The Motley Fool: Generation 1 to Boost Hasbro's Revenue

Sigh.

I love the G1 toys, don't get me wrong... but alot of them are bricks, as much as people love them. There's something to what he's saying though. a G1 revival would get a lot of older fans back to transformers and maybe get them to take a closer look at the newer toylines and see that many of them still have alot to offer. Even one or two movie toys (though I hold that bay needs to at least stop designing heads that look like someone smashed the mould in for the love of god)

So basically, make even more shows.

If Movieverse taught me anything, it's that live-action is not the best way to go about it. The bots have to be CGI, while their alt modes probably have to be licensed (and subject to the whims of whoever holds the license), and a whole bunch of human characters have to be involved to make up for the fact that the bots can't be there the entire time.

A new G1 cartoon might not be bad. I know Frank Welker mentioned wanting to do a "reunion" with the other original cast members. Better do that while there are original cast members...

should be nice a headmasters in english version !

YESSSSS!!!!

If they update them as they updated Metroplex, will be just a boom!!!

I would love combiners G1 on legends/legion, like constructicons, stunticons, etc...

The idea of a series based on the untouched period between season 2 of Generation One and the original animated film is pure, unadulterated genius. I'd watch the hell out of it, then buy the toys if they choose to make them, as long as they don't cheat like some of the Dark of the Moon and Prime toys did.

It would seem they believe animation is only when it's 2-dimension artwork. That sad logic there.

Also, Hasbro had an opportunity to continue G1 with the rest of the Headmasters cartoon, but they only aired 3 episodes and called it a day after that.

In all honesty, redoing/bringing back G1 w/ brick toys to boot will most likely hurt sales even more.

Manterax Prime wrote:In all honesty, redoing G1 w/ brick toys to boot will most likley hurt sales even more.

Even if Hasbro decides to do a Generation One revival, they definitely would not have the stupidity to make bricks. We would just be getting something like the IDW-themed Generations: Thrilling 30.

I am thinking and thinking more about this great news. Could be amazing to re-take G1/G2 characters and storyline to accomplish a great job instead of producing more and more new shows with incompleted toys line which just split fan generations instead of unify them, and open doors to 3rd party products.

I believe the longest toy line in legends size has been done for movieverse, however they haven't completed one toy line in the past, leaving too many characters just on names, as a collector I can say, is sad to start collecting a brand action movie and finish filling up holes with 3rd party products, Hasbro is missing there great opportunities, killing himself even with special editions for not world wide distributions.

As they started legends size, now called legion size, they did not fill the whole character spots, not even the half for G1, jumping from tv show to tv show, movie, comic, etc... nothing has been done right. I see very positive re-taken old projects on collector's sake.

on the picture I show an amazing Starscream from hasbro, follow by takara's seekers (hasbro lost there, just Asia market) plus a 3rd party product (hasbro lost again), just as a sample of undone work. 3rd parties are taking advantage.

Transformers Prime DTV movie next year? Surely they are incorrect and they mean Predacons Rising this year. If there is a new movie, count me in.

OK. Before anyone gets too excited one way or another, these are just suggestions to Hasbro. There is nothing saying any of this will ever come to fruition. Basically this is professionals saying if they had control of Hasbro, this is what they would do. Nevermind that millions of fans (you know, the people who actually give their money to Hasbro)have been saying these types of things for years and Hasbro has barely bothered to act on any of it and the fact of when they do, it quickly gets moved to the back burner any time Michael Bay changes his mind about throwing in the towel... once again.

The Sunbow version. Re animate the original episodes. Get rid of the errors but use the original sound tracks/voice actors which can easily be implemented using the latest voice synch technologies.. To some extent, Dragonball Z retouched their early 1990s anime.

Stay true to the original G1 with no more of those "stylized" look. The Dery style plus a bit of the mech tech of Studio Ox. Just imagine that?

Btw, which would cost more anyway? 3D or 2 D animation?

Sometimes you needn't look too far away to find a winner. And those current sales advisers in the Hasbro think tank (ahem..........TFA )

Dreamwave already tried doing a bridge between 1986 and 2005.

