The Energon Pub

I'm a former star wars collector turned TF. Ive been posting all my old SW toys on a few boards and noticed something I had forgotten about.

Star Wars Action News website has a "Dear Hasbro" section where collectors ask Hasbro why/what/when/how a out their toys. Hasbro answers back and they have made it a regular part of their podcast to read Hasbros responses. Do we as TF collectors have anything like that? Lots of the "Fans Choice" figures in the SW lines came from communication with Hasbro. It just makes me wonder what we could request or make better by openly talking to the toy maker.

A fine idea that seemed to work for Star Wars, but we, the TF fans were not quite so lucky.

There was a "Ask Hasbro your burning questions" thing going on here for a while, but it was ridiculously restricted by the question rules and parameters set by Hasbro, as well as the limited number of questions they would field. The answers tended to be lackluster as well, sounding more like one of those evasive form letters you get to any inquiry made to a big corporation nowdays. In a nutshell, not informative, and not particularly productive.

The folks here have instituted an alternative thread here where they do their best, given careful research and inside info, to answer those burning questions, though they themselves caution us to take the answers with a grain of salt.

I guess Hasbro feels that they don't need no stinkin' input from us TF fans, and that product info is on a "need to know" basis, and WE don't need to know.

Well that's ridiculous. The SW questions are so detailed and with enough pestering Hasbro made "the ice cream maker guy" who was a background character holding an ice cream maker in one of the movies. He is a throw away and pretty much just for laughs.

Oh well. Now I know how it works on this side of the world.

There's a middle man PR firm we have to go through as well....

SN95 Cobra R wrote:Well that's ridiculous. The SW questions are so detailed and with enough pestering Hasbro made "the ice cream maker guy" who was a background character holding an ice cream maker in one of the movies. He is a throw away and pretty much just for laughs.

Oh well. Now I know how it works on this side of the world.

Yeah, a figure for a guy who was in the movie for all of 2 seconds (man, my SW buddies are going to kill me for saying that).

I guess it has to do with the sheer number of SW fans out there. I'm actually in the 501st, myself, so I have ALOT of SW fans for buddies. Out of that number, there is only a fraction of those guys that are into Transformers. I might be wrong, but they may outnumber us. But still, there are plenty of Transformers fans out there to where we should be able to voice our ideas and opinions to them too!!!!!

headsortails wrote:

SN95 Cobra R wrote:Well that's ridiculous. The SW questions are so detailed and with enough pestering Hasbro made "the ice cream maker guy" who was a background character holding an ice cream maker in one of the movies. He is a throw away and pretty much just for laughs.

Oh well. Now I know how it works on this side of the world.

Yeah, a figure for a guy who was in the movie for all of 2 seconds (man, my SW buddies are going to kill me for saying that).

*cough*Jolt*cough*

I love Star Wars and Transformers and I think we have to remember that Star Wars is with all due respect to any absolute die-hard Transformers fans out there, bigger and infinitely more popular than Transformers.

The new Transformers movies have certainly increased Transformers popularity but Star Wars is just so huge.
The sheer volume of Star Wars fans means that if they want a figure they could potentially get a petition of thousands of people demanding it just like the Ice cream guy.

We Transformers fans are not so lucky as there are fewer of us so Hasbro doesn't need/want to listen to us so much especially as their focus is on the younger, new generation of TF fans as opposed to us older nostalgic fans. There are just so many more older Star Wars fans than there are Transformers fans so that's why they get a lot more of what they want as they make up a bigger segment of the toy buying market for Hasbro.

Star Wars must be the biggest cash cow in the history of toys. Hasbro =

I agree with your idea, it would be nice if Hasbro would loosen their grip a little and give us a bit more info in the Q & A sessions.
I think the guys at Seibertron do a great job of giving as informed answers as possible to site members who send them a question.

Mkall wrote:

headsortails wrote:

SN95 Cobra R wrote:Well that's ridiculous. The SW questions are so detailed and with enough pestering Hasbro made "the ice cream maker guy" who was a background character holding an ice cream maker in one of the movies. He is a throw away and pretty much just for laughs.

Oh well. Now I know how it works on this side of the world.

Yeah, a figure for a guy who was in the movie for all of 2 seconds (man, my SW buddies are going to kill me for saying that).

*cough*Jolt*cough*

LOL

Transformers is my first, but I got respect for the Wars (yeah, Fanboys was funny!!). I got to see Jedi the first time it hit the theaters. I was really young, but I remember it pretty well. Plus who hasn't at least thought once of owning a Storm Trooper costume? I know I did, and now I have the Biker Scout armor. Star Wars is huge and will always be. I feel the same about Transformers too. There's no way to get rid of them.....

Rock on fanboys and girls. The geeks are here to stay.......

Jazz-1982 wrote:The new Transformers movies have certainly increased Transformers popularity but Star Wars is just so huge.
The sheer volume of Star Wars fans means that if they want a figure they could potentially get a petition of thousands of people demanding it just like the Ice cream guy.

That and making a Star Wars figure has to be a lot easier and cheaper than making a Transformer.

Evil_the_Nub wrote:

Jazz-1982 wrote:The new Transformers movies have certainly increased Transformers popularity but Star Wars is just so huge.
The sheer volume of Star Wars fans means that if they want a figure they could potentially get a petition of thousands of people demanding it just like the Ice cream guy.

That and making a Star Wars figure has to be a lot easier and cheaper than making a Transformer.

Good point, that's absolutely right.