So he showed up on YouTube yesterday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YncDbnxqvyY

It's Siege Sideswipe retooled to Kingdom Red Alert repainted in to Clampdown, who is the 13th-15th time they've reused this mold. At least they made the black hinge bars white now and it looks like all the whites in car mode match even though they don't in robot mode.

I might get this just because I don't have the Kingdom retool of this moldyet, but I feel like I really do not need him.

On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 6:31:48 AM UTC-6, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:

> So he showed up on YouTube yesterday

Yeah, they were talking about this on the message boards a couple of days ago:

https://www.seibertron.com/transformers/news/first-images-of-upcoming-velocitron-clampdown/46923/

> It's Siege Sideswipe retooled to Kingdom Red Alert repainted in to Clampdown, who is the 13th-15th time they've reused this mold. At least they made the black hinge bars white now and it looks like all the whites in car mode match even though they don't in robot mode.

The Earth mode version is arguably different enough from the Siege version that I don't really think of them as the exact same toy. But, yes, we've seen many iterations of it. I like that they mixed up his color scheme a bit so he doesn't just look like Red Alert as a police car. Getting rid of most of the red coloring was honestly a great move.
> I might get this just because I don't have the Kingdom retool of this mold yet, but I feel like I really do not need him.

He's a non-vital non-media character, but he's one of those "What If?" early Diaclone toys that theoretically COULD have been made into a Transformer by Hasbro back in 1984, but never was. I didn't buy the Takara eHobby version (didn't have that kind of cash to throw around in 2003) and I didn't buy the Masterpiece version (I only buy Masterpiece versions of media characters), but I'll get this one. $20ish isn't a lot to add a new character to my collection.

It's kind of funny that we're getting so many non-vital Autobots lately (Cordon, Deep Cover, Spin-Out, Tigertrack, Lift-Ticket, DK-2 Guard, etc. etc. etc.) and yet there are generic Decepticon jets who actually appeared in the cartoon that Hasbro still hasn't touched. I guess the heritage Diaclone color schemes trump the existing Sunbow color schemes. Also, I suppose a twentyish-dollar toy of an unimportant character is an easier sell than a thirtyish-dollar one (all the generic Decepticon jets would be Voyagers by default), but in a world where they're selling us random extra versions of Galvatron and Ultra Magnus (fitty dollah a pop), I imagine the fandom's collective wallets could probably handle it.

Zob (but, then, Hasbro would probably give the generic Decepticon jets different names than the ones I've already assigned to them, and that would just end up making me upset, so...)

In article <0503904f-0d06-4246-868d-89a05b73e98bn@googlegroups.com>,
Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
>Zob (but, then, Hasbro would probably give the generic Decepticon jets
>different names than the ones I've already assigned to them, and that
>would just end up making me upset, so...)

What I want is the generic Seekers to be done as Core Starscream
redecos. Maybe sell them in two-packs at the Deluxe price point, it'd be an
easier Walgreens exclusive to push that way.

Dave Van Domelen, doesn't want more copies of Voyager jets, wants more
copies of Core jets....

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:

> It's kind of funny that we're getting so many non-vital Autobots lately
> (Cordon, Deep Cover, Spin-Out, Tigertrack, Lift-Ticket, DK-2 Guard, etc.
> etc. etc.) and yet there are generic Decepticon jets who actually
> appeared in the cartoon that Hasbro still hasn't touched. I guess the
> heritage Diaclone color schemes trump the existing Sunbow color schemes.
> Also, I suppose a twentyish-dollar toy of an unimportant character is an
> easier sell than a thirtyish-dollar one (all the generic Decepticon jets
> would be Voyagers by default), but in a world where they're selling us
> random extra versions of Galvatron and Ultra Magnus (fitty dollah a pop),
> I imagine the fandom's collective wallets could probably handle it.

They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
Sandstorm?)

And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)

That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.

That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.

On that note, I do wonder what would happen if they just did new runs for
sold out toys. Are the Earthrise coneheads, which were really hard to get,
covered by an exclusivity contract? Would wiping out the eBay resale market
for these toys be bad? Or Unicron?