I think if they got a writer as good as James Roberts to pen the series it would attract new fans in whatever television medium they go with. MTMTE is Transformers done 100% right.

like Metroplex i would love to see Trypticon make his return omg Thrilling 30 Trypticon

Honestly, I would love to see IDW work with whoever has the tv rights to bring MTMTE or something in that vein to the screen.

durroth wrote:Honestly, I would love to see IDW work with whoever has the tv rights to bring MTMTE or something in that vein to the screen.

Yes.

Am I the only one who thinks these ideas are really dumb? A live action show would be out of the question for cost reasons. I also think that a G1 revival isn't a good idea, I think reinventing the franchise every few years to better suit the changing culture is good.

Never heard of this site, but they have an article about hydro-fracking that claims it "arguably saved the U.S. economy", so I'd take any of their advice with a grain of salt...and a glass of flammable well-water.

As to how cramming a lost season into the middle of the Sunbow cartoon might go over, let's look back at the last American TV show to even imply serious continuity with it: Beast Machines. While much of fandom is apparently OK with those 2 years of the franchise, I mentioned hydro-fracking in part because that's also a good analogy to BM's approach to storytelling. Yes, the show did produce several ounces of decent drama, but extracting it required forcibly retconning several tons worth of an organic core into a planet which had been entirely cybernetic in cartoons and comics for the previous 15 years. Was it really worth the cost? Enough fans said "no" that a tradition of fiction restarts began immediately afterward.

And no, Beast Wars didn't really have those problems because it tried to remain vague enough be connected to either the G1 cartoons or comics, preventing significant retcons. Of course, Japan just had their version of G1 cartoon continuity without another TF universe running parallel from the beginning, so they've been cramming new stuff into it for almost a decade now. And what's been their most infamous addition to the gap between Sunbow seasons 1 and 2?

KISS PLAYERS.

Now, it's easy to say that there's no way Hasbro would allow something that inappropriate, but in addition to occurring in the same time gap this article suggests filling, Kiss Players was also clearly targeted at an older audience, technically fulfilling the suggestion for the live action TV show.

The point I'm getting at is that these authors are proposing something which makes business sense on paper without any "boots on the ground" understanding of how that would be implemented in order to please fandom. They've clearly heard the chorus of "Bring back G1!", but if they asked any two fans what that actually means, the answers would be as different as night and day. I think this is genuinely more true for TF than other long running scifi franchises, in part because the original treatment wasn't so much "high concept" as O'Neil and Shooter projecting then-current events onto pre-existing robot toys in the manner of a creative-writing exercise: The oil crisis as relevant to a robot's fuel source, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens as an expression of ancient power we never knew was right under our feet. (The resulting 4-million year time gap and fighting over fossil fuels have largely faded from prominence in recent years) Therefore, the Sunbow cartoon ended up being just loose enough in its value system that fans could project a LOT of different ideas onto it.

For me, the whole appeal was misanthropy. The general rule of toy-characters in 80's 'toons being decently developed while non-toy-characters were extraneous, when filtered through TF, resulted in a vision of humanity as a bunch of dumb animals who more-or-less deserved to be squashed and have "their" fuel seized by these superior robots from space, with the Autobots being the good guys because they valued protecting lesser species. Since I was already getting fed up with human nature as early as kindergarten, this idea seemed downright empowering, since it forced the viewer to look down on their own race and consider the flaws we might fix so that we might one day be as awesome as these robots. I don't expect anyone else to share this view of the cartoon, but even if it was unintentional, that subtext was there, so I'd consider any TF series totally devoid of misanthropy to be flawed. And yet, TV producers would probably consider removing it a way of making TF mainstream enough for primetime.

And yes, the two most recent American series have misanthropy too, just in different ways. Rescue Bots' only antagonist is a human who would subjugate the rest of his kind if not for the intervention of superior alien robots. Prime just plain never had many humans, and the majority that we actually ever saw do anything were terrorists; KILL 'EM ALL!

And no, even Raksha's take on TF isn't more outlandish than anyone else's.

See, we all agree that there were some flaws in the G1 'toon that a lost-years season should fix: Animation errors, continuity, etc. But no one will ever agree on how to fix them. Someone mentioned Dreamwave, but even its flawed G1 universe reads like Shakespeare compared to much of it's fellow '80s nostalgia boom books. Just look at Wildstorm's Thundercats: that was a "more mature" continuation of a cartoon classic, right?

