The Energon Pub

I'm back! Happy holidays and a great new year to all Seibertronians!

Anyway, on to the point of this topic. While spending the holidays in the UK I picked up a number of TF figures, from Animated and ROTF, and I was pretty shocked to see that the figure's bios on the card backs had been reduced to a mere couple of lines in order to fit in about a squillion different languages.

Now I appreciate that to viably sell figures in Europe what with distribution laws Hasbro is probably stuck with including a requisite number of languages (hasn't stopped Takara having English bios on the back of their figures ) but the ROTF figures have precious little characterisation as it is. Would it have been too hard for Hasbro to include a little fold-out poster for each wave, featuring everyone's bios in full? Or a card like with many Takara releases? Or even a little slip of paper?

Too expensive. Profit is everything. Mst keep rply shrt, time = money.

What Mykltron said, and you too pretty much answered your own question. Europe has pretty much standardized toy quality standards, so there's very little need to adapt toys, packaging or inserts for seperate European countries. This does hoewever mean multi-language call outs on the packaging and on the inserts.

Diem wrote:Would it have been too hard for Hasbro to include a little fold-out poster for each wave, featuring everyone's bios in full? Or a card like with many Takara releases? Or even a little slip of paper?

Because of the standardized European packaging, this would also mean multi-language fold-out posters or multi-language 'little slips of paper': fitting bio text in about 15 to 25 languages on 15 to 25 slips of paper. = WAY TOO MUCH paperwork. Asides from that, translation costs of the full bio's into all those seperate languages would also make the toys prohibitively expensive.
In Europe, even GI Joe bio cards are no more than the function of the character translated into several languages.

Both good answers! Thank you.