> Zob (but, then, Hasbro would probably give the generic Decepticon jets
> different names than the ones I've already assigned to them, and that
> would just end up making me upset, so...)
>

On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 12:50:34 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:

> They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
> time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
> Sandstorm?)

I thought it was great that we were able to get the three 1984 jets and the three 1985 jets in Voyager format all in the same product year, instead of having to wait for years and years to collect them all like we did with the Deluxe jets. But, Hasbro still planned it pretty carefully, and Starscream was the only one you could find at normal retail. The rest were either store exclusives (Thundercracker/Skywarp and Thrust were only sold at Target) or online exclusives (Dirge/Ramjet were Amazon). You had to actively seek out G2 Ramjet and Sandstorm if you wanted them.

So, it was still a good sales model, since fans could still get the characters they wanted, but there was never a consumer or retailer perception that it was just the same jet in different colors everywhere you looked.
> And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
> Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)
> That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.

It's funny how I know exactly who you're talking about and this needs zero clarification.

We've definitely gotten a lot of jets, no question about it. I was just commenting that it's interesting how deep Hasbro is willing to dig into the lore to give us these obscure Diaclone characters, and yet they're not tapping into the rich potential of all these generic Decepticon troopers, who actually appeared in cartoon episodes (some of them multiple times). I would think the number of people who would buy a violet-colored Seeker is much greater than the number of people who would buy, say, a Diaclone-style red Mirage, because at least with the purple Seeker you can point to a cartoon episode and demonstrate that he exists in the fictional universe.

Remember the love affair they had with Sunstorm for a while? We got like ten versions of Sunstorm in the space of a few years. It shocks me that they didn't do Sunstorm for Siege or Earthrise.

(As an aside, I loved it when Hasbro was were producing all these obscure astromech droids for the Star Wars toy line. Like, the all-black R2 unit that's on board the Death Star, or the droid on Hoth with the clear dome you can see in some scenes. It was a great way of celebrating the obscure background characters. Then Disney went all sideways and weird and started just making up stupid off-screen droids, like a Halloween-themed one called R2-B00 (get it? get it??) or one that's colored like a snowman and wears a scarf and top hat (R6-SN0) or one in rainbow colors (R2-RN8W) to celebrate gay pride. None of these guys appeared in any film or episode. My interest in off-screen characters is approximately zero.)

(And R6-SN0 is ESPECIALLY OFFENSIVE because he's clearly an R2 unit and not an R6 unit, which has a completely different lampshade-shaped head.)

> That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
> always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
> a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.

I would be one hundred percent on board with that idea. I mean, if people bought toys based on unproduced product ideas like Sandstorm or Combat Hero Megatron, surely they'd buy armybuilders for their Seeker collection...

> On that note, I do wonder what would happen if they just did new runs for
> sold out toys. Are the Earthrise coneheads, which were really hard to get,
> covered by an exclusivity contract? Would wiping out the eBay resale market
> for these toys be bad? Or Unicron?

Hasbro said recently that they can't reissue Netflix Soundwave because they had an exclusivity contract with Walmart, and that would have to expire before they could sell the toy again. So it follows that the same thing is probably the case with the Amazon Dirge/Ramjet set or Target-exclusive Thrust.

But, we've seen a willingness on their part to simply do new production runs for earlier toys. The Siege versions of Skyfire and Omega Supreme were up for same on Hasbro Pulse a few years after their initial release, for instance. It speaks towards the idea that instead of doing a silly redeco for a toy to try and justify the production costs, they can just continue to sell the toy in its original intended colors. I'm guessing they did a second production run for the Seacons, too, which is why they all showed up a second time on Hasbro Pulse (except for Overbite, weirdly).