I think Hasbro's already on the right path; Transfans have it pretty good now, right? If they want to expand their empire, they should focus more on having MLP chip away at Mattel's lock on the fashion-doll market, and experiment with reviving some of their forgotten boy's franchises. M.A.S.K. was already name dropped in Prime, and the current popularity of zombies points to a lot of untapped potential in Inhumanoids and Spiral Zone.

Ugh, that article is so ignorant and Geewun it hurts.

Sabrblade wrote:Ugh, that article is so ignorant and Geewun it hurts.

Hence my sigh.

Manterax Prime wrote:It would seem they believe animation is only when it's 2-dimension artwork. That sad logic there.

Also, Hasbro had an opportunity to continue G1 with the rest of the Headmasters cartoon, but they only aired 3 episodes and called it a day after that.

In all honesty, redoing/bringing back G1 w/ brick toys to boot will most likely hurt sales even more.

Yeah when the Headmasters/Targetmasters arc for the US arrived I think Hasbro/Sunbow partnership was done. That was the decline for the US because there was no cartoon to support the new toys being released after '87. Japan would see their decline 3 years later in 1990.

I think Hasbro gave us the redux of Gen 1 with the C.H.U.G. Now Asia is getting all the important re-issues of the C.H.U.G which we deserve. Another airing of the original G1 cartoon will not do a damn thing....unless they create a new story on a more serious tone using the C.H.U.G molds in a animated or CGI fashion. Also, they can fix the errors that plagued the C.H.U.G line(s) do it slow with 5 of each faction per wave. If DC/Marvel can reboot there perspective comic books, what's wrong with doing the same for Transformers? The greatest thing Hasbro can do with the molds is paint, paint, PAINT please!!!!

P.S. Give us a true Classics Soundwave and Blaster with real transforming tapes. How about using a large voyager scale mold from the Hybrid Convoy and you got a beefy Optimus Prime. Not that I am mad with the Classics/Henkei mold but we want new life to the old G1.

Create live action TV shows

No.

This would be it. I would never touch Transformers again and I may destroy every single Hasbro Licensed toy I own if they did this. I swear.

Not that it would happen. The mere suggestion is positively insane for more reasons than I could count on the typing fingers of every single member of this site.

The best advice Hasbro could get right now might be to stop dropping shows left and right. Or maybe the opposite and just drop The Hub altogether. I mean considering the economy is continuing to crumble under it's own weight, one would think people would be tightening their belts.

BERSEKAEL wrote:I am thinking and thinking more about this great news. Could be amazing to re-take G1/G2 characters and storyline to accomplish a great job instead of producing more and more new shows with incompleted toys line which just split fan generations instead of unify them, and open doors to 3rd party products...

Have to agree with this (and everything you continued after that)
It's frustrating to have to pull from 3 other series to fill in gaps in my Generations line. Substituted a DotM movie-line Firetrap for a Generations Brawn since the only Brawn they gave us (also in a Movie line) sucked.

While I agree that some points of the article had merit from a sentimental POV I also know that absolutely NONE of it will see the light of day. Hasbro's sales may not be stellar in the off years between the movies but they aren't reporting losses so why dump obscenely more money into the advertising monster when you know that all you have to do is sit on your ass and wait a year and your sales will shoot up again? They care enough about us fans to give us our Generations line and THAT'S IT! Nothing beyond that. The rest is just waiting on the kids to pester the hell out of their parents to buy them the next over-priced, under-sized piece of plastic crack to shut them up and quell their tantrums. Hasbro didn't make it to the top of the heap by being stupid or being generous. They are cut-throat, they are out for blood, they know what the hell they are doing. The suggestions made by The Motley Fool, while catering to a sense of nostalgia that many of us, myself included, still harbor are sadly quite impractical and are at best purely whimsical.

Vicalliose wrote:

Create live action TV shows

No.

This would be it. I would never touch Transformers again and I may destroy every single Hasbro Licensed toy I own if they did this. I swear.

Bit harsh, bro?

