First-Aid wrote:Where does the blame lie? I don't know.
Therein lies the tale.
For all of the 2000s and up until then, the Transformers brand had been headed by a team led by Aaron Archer, who spearheaded such ventures as the Unicron Trilogy, the first three live-action movies, and the Aligned continuity (Animated was in there too, but it was kinda treated by the higher ups as a side thing meant only to tide us over until the Aligned continuity came along
*cough*cough*Prime killed Animated*cough*).
Suddenly, by 2013, the winds of change were blowing. The first sign was the Beast Hunters subline of TF: Prime, which was brought about by change in the brand team that wanted TF: Prime to be cut short for a new cartoon featuring Predacons and a new Optimus Prime toy. The Prime creators convinced Hasbro to let them finish Prime with one more season, with the promise of rebranding the show to incorporate both the new Optimus toy design and at least one Predacon (the epilogue movie was a later decision made after the series had ended its intended 65-episode run).
Then, in 2014, the whole Transformers brand team at Hasbro had changed completely, now headed by John Warden. The Age of Extinction movie hit with its toyline being radically different from those of the first three films, and quite different from pretty much every Transformers toyline since Beast Wars. The engineering was quite different, and the line was split between "Generations" toys for older fans and "Robots in Disguise" toys for younger fans. Little did we know at the time that this would be a sign of things to come.
By 2015, Warden's team had rolled out the first Generations line to arguably be a new toyline all on its own instead of just the next phase of the 2010-2014 Generations line (as had previously been the case for the War for Cybertron, Fall of Cybertron, and Thrilling 30 toys): Combiner Wars. They also launched a new line aimed at younger fans named "Robots in Disguise" (sound familiar?). It was at this point that the Transformer brand had truly begun to put a greater focus on the older fan consumers than it ever had before, while also steering the TV show line more towards younger consumers with simpler and more gimmicky toys, a trend that would continue throughout both the Prime Wars and War for Cybertron trilogies and the Cyberverse line.
Whereas, previously, under Archer's team, the TV and movie lines had been the primary focus while the likes of Alternators, Classics, Universe, Power Core Combiners, Reveal the Shield, and Generations 2010-2014 had all been regarded as side lines. It was because of the popularity of these nostalgia-focused side lines (sans PCC) that they kept coming back every time Hasbro tried to end each of them (heck, Classics was always meant to be a filler line that would die in 2007 once the first movie line came out). And once the changeover at Hasbro had occurred, what were once seen as siden lines became the main focus by Warden's team, superseding at least the TV lines (the movie lines pretty much evolved in Studio Series, which is also a Generations line) in terms of promotion to the fanbase and the press.
And now, we're currently under the watch of another man's team since Warden left Transformers for Power Rangers last year, and said current team seems to be going full steam ahead with the same flavor of fervor that Warden's team had.