Obviously, it would be in Hasbro's best interests to get a piece of the pie if people are spending excess amounts of money on the secondary market to acquire collectibles that you can't get through any other source. There always seems to be enough of a difference in the toy itself, and the packaging, that they have never really completely devalued the original versions. (I guess G1 Hot Rod's value has gone way down, since there was a time about 20 years ago when he was one of the most expensive Transformers on eBay ever sold in the USA, but thanks to his multiple reissues you can get even vintage G1 units on the cheap now. But, that's life.)

When you say Unicron, do you mean HasLab Unicron? Now that they've invested in the tooling, most of the expense of producing that toy is already taken care of. It would be much less costly to do a second production run, though I think there are still monster-planet level expenses associated with assembly and shipping and distributing the toy, just due to his complexity and size. I would imagine that most of the people who were interested in a $600 version of Unicron already got one. Judging from the buzzing on the message boards, there were a handful of people who wanted to spend the money but couldn't because they had unexpected car trouble or some other multi-hundred dollar expenses. Hasbro would have to crunch the numbers. Like, let's say they would need to crank out another two thousand units in order to justify the expense of putting the molds back into production, using up the factory and its employees for x number of days, and so forth. Are there two thousand people in the world who couldn't afford the toy in 2020 (I know he shipped in 2021 but people paid for the toy in 2020) but would shell out the money for it now?

I'd honestly rather see a slightly smaller Titan-class Unicron at, like, a $160 price point. It would be much more affordable for a far greater number of people, and it would be small enough that Walmart and Target could stock it on their shelves, AND it would be different from what Hasbro has offered previously, *AND* it wouldn't devalue the HasLab Unicron and piss off collectors, **AND** they could sell more units because the people who had already bought the HasLab version might double-dip.

Zob (like, seriously, the R6 thing burns my biscuits like you would not believe)

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 12:50:34 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the
> Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
>> They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
>> time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
>> Sandstorm?)
>
> I thought it was great that we were able to get the three 1984 jets and
> the three 1985 jets in Voyager format all in the same product year,
> instead of having to wait for years and years to collect them all like we
> did with the Deluxe jets. But, Hasbro still planned it pretty carefully,
> and Starscream was the only one you could find at normal retail. The
> rest were either store exclusives (Thundercracker/Skywarp and Thrust were
> only sold at Target) or online exclusives (Dirge/Ramjet were Amazon).
> You had to actively seek out G2 Ramjet and Sandstorm if you wanted them.
>
> So, it was still a good sales model, since fans could still get the
> characters they wanted, but there was never a consumer or retailer
> perception that it was just the same jet in different colors everywhere you looked.

Was it a good sales model? Lots of people couldn’t get the cone heads as
they were underproduced.

They go for a fortune these days.

>> And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
>> Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)
>> That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.
>
> It's funny how I know exactly who you're talking about and this needs zero clarification.
>
> We've definitely gotten a lot of jets, no question about it. I was just
> commenting that it's interesting how deep Hasbro is willing to dig into
> the lore to give us these obscure Diaclone characters, and yet they're
> not tapping into the rich potential of all these generic Decepticon
> troopers, who actually appeared in cartoon episodes (some of them
> multiple times). I would think the number of people who would buy a
> violet-colored Seeker is much greater than the number of people who would
> buy, say, a Diaclone-style red Mirage, because at least with the purple
> Seeker you can point to a cartoon episode and demonstrate that he exists
> in the fictional universe.

Red Mirage is Crasher, right? The Go-Bot FemmeThug? Pretty sure she would
sell better than an entirely unknown 3 second Seeker.

> Remember the love affair they had with Sunstorm for a while? We got like
> ten versions of Sunstorm in the space of a few years. It shocks me that
> they didn't do Sunstorm for Siege or Earthrise.

Remember how that love affair ended? A terrible Dreamwave Comic appearance
that made people hate the character by making him overpowered and special.
It really ruined the character.

So much so that he was replaced by Lemon Skittle in the Siege Rainmaker
pack. (No, I’m not going to look up the real name. Ok, I just did but I
literally forgot it while switching apps. It was not Golden Showers. Lime
Skittle was Acid Storm though, and Blue Skittle was… oof, these were
forgettable. Some kind of storm thing? Raspberry SlushieStorm?)