What's wrong with a live action series? Assuming they were willing to put up the budget, it could allow for a lot more drama and TF character development than the movies. Have some human episodes, some more TF-focused episodes. Why not? Transformers have been on TV forever, why not have a live action version? Could be great.

What exactly would be the point of them doing a live action show if the titular characters themselves couldn't be in live action?

And, as evidenced by the movies, the TFs wouldn't even be the stars of such live action show since it's always always the humans who get center spotlight in any and all live action Transformers fiction.

Live action works better for other properties because those properties star and focus on humans first and foremost. Unless this were to be some kind of Tokusatsu (which would most definitely receive even worse criticism than live action w/ CGI), there's no way on Earth the Bots would be the stars over the humans as long as the formula of the films were to be carried over into a live action TV show (which it most likely would seeing as how this formula helped the films earn a bajillion dollars).

YRQRM0 wrote:What's wrong with a live action series? Assuming they were willing to put up the budget, it could allow for a lot more drama and TF character development than the movies. Have some human episodes, some more TF-focused episodes. Why not? Transformers have been on TV forever, why not have a live action version? Could be great.

Budget. TV shows don't have the budget of a movie. They also can't recoup the dollars like movies can.

It's why a live action Star Wars movie has been held off for years, they're still trying to develop technology that will cut costs but still maintain great visual effects.

Shadowstream wrote:Bit harsh, bro?

The burning wreckage laden about the wasteland of live action television says otherwise. The sheer amount of high-school drama that would be spewed from such an abomination would set even such barren wastelands asunder. You know this to be true.

Again. Not like it could ever happen and it would probably be canceled after half a season even if it did.

Personally, the only way I could see a live action TF show being made in a way that would be affordable, and as a show I would personally watch (but I can't speak for everyone else since this is just my personal view), would be if it were to be a Japanese Tokusatsu adaptation of Transformers: Super-God Masterforce.

Vicalliose wrote:

Shadowstream wrote:Bit harsh, bro?

The burning wreckage laden about the wasteland of live action television says otherwise. The sheer amount of high-school drama that would be spewed from such an abomination would set even such barren wastelands asunder. You know this to be true.

Again. Not like it could ever happen and it would probably be canceled after half a season even if it did.

I was more worried about you wrecking our sh*t in the face of such evil. Don't I get a say in such destruction?

this guy needs to be on hasbros payroll cause he seems to get it. Relying on the movies and kiddie shows exclusively arent going to keep the lights on forever, the past few years have shown this to be true. They need to focus on the collectors, the kids & the mindless morons equally & not favor one over the other. They also need to put the consumer first & their wallets second. A happy customer means return business, return business means more money. I guarantee if they were to raise the quality & lower the prices they'd see a boost in sales, i know id start buying more. And if they'd make a show or movie geared towards the older collectors id probably jump back on the wagon.

But as for the live action series i dont think it would be that hard to do in this day and age, just look at shows like Defiance, Sanctuary & Star Gate. Towards the end of Star Gate they had as many CGI effects as a major hollywood movie. GIJOE would be simple, would be no more expensive than 24 or walking dead. Just need to make sure you have good writers & actors on board.

I'd love a G1 revival if handled properly with intelligent writing like Roberts Mtmte or Furmans marvel run. I admit to loving dreamwave. They really knew the G1 characters.

But starting with the G1 toon as a base would be terrible. I loved the voice cast and music and the pilot which gave us a reasonable origin not some giant cube but even as a kid I found most of the cartoon to be silly. I've never understood why season 2 is so popular as for the most part it was as bad as Energon with crap like Alpha trionand Kremzeek.

And for God's sake bring back the scout size. People berate G1 toys which were limited by technology but love the Legion/legend toys which I find to be as cheap as other fans find G1.

Sorry for being negative but G1 season 2 and the legend toys just bug the crap out of me.

I'd love a G1 revival if handled properly with intelligent writing like Roberts Mtmte or Furmans marvel run. I admit to loving dreamwave. They really knew the G1 characters.

But starting with the G1 toon as a base would be terrible. I loved the voice cast and music and the pilot which gave us a reasonable origin not some giant cube but even as a kid I found most of the cartoon to be silly. I've never understood why season 2 is so popular as for the most part it was as bad as Energon with crap like Alpha trionand Kremzeek.

