblebee has lost his memory, Windblade helping him recover, over 90 bots designed for the first season alone.
Designs worked closely with Sean Carmine Isabella for look that pays homage to oriignal animated series.











Toys: new classes with Action Attack feature across all line, Ultimate class can do gimmick in both modes.
New: Windblade, Acid Storm, Slipstream, Shadow Striker.








EXCLUSIVES

BUMBLEBEE vol 2 Retro Pop Highway

HALL OF FAME

Favourite Character - BLACKARACHNIA
Toy of the Year - ROADTRAO AND BATTLESLASH
Hall of Fame inductee 2018 - JOHN BARBER

What's remolded about Soundwave?

Dropkick looks really nice!!!

That was really disappointing. Only one SS figure that we haven’t already seen. Dropkick at least looks cool, but it’s weird that it’s not his car alt. mode.

Sabrblade wrote:What's remolded about Soundwave?

In comparison to the TR release, his shins.

I really wanted to see more fem bots for the Elita 1 combiner, but really could we have put the effort in at least 1 other mold to do the last two?

Manterax Prime wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:What's remolded about Soundwave?

In comparison to the TR release, his shins.

Yep, made to look more like an 80s boombox in alt mode!

The description for the WFC Seige storyline DOES seem to hint at an IDW reboot, with the toyline coming from the time at the start of the war where the Autobots still represented the corrupt senate and the Decepticons were noble revolutionaries they were before they fell to their lust for power.

Yay! Blackarachnia won the Hall of Fame! Hot dog!

Ironhide is TR Kup retool. Look at the windshield and how the legs form and where the arms are. totally a Kup retool but with a typical transformation.

There's nothing here that I badly want, I might buy Cog, Hound and a few Micromasters, but otherwise Siege isn't wowing me so far. I'm half tempted to army build the Studio Series KSI Sentry, but that would probably set me back an insane amount of money.

That looks like Red Alert carrying a wounded Hound. I’m guessing a Sideswipe Redeco for him in a later wave.

That ship is definitely an Ark, but there’s precedent for using that as an Omega Supreme from Transformers Animated.


That looks like Ratchet in the background. That’d be an Ironhide redeco.

autobot00 wrote:Ironhide is TR Kup retool. Look at the windshield and how the legs form and where the arms are. totally a Kup retool but with a typical transformation.

A9RFFCA.jpg

Yep, this was confirmed as such in the panel.

Bonfireben wrote:

AF402D49-BDE7-462F-B327-F83E0D2A732D.png

That looks like Red Alert carrying a wounded Hound. I’m guessing a Sideswipe Redeco for him in a later wave.

Looks more to me like it's just Sideswipe carrying Hound.

Bonfireben wrote:That ship is definitely an Ark, but there’s precedent for using that as an Omega Supreme from Transformers Animated.

This current Hasbro brand team in unabashedly in love with G1 that if they were to do Omega Supreme, they'd most likely just give him his G1 altmode. The Ark is pictured to show how this Siege line takes place before the Ark blasts off from Cybertron into space.

Va'al wrote:

autobot00 wrote:Ironhide is TR Kup retool. Look at the windshield and how the legs form and where the arms are. totally a Kup retool but with a typical transformation.

A9RFFCA.jpg

Yep, this was confirmed as such in the panel.

Looks like another case of "same transformation, different parts" like CW Silverbolt and PotP Hun-Gurrr.

Emerje

Did any of you wish to attend the Hasbro panel at SDCC? Well, now you can in a way thanks to Seibertron who videotaped the whole thing. You get to hear John Warden talk about th Seige line and see the Cyberverse footage, as if you were there.

We definitely get new tidbits like the combined mode of the micromasters who become targetmasters and we do hear confirmation that scale is a big factor in the Seige line. So this line is a fresh take and bos scale with one another in bot mode, like in the Studio Series line.

Enjoy the presentation and let us know other tidbits you gather!

I before E except for C.

Sabrblade wrote:I before E except for C.

What if you're an atheist? Or if you're ageist?

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:I before E except for C.

What if you're an atheist? Or if you're ageist?

At least it's not "Rouge One".

Sabrblade wrote:

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:I before E except for C.

What if you're an atheist? Or if you're ageist?

At least it's not "Rouge One".

Is that the film where Nicole Kidman plays Jyn Erso?

That Ultra Magnus looks awesome. Do I detect a small RID1 homage there in that figure?

First-Aid wrote:That Ultra Magnus looks awesome. Do I detect a small RID1 homage there in that figure?

That was explicit in the design process, yes!

Did anyone get a reason to as why the Siege line up was so one sided?.....

NTESHFT wrote:Did anyone get a reason to as why the Siege line up was so one sided?.....

I noticed that too. No Cons at all. Siege should be over quickly with those numbers...

This may be a money saving year for me. Siege looks interesting, but I'm not seeing enough to get me excited about it yet. The rest of it has all the appeal of a dental cleaning.

Has anyone explained the meaning of the title "Cyberverse" yet?