04 - Transformers Armada Part 1 Behind The Scenes:
https://youtu.be/vNgWvNmMJfE

05 - Transformers Armada Part 2 The Birth of Unicron
https://youtu.be/5j7kdLZv8Ck

Always nice to hear a bit of inside baseball, and he covers the transition from Kenner, the decline of the brand with Beast Machines, and the development of Armada.

On a side note, podcast interviewers need to realize that the audience would actually like to hear the guest being interviewed. There are long stretches where the interviewer rambles on. We get it, you know a lot about Transformers. You know who else does? Your podcast guest, the man from Hasbro who reinvigorated the brand with Armada. So maybe zip it and let him talk.

Not that I have any strong feelings about it.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 12:39:21 AM UTC-6, Codigo Postal wrote:
> Always nice to hear a bit of inside baseball, and he covers the transition from Kenner, the decline of the brand with Beast Machines, and the development of Armada.

Thanks for posting these!

I've listened to the first one so far (at 2.00 speed, so it only took about half an hour instead of an hour).

So far, my key takeaways are:

• The main reason Aaron Archer was put in charge of the Transformers toy line was because he was the only Kenner employee who was willing to relocate from Ohio to Rhode Island;

• Archer knew so utterly little about Transformers that he had to buy books online to serve as reference materials;

• and Armada really was the Transformers answer to Pokémon with its "gotta catch 'em all" aspect.

Gonna listen to more, perhaps tonight.

Zob (finally done murdering dandelions for a while... but I still see them every time I close my eyes)

Excited to check these out over the weekend. Thanks for posting them, Codigo! And thanks, Zob, for the succinct recap. :)

JB

On Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at 5:47:58 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 12:39:21 AM UTC-6, Codigo Postal wrote:
>
> > Always nice to hear a bit of inside baseball, and he covers the transition from Kenner, the decline of the brand with Beast Machines, and the development of Armada.
> Thanks for posting these!
>
> I've listened to the first one so far (at 2.00 speed, so it only took about half an hour instead of an hour).
>
> So far, my key takeaways are:
>
> • The main reason Aaron Archer was put in charge of the Transformers toy line was because he was the only Kenner employee who was willing to relocate from Ohio to Rhode Island;
>
> • Archer knew so utterly little about Transformers that he had to buy books online to serve as reference materials;
>
> • and Armada really was the Transformers answer to Pokémon with its "gotta catch 'em all" aspect.
>
> Gonna listen to more, perhaps tonight.
>
>
> Zob (finally done murdering dandelions for a while... but I still see them every time I close my eyes)

On Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at 6:47:58 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> Gonna listen to more, perhaps tonight.
So, it's odd to me that Aaron Archer is so articulate during this podcast, but he was so utterly terse and uncommunicative during his tenure on the Orson's World forum.

Like, he speaks at length about the presentation of the brand as a whole, and specifically individual waves, and how he was making an active effort to promote variety of colors and shapes on the shelf—a bright yellow race car, a red jet, a green tank. It was an active effort to cater to the widest possible consumer base because they will gravitate naturally towards the types of vehicles they prefer. If they did a wave that was all race cars, they were missing out on the opportunity to sell to consumers who prefered to buy spacecraft, for example.

So, that's a totally sensible business decision and I totally get it. But on the web forum, people asked him why Hasbro had only reissued the G1 versions of the 1984 Decepticon jets but not the 1985 characters and he said something like "CAN'T FLOOD THE MARKET WITH JETS" which is such a highly truncated and abbreviated version of the longer, sensible explanation that it becomes almost meaningless.

It's the same thing with the explanation as to why the Tidal Wave toy was green, but he was purple in the cartoon. Archer gives a totally sensible explanation in the podcast about how Tidal Wave's toy was all set to go, and it was planned to be purple to match the media presentation, but then one of the Hasbro higher-ups expressed concern about how many other products also had purple color scheme (Galvatron, Skywarp, etc.) and that Tidal Wave was selling at a higher price point and they were concerned about the sales, since purple was historically not a color associated with boys' action figures and hero characters in general.

Again, that's a totally fair response, and it mirrors the situation with Studio Series Hot Rod not being magenta. But I think the Orson's World explanation was something like "TOO MUCH PURPLE" which just led me to believe that Aaron Archer hated the color himself, so he was unilaterally making these arbitrary choices based on his own preferences.

I mean, maybe the guy was just no good with a keyboard so he could only peck out three- or four-word responses, and he had to truncate his answers to the absolute bare minimum. I mean, it's possible. Michael Jackson didn't know how to read sheet music. But my point is that if he'd explained himself that well 20 years ago, then maybe I wouldn't have seen him as this villain and interloper who knew nothing about Transformers and was trying to drive the brand into the ground.

Zob (of course, I've also matured a little bit in the last 20 years... not a lot, but a little)

On 5/26/2022 6:38 PM, Zobovor wrote:
> It's the same thing with the explanation as to why the Tidal Wave toy was green, but he was purple in the cartoon.

Pretty sure he blamed Takara or the anime studio for that. He seemed to
pass the buck a lot that way at the time.

Travoltron <travoltron@defender.uni> wrote:
> On 5/26/2022 6:38 PM, Zobovor wrote:
>> It's the same thing with the explanation as to why the Tidal Wave toy
>> was green, but he was purple in the cartoon.
>
> Pretty sure he blamed Takara or the anime studio for that. He seemed to
> pass the buck a lot that way at the time.
>

That is not at all how I remember it.

I don’t know if he had done interviews sometime later where he explained
things, which only I remember, but none of these revelations that people
are discovering here seem like revelations.

Things that seemed to annoy people happened for mostly practical reasons
and were explained sometime over the past twenty years, and long enough ago
that I thought it was basically contemporaneously.

On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 12:29:33 AM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> I don’t know if he had done interviews sometime later where he explained
> things, which only I remember, but none of these revelations that people
> are discovering here seem like revelations.

I will confess that I don't keep tabs on the guy, and there are probably some interviews I've missed. So, maybe he's already explained this already and I just missed it. But, right now, the only information I had was this podcast and my ability to compare it to what he said on the Orson's World forum.

Zob (every time I try to get some work done in the backyard it starts raining, so that either means I'm not meant to do it, or that I need to be soaking wet)