And for God's sake bring back the scout size. People berate G1 toys which were limited by technology but love the Legion/legend toys which I find to be as cheap as other fans find G1.

Sorry for being negative but G1 season 2 and the legend toys just bug the crap out of me.

Bring back Gen 1 Transformers
Walt Disney and Hasbro appeal to the nostalgic collector by releasing toy lines such as the Star Wars: The Black Series and reissuing old Star Wars toys. Moreover, Hasbro occasionally releases a Transformers Generation 1 reissue geared toward people who enjoyed Transformer's original line in their childhood. Hasbro could take this a step further and produce an animated (not computer generated) series that picks up where it left off during the second season in 1986 bridging the gap between that time period and the animated classic Transformers: The Movie. An hour long show with a shortened season could conserve on costs. A good working title: Transformers 1980s. Hasbro could also do a spinoff series that centers on post Transformers: The Movie characters such as Headmasters.

I've always fantasized about a longer 4th season. I loved "Rebirth", and always wanted to see more of the new Autobot cars & Decepticon jets/beasts it introduced, (as well as the new concepts such as the twins, the double spy, the hexachanger; and well, we didn't even get to see Duocons.)
We were also two episodes short of 100. But we did get a proper closure, not every show gets that!

They can't recreate the magic of the original show now, almost 3 decades later. "The Transformers" was ahead of its time, and still is unsurpassed. Season 2.1 is even more impossible because you don't have Starscream's irreplaceable voice actor. (and besides, some things like the time period preceding to the movie, are best left alone. It fires up the imagination.)

(Though I probably wouldn't say no to a comic-series by Dan Khanna, Makoto Ono, or especially Guido Guidi. Any of the artists that love using Dery's models. ;)


Regarding the G1 toys, they were innovative in their time, but many of them are rather outdated now. Takara's Masterpiece line gives you the same characters, with amazing articulation and uncanny likeness to the cartoon counterparts.

I can't say I'm into Hasbro's current stuff; the 3rd party companies seem to get it right: modern day engineering with G1 esthetics.

This is very much a g1 fan thinking out aloud and lots of us would like to see something like that happen.

I am pretty happy with my chug (classics etc) collection and think a lot of those designs would make great models for a g1 show. It would definitely have to be all cgi as it is probably more cost effective these days. The 3d models can be based very closely on the toys so that would be cheaper too. Lot of lore and plots from g1 can be explored etc, maybe it's cos the cartoon was my main exposure to the tf universe as a kid that I find their versions if the characters and origins more interesting than the comics,

Anyways, it's all for nowt, what I seem to understand is that the recent games and prime are basically the revamped g1 era hasbro have prepared for us, and I'm more than fine with that, I found prime to be very well executed and a lot of the toys to be the best in my collection.

The only way hasbro can make money from re imagining g1 as we'd like is if they pull the nostalgia card big time and target all those who used to watch the show and who, unlike us grew out of it.

I'll tell you how they could boost revenue: improve distribution to Europe. And stop flooding the shelves with Bumblebee.

"Exploitation" of G1 has never really gone away. Every new incarnation of the Transformers has an Optimus Prime, a Megatron, a Starscream, a Bumblebee, etc.
And they are generally based on the originals, whether it's the overall colour scheme, certain iconic elements of their design, alt-modes, personality traits, and what have you.

Actually, you know what I would Ike to see? A Transformers show based on the fashion of:

1) Power Power Rangers:
As silly as this show is, it's extremely popular with kids and me, a 38 yr old. I originally thought its a silly show, but May times I watched it with my son (and daughter), I found my self not able to resist finishing the episode. Now, every time I goto the toy aisles, I look at these toys. Even bought a few for my son and daughter.
My analysis: live action based on Power Rangers worked. It's silly, weird, but it's popular (for 20 yrs). A g1 transformers show based on this show is cheap to make, provides silly fun, brings back nostalgia, and sells toys, lots of it. And best of all, I can go trick or treating with my kids with these costumes, sold everywhere.