> (As an aside, I loved it when Hasbro was were producing all these obscure
> astromech droids for the Star Wars toy line. Like, the all-black R2 unit
> that's on board the Death Star, or the droid on Hoth with the clear dome
> you can see in some scenes. It was a great way of celebrating the
> obscure background characters. Then Disney went all sideways and weird
> and started just making up stupid off-screen droids, like a
> Halloween-themed one called R2-B00 (get it? get it??) or one that's
> colored like a snowman and wears a scarf and top hat (R6-SN0) or one in
> rainbow colors (R2-RN8W) to celebrate gay pride. None of these guys
> appeared in any film or episode. My interest in off-screen characters is
> approximately zero.)
>
> (And R6-SN0 is ESPECIALLY OFFENSIVE because he's clearly an R2 unit and
> not an R6 unit, which has a completely different lampshade-shaped head.)

Doesn’t Obi-wan have an R2 unit he keeps calling R4? There’s some overly
complicated backstory to explain it rather than just “Obi-wan isn’t much of
a droid guy”

>> That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
>> always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
>> a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.
>
> I would be one hundred percent on board with that idea. I mean, if
> people bought toys based on unproduced product ideas like Sandstorm or
> Combat Hero Megatron, surely they'd buy armybuilders for their Seeker collection...
>
>> On that note, I do wonder what would happen if they just did new runs for
>> sold out toys. Are the Earthrise coneheads, which were really hard to get,
>> covered by an exclusivity contract? Would wiping out the eBay resale market
>> for these toys be bad? Or Unicron?
>
> Hasbro said recently that they can't reissue Netflix Soundwave because
> they had an exclusivity contract with Walmart, and that would have to
> expire before they could sell the toy again. So it follows that the same
> thing is probably the case with the Amazon Dirge/Ramjet set or Target-exclusive Thrust.

Whoever let the accurate version of Bumblebee be a Wal-Mart exclusive
screwed up. But I don’t assume all the exclusive contracts are the same.

> When you say Unicron, do you mean HasLab Unicron? Now that they've
> invested in the tooling, most of the expense of producing that toy is
> already taken care of. It would be much less costly to do a second
> production run, though I think there are still monster-planet level
> expenses associated with assembly and shipping and distributing the toy,
> just due to his complexity and size. I would imagine that most of the
> people who were interested in a $600 version of Unicron already got one.
> Judging from the buzzing on the message boards, there were a handful of
> people who wanted to spend the money but couldn't because they had
> unexpected car trouble or some other multi-hundred dollar expenses.
> Hasbro would have to crunch the numbers. Like, let's say they would need
> to crank out another two thousand units in order to justify the expense
> of putting the molds back into production, using up the factory and its
> employees for x number of days, and so forth. Are there two thousand
> people in the world who couldn't afford the toy in 2020 (I know he
> shipped in 2021 but people paid for the toy in 2020) but would shell out
> the money for it now?

$600 is a lot to drop on a toy when you have no idea how it will turn out.
I think that may have made people balk. He currently sells for close to
$2000

> I'd honestly rather see a slightly smaller Titan-class Unicron at, like,
> a $160 price point. It would be much more affordable for a far greater
> number of people, and it would be small enough that Walmart and Target
> could stock it on their shelves, AND it would be different from what
> Hasbro has offered previously, *AND* it wouldn't devalue the HasLab
> Unicron and piss off collectors, **AND** they could sell more units
> because the people who had already bought the HasLab version might double-dip.

Would it piss off toy collectors, or would it piss off toy investors?

>
> Zob (like, seriously, the R6 thing burns my biscuits like you would not believe)
>

The whole droid naming suggests there were only 260 R2 units made. We’ve
seen about half the production run at this point.

R5-D4 is still my favorite droid though. He has a bad motivator, just like
me.

