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interests / alt.toys.transformers / Re: We've Come A Long Way.

SubjectAuthor
* We've Come A Long Way.Zobovor
+* Re: We've Come A Long Way.Evil King Macrocranios
|`* Re: We've Come A Long Way.Zobovor
| `* Re: We've Come A Long Way.Gustavo Wombat
|  `- Re: We've Come A Long Way.Zobovor
`- Re: We've Come A Long Way.Gustavo Wombat

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We've Come A Long Way.

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Subject: We've Come A Long Way.
From: zmf...@aol.com (Zobovor)
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 by: Zobovor - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 01:12 UTC

So I've begun the long and arduous process of packing up the various toys and things that I've painted over the years. I've done well over five hundred projects (many of them die-cast cars), so that's a lot. It involves wrapping lots of things in paper towels. And it occurs to me how many, many of the projects I was doing a decade or two ago have been rendered completely superfluous.

For example, I've got a G1 Cliffjumper that I painted in Sunbow colors, which mostly involved giving him sky blue windows and grey arms and legs. That was about as close to a cartoon Cliffjumper as I was ever going to get, but now we've not only got the very good Earthrise Cliffjumper, but the even better Cliffworthy Cliffjumper version (which is hitting Target stores now, I'm told).

Or my attempts at painting the G1 Galvatron toy purple. Or doing the G1 Dinobot toys into cartoon colors. Or painting G1 Optimus Prime and Megatron in cartoon colors. Or G1 Red Alert with his red helmet. Or G1 Kup in shades of grey. Heck, I don't even have to put these back on display now. There is no longer a need for them to exist.

I think my lumpy Matrix-infected Scourge still holds up really well. And there's still never been an official equivalent of that one yet, even though there definitely needs to be.

I also rediscovered projects I haven't touched in quite a while, like my Alternators Smokescreen painted in G1 colors. Alternators was a good toy line to get excited about for a while, but they made so many bad color choices..

Star Wars has come a long way, too. When Kenner was first pumping out Power of the Force 2 toys, they did a lot of scene-specific action figures but didn't give C-3PO and R2-D2 a lot of love. I was systematically creating my own versions of Dagobah R2-D2 covered in mud, Endor C-3PO in a little Ewok throne, etc. because they didn't exist but I wanted to own them. I think that, one by one, Hasbro eventually supplanted almost every single one of those projects.

Then there's the Ninja Turtles stuff. There was a period there for a while when you could Google "TMNT custom figure" and just about the only search results were from my web site. But, I think I just jumped into the game a bit early. I became a Ninja Turtles fan at age 14, much older than a lot of kids who grew up on the brand, so naturally I became an adult fan about a decade sooner than everybody else. And NECA is finally, finally stepping up and creating mass-produced figures of all the characters that I built and always wanted to own—Granitor, the Neutrinos, Zach the Fifth Turtle, etc. They're even doing goofy toys that it never even dawned on me to build, like the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang members with paper sacks over their heads and turtle faces drawn on the bags. (Why, yes, I did order four of them, thank you for asking.) There are some characters I've addressed that they haven't gotten to yet (Lotus Blossom, Don Turtelli, etc.) but I have every expectation that they will some day.

It's just incredible how much the collecting scene has changed in the last 20 years. I used to feel very frequently like if I was a fan of something, unless it was utterly mainstream, we'd get no licensed toys and I'd have to build one myself if I wanted to own a physical representation. Nowadays we get these wildly authentic figures for even dead, obscure properties like Knight Rider or The Black Hole or Darkwing Duck. I own three versions of K.I.T.T.'s evin twin, K.A.R.R., in three different scales! I didn't even have to make them! I got every single one of them at Walmart! How is that even possible?!

I love how much attention toy companies like Hasbro and Super7 and NECA and Mattel are paying to collectors nowadays. My desire to build physical representations of characters I love is largely subsided, because the official companies are catering to my specific desires more frequently than ever before.

Remember when the Trannies awards would come out every year, and the fan wish list for "Characters Who Never Got a Toy, But Should" was pretty much the same every single year? Unicron, Arcee, Quintessons, Alpha Trion, etc. It never really changed much. There was this eternal, unchanging list of Non-Toy Characters and it was immutable. Pretty much every character has gotten knocked off that list in recent years. I don't even know who our current list of non-toy characters would be nowadays. Slizardo. The Skuxxoid. That's seriously about it.

So, I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate everything we've gotten in recent years. It's really extraordinary. And it's only going to get better.

Zob (still doesn't own an Aeon Flux action figure, though)

Re: We've Come A Long Way.

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Subject: Re: We've Come A Long Way.
From: evil.kin...@gmail.com (Evil King Macrocranios)
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 by: Evil King Macrocrani - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 02:39 UTC

On Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 5:12:12 PM UTC-8, Zobovor wrote:
> So, I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate everything we've gotten in recent years. It's really extraordinary.

Heck, I was just blown away to get Battlechargers again. Holy heck, true blue, G1 with knees Battlechargers. And even more amazingly I found them at retail. Someone pinch me.

>And it's only going to get better.

I'm not that optimistic. I think it's all downhill from here. Unicron and the surrounding movie releases were the highpoint for geewunners like me and now I expect the focus to shift completely and permanently to the upcoming media tie-in lines. The G1 party is over but we had a really great run. I am very thankful.

I do still kinda want a definitive Scrounge, though.

Re: We've Come A Long Way.

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Subject: Re: We've Come A Long Way.
From: zmf...@aol.com (Zobovor)
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 by: Zobovor - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 04:30 UTC

On Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 7:39:21 PM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:

> I'm not that optimistic. I think it's all downhill from here. Unicron and the surrounding movie releases were the highpoint for geewunners like me and now I expect the focus to shift completely and permanently to the upcoming media tie-in lines. The G1 party is over but we had a really great run.

I'm not convinced Hasbro has completely forsaken us yet. As long as there are fans who are willing to spend gobs of money on G1 tributes, Hasbro will keep churning them out. It doesn't make sense to stop right now. Maybe when the original Transformers fans have all reached retirement age and are selling off their collections in two decades to pay for a new set of dentures and an in-home elder care robot. But that's still like two decades away for most of us.

Besides, there are lots and lots of G1 characters who haven't gotten modern updates. Something like 170 characters, give or take. Granted, a large percentage of them are bottom-rung Micromasters and such that most casual fans have never heard of. I think the juice is still worth the squeeze, though, at least for the time being.

Zob (of course, it's hard to tell how much of the current toy line plans are Lenny's vision for the future, and how much of it was John Warden furiously scribbling notes on a napkin mere minutes before Hasbro kicked him out)

Re: We've Come A Long Way.

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From: gustavow...@yahoo.com (Gustavo Wombat)
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Subject: Re: We've Come A Long Way.
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2022 05:22:31 -0000 (UTC)
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 by: Gustavo Wombat - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 05:22 UTC

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:

> Remember when the Trannies awards would come out every year, and the fan
> wish list for "Characters Who Never Got a Toy, But Should" was pretty
> much the same every single year?

That was never a great name… a little worse now. I do with someone was
still doing it and compiling it, but I don’t know where the center of the
fandom is anymore. And renaming the thing.

> Unicron, Arcee, Quintessons, Alpha Trion, etc. It never really changed
> much. There was this eternal, unchanging list of Non-Toy Characters and
> it was immutable. Pretty much every character has gotten knocked off
> that list in recent years. I don't even know who our current list of
> non-toy characters would be nowadays. Slizardo. The Skuxxoid. That's seriously about it.

I would love a Skuxxoid. I think Hasbro should have done him and Slizardo
as Prime Master armor.

> So, I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate everything we've gotten
> in recent years. It's really extraordinary. And it's only going to get better.

I think we might be getting to the spot where so much of G1 is redone that
they can start doing interesting things with it again. I loved the odd
Combiner Wars things that shouldn’t have existed, like Sky Lynx, and want
more of that. I get that we’re going to hit the same characters all the
time, but do something new with them. It doesn’t always work (PotP Optimus
Prime), but it’s fun when it does (PotP Rodimus Prime)

Re: We've Come A Long Way.

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From: gustavow...@yahoo.com (Gustavo Wombat)
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Subject: Re: We've Come A Long Way.
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2022 05:23:51 -0000 (UTC)
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 by: Gustavo Wombat - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 05:23 UTC

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 7:39:21 PM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> I'm not that optimistic. I think it's all downhill from here. Unicron
>> and the surrounding movie releases were the highpoint for geewunners
>> like me and now I expect the focus to shift completely and permanently
>> to the upcoming media tie-in lines. The G1 party is over but we had a really great run.
>
> I'm not convinced Hasbro has completely forsaken us yet. As long as
> there are fans who are willing to spend gobs of money on G1 tributes,
> Hasbro will keep churning them out. It doesn't make sense to stop right
> now. Maybe when the original Transformers fans have all reached
> retirement age and are selling off their collections in two decades to
> pay for a new set of dentures and an in-home elder care robot. But
> that's still like two decades away for most of us.
>
> Besides, there are lots and lots of G1 characters who haven't gotten
> modern updates. Something like 170 characters, give or take. Granted, a
> large percentage of them are bottom-rung Micromasters and such that most
> casual fans have never heard of. I think the juice is still worth the
> squeeze, though, at least for the time being.
>
>
> Zob (of course, it's hard to tell how much of the current toy line plans
> are Lenny's vision for the future, and how much of it was John Warden
> furiously scribbling notes on a napkin mere minutes before Hasbro kicked him out)
>

I don’t really get the whole “Josh is good, Lenny is bad” thing. They’re
both working for a large corporation, across countries and markets, and the
entire thing is always likely to be way more of a collaboration than one
man’s vision.

Your true hero might be some random Japanese guy you never heard of,
overseeing the designers, while gently petting his vintage Chainclaw as if
it is a white cat.

Re: We've Come A Long Way.

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Subject: Re: We've Come A Long Way.
From: zmf...@aol.com (Zobovor)
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 by: Zobovor - Sun, 27 Feb 2022 12:46 UTC

On Saturday, February 26, 2022 at 10:23:52 PM UTC-7, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:

> I don’t really get the whole “John is good, Lenny is bad” thing. They’re
> both working for a large corporation, across countries and markets, and the
> entire thing is always likely to be way more of a collaboration than one
> man’s vision.

I was content to perceive Hasbro as a nameless, faceless entity for a really long time. Years ago people in the fandom would buddy up with Joe Kyde or someone and I was like, "Stop it! Hasbro is a magic toy factory! People don't LIVE there!"

Obviously, there's a team of designers and engineers and artists and it takes effort from all of them to bring a product from the drawing board to the toy store shelves. I think the artistry is still there, certainly. I want to find whoever has been doing the head sculpts for the last few years and kiss him full on the lips.

But it's the brand manager who ultimately decides what direction they go in and which characters are going to be addressed. Lenny doesn't have as strong a public presence as John Warden did, so I haven't yet gotten a feel for his brand management style. And, I don't mean to villify the guy by any stretch of the imagination. All I really know about him, really, is what we can infer based on which toys are coming out.

John Warden was a huge G1 fanboy who grew up on the brand. He had a real sense of what kids growing up on the brand never got to see. Why was there no Arcee toy? Why were there no Quintessons? Stuff like that. Of course, I didn't know who he was when he first took over the brand. I just noticed that Hasbro had suddenly taken a hard tilt towards doing some really great G1 updates (around Combiner Wars was when I went from "huh, okay, this exists now" to "OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS EVEN A THING") and he maintained a consistent level of excitement about the brand until his departure.

So, no, Lenny isn't inherently bad. He's just not John Warden, who is amazing.

And if you think that an individual brand manager cannot single-handedly disrupt the franchise as we know it, we need look no further than Aaron Archer. Not only was he awful to the fans in online interaction, but he had this ham-fisted, my-way-or-the-highway approach to managing the brand that I abhored.

Zob (John Warden had no trouble "flooding the market with jets" and I love him for it!)

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