2) Robot Chicken/Wizard magazine toy animation sheets.
A stop animation show with toys does not require human elements or be as expensive. Transformers characters based on g1 would make a very cool and enjoyable alternative for the adult collectors. I've seen some online and some of it was just silly, but fun to watch. I especially hate the one where Bumblebee kicked Optimus Prime and took off his head. My most hated character killing my favorite character. Imagine amature videos done right, professionally, and with actual voice actors (doesn't have to be the A-listers).
My analysis: stop animation has always been cheap and inexpensive. Episodes does not have to tie into one long season. Once in a while, a 3-parted like the ultimate doom can be aired. Hasbrotoyshop can also solicit freelance people to do one for some episodes or even all of it. Many online fan would love for their episodes to be aired on TV with minimal payment. Just like a newspaper reporter, freelance is extremely inexpensive.

With many of you talking about costs and appeal to the adult collectors, watch Power Rangers Samurai and Robot Chicken/retread Wizards Magazine (went under by the way), and enjoy the silly ness. At my age, I just want to sit with my kids and enjoy a silly show, lighten upp my mood after work, and reminding me of my favorite shows and toys, The Transformers.

I'd love to see a series based on the way IDW have taken on the franchise. MTMTE has a lot of humour and hijinks while the intrigue surrounding Prowl and friends would make for a great adult-oriented show.

The only problem would be that, without at least some humans, the average viewer may find it hard to engage with the characters.

Rork wrote:The only problem would be that, without at least some humans, the average viewer may find it hard to engage with the characters.

I'd rather there be no humans in sight for at least one more series.

I'd be happy, sure - I think MTMTE and RID storylines recently have been great without a human in sight. I'm currently watching Beast Machines and it's nice to have the bots running around having to protect some human or another from the bad guys for once.

But I reckon if it's going to last (from a business point of view) it either has to sell toys or have a mass market appeal. Even if you look at the IDW post-All Hail Megatron issues, the role of humans was pretty murky (xenophobic/paranoid/murderers/all three...) - and might work in its favour for that mass market appeal without getting all happy-clappy Michael Bay on us using panicky characters played by Shia LeBoeuf.

Shadowstream wrote:I was more worried about you wrecking our sh*t in the face of such evil. Don't I get a say in such destruction?

I'd spare Classics Springer, Jazz and Kup at least.

Vicalliose wrote:

Shadowstream wrote:I was more worried about you wrecking our sh*t in the face of such evil. Don't I get a say in such destruction?

I'd spare Classics Springer, Jazz and Kup at least.

And... Armada Starscream? MP-11 Starscream too?

This continuation of Generation 1 stories and animation is what all of us have been thinking of for years. Whoever has been there since the beginning like me. If there would be 2D animation (cell or stop motion) for the show sign me up!. I can write and add my voice talents too! Does Hasbro still read the fan sites? Let's get to work.

There has to be a G1 symbol flip.

Has to be.

(It's basically childhood distilled into a 2 second sound clip!)

It's basic common sense to me. Do a whole animated show in the spirit of TFTM with some of the '84-'85 cast with an accompanying toy line. Screw the parents who will whine about it being too violent. Hardcore Geewunners like me would buy it and the grown men who bought Animated and Prime would buy it too... because if you bought that kiddie crap you would buy anything!

The articles G1 idea would draw money/make money.

It would be enjoyable too.

It would continue to keep interest in the product, both G1, & new going.

We will see if Hasbro is as wise. As it is, anything that comes to the Hub, is likely going to be on iTunes & hopefully Hulu Plus. Hasbro wants to use digital download & streaming, because that is where TV is going in general. Cable is dying. Who needs it when you have streaming for a fraction?

Anyway, I hope that, whatever they do, everyone of every age says, I like the new TV show & want to watch it. & not Rescue Bots - that show is "neat" but not in the way that makes me watch it.

Mindmaster wrote:

Vicalliose wrote:

Shadowstream wrote:I was more worried about you wrecking our sh*t in the face of such evil. Don't I get a say in such destruction?

I'd spare Classics Springer, Jazz and Kup at least.

And... Armada Starscream? MP-11 Starscream too?

We don have any MP seekers... and no, Armada Screamer won't survive either.

It is a very very sad thing to see anyone agreeing with this hack of an article.

Shadowstream wrote:We don have any MP seekers...

You might need to brush up on your MPs...

The original MP Seeker mold:



And the MP-11 Starscream I was talking about.