On Sunday, May 29, 2022 at 1:53:39 AM UTC-5, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 12:50:34 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the
> > Seattle Wombats wrote:
> >
> >> They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
> >> time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
> >> Sandstorm?)
> >
> > I thought it was great that we were able to get the three 1984 jets and
> > the three 1985 jets in Voyager format all in the same product year,
> > instead of having to wait for years and years to collect them all like we
> > did with the Deluxe jets. But, Hasbro still planned it pretty carefully,
> > and Starscream was the only one you could find at normal retail. The
> > rest were either store exclusives (Thundercracker/Skywarp and Thrust were
> > only sold at Target) or online exclusives (Dirge/Ramjet were Amazon).
> > You had to actively seek out G2 Ramjet and Sandstorm if you wanted them..
> >
> > So, it was still a good sales model, since fans could still get the
> > characters they wanted, but there was never a consumer or retailer
> > perception that it was just the same jet in different colors everywhere you looked.
> Was it a good sales model? Lots of people couldn’t get the cone heads as
> they were underproduced.
>
> They go for a fortune these days.
> >> And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
> >> Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)
> >> That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.
> >
> > It's funny how I know exactly who you're talking about and this needs zero clarification.
> >
> > We've definitely gotten a lot of jets, no question about it. I was just
> > commenting that it's interesting how deep Hasbro is willing to dig into
> > the lore to give us these obscure Diaclone characters, and yet they're
> > not tapping into the rich potential of all these generic Decepticon
> > troopers, who actually appeared in cartoon episodes (some of them
> > multiple times). I would think the number of people who would buy a
> > violet-colored Seeker is much greater than the number of people who would
> > buy, say, a Diaclone-style red Mirage, because at least with the purple
> > Seeker you can point to a cartoon episode and demonstrate that he exists
> > in the fictional universe.
> Red Mirage is Crasher, right? The Go-Bot FemmeThug? Pretty sure she would
> sell better than an entirely unknown 3 second Seeker.
> > Remember the love affair they had with Sunstorm for a while? We got like
> > ten versions of Sunstorm in the space of a few years. It shocks me that
> > they didn't do Sunstorm for Siege or Earthrise.
> Remember how that love affair ended? A terrible Dreamwave Comic appearance
> that made people hate the character by making him overpowered and special..
> It really ruined the character.
>
> So much so that he was replaced by Lemon Skittle in the Siege Rainmaker
> pack. (No, I’m not going to look up the real name. Ok, I just did but I
> literally forgot it while switching apps. It was not Golden Showers. Lime
> Skittle was Acid Storm though, and Blue Skittle was… oof, these were
> forgettable. Some kind of storm thing? Raspberry SlushieStorm?)
> > (As an aside, I loved it when Hasbro was were producing all these obscure
> > astromech droids for the Star Wars toy line. Like, the all-black R2 unit
> > that's on board the Death Star, or the droid on Hoth with the clear dome
> > you can see in some scenes. It was a great way of celebrating the
> > obscure background characters. Then Disney went all sideways and weird
> > and started just making up stupid off-screen droids, like a
> > Halloween-themed one called R2-B00 (get it? get it??) or one that's
> > colored like a snowman and wears a scarf and top hat (R6-SN0) or one in
> > rainbow colors (R2-RN8W) to celebrate gay pride. None of these guys
> > appeared in any film or episode. My interest in off-screen characters is
> > approximately zero.)
> >
> > (And R6-SN0 is ESPECIALLY OFFENSIVE because he's clearly an R2 unit and
> > not an R6 unit, which has a completely different lampshade-shaped head.)
> Doesn’t Obi-wan have an R2 unit he keeps calling R4? There’s some overly
> complicated backstory to explain it rather than just “Obi-wan isn’t much of
> a droid guy”

I thought the droid was shot in the dome and had his dome replaced after market.

> >> That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
> >> always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
> >> a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.
> >
> > I would be one hundred percent on board with that idea. I mean, if
> > people bought toys based on unproduced product ideas like Sandstorm or
> > Combat Hero Megatron, surely they'd buy armybuilders for their Seeker collection...
> >
> >> On that note, I do wonder what would happen if they just did new runs for
> >> sold out toys. Are the Earthrise coneheads, which were really hard to get,
> >> covered by an exclusivity contract? Would wiping out the eBay resale market
> >> for these toys be bad? Or Unicron?
> >
> > Hasbro said recently that they can't reissue Netflix Soundwave because
> > they had an exclusivity contract with Walmart, and that would have to
> > expire before they could sell the toy again. So it follows that the same
> > thing is probably the case with the Amazon Dirge/Ramjet set or Target-exclusive Thrust.
> Whoever let the accurate version of Bumblebee be a Wal-Mart exclusive
> screwed up. But I don’t assume all the exclusive contracts are the same.
> > When you say Unicron, do you mean HasLab Unicron? Now that they've
> > invested in the tooling, most of the expense of producing that toy is
> > already taken care of. It would be much less costly to do a second
> > production run, though I think there are still monster-planet level
> > expenses associated with assembly and shipping and distributing the toy,
> > just due to his complexity and size. I would imagine that most of the
> > people who were interested in a $600 version of Unicron already got one..
> > Judging from the buzzing on the message boards, there were a handful of
> > people who wanted to spend the money but couldn't because they had
> > unexpected car trouble or some other multi-hundred dollar expenses.
> > Hasbro would have to crunch the numbers. Like, let's say they would need
> > to crank out another two thousand units in order to justify the expense
> > of putting the molds back into production, using up the factory and its
> > employees for x number of days, and so forth. Are there two thousand
> > people in the world who couldn't afford the toy in 2020 (I know he
> > shipped in 2021 but people paid for the toy in 2020) but would shell out
> > the money for it now?
> $600 is a lot to drop on a toy when you have no idea how it will turn out..
> I think that may have made people balk. He currently sells for close to
> $2000
> > I'd honestly rather see a slightly smaller Titan-class Unicron at, like,
> > a $160 price point. It would be much more affordable for a far greater
> > number of people, and it would be small enough that Walmart and Target
> > could stock it on their shelves, AND it would be different from what
> > Hasbro has offered previously, *AND* it wouldn't devalue the HasLab
> > Unicron and piss off collectors, **AND** they could sell more units
> > because the people who had already bought the HasLab version might double-dip.
> Would it piss off toy collectors, or would it piss off toy investors?
> >

I don't think there's much that could get me to invest in a Unicron these days. I'll stick with my original Armada and his Deluxe scale child.

> > Zob (like, seriously, the R6 thing burns my biscuits like you would not believe)
> >
> The whole droid naming suggests there were only 260 R2 units made. We’ve
> seen about half the production run at this point.
>
> R5-D4 is still my favorite droid though. He has a bad motivator, just like
> me.

R5-P8, an R5 that's also an armed pirate. He's also got the best paintjob. He's the Sharkticon of droids.

On Sunday, May 29, 2022 at 12:53:39 AM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:

> Was it a good sales model? Lots of people couldn’t get the cone heads as
> they were underproduced.

Well, I guess it was a good *theoretical* sales model. If their goal was to ensure that the toy line didn't seem samey, but they still wanted to offer multiple Seekers to consumers, then shunting them to multiple exclusive outlets was a good way to prevent that perception. It seems like that seems to be their preferred method of offering redeco toys these days. For example, we got Earthrise Cliffjumper at retail, but Bumblebee was Walmart, Hubcap and Bugbite were Hasbro Pulse, Worlds Collide Bumblebee was in a Target pack, etc.
> Red Mirage is Crasher, right? The Go-Bot FemmeThug? Pretty sure she would
> sell better than an entirely unknown 3 second Seeker.

Crasher is mostly black. We did get a Mirage redeco once as Decepticon Fracture, but that was based on some contemporary racing deco instead of the Tonka GoBots toy.

Legacy Drag Strip might not make a bad Crasher toy, though.

> Remember how that love affair ended? A terrible Dreamwave Comic appearance
> that made people hate the character by making him overpowered and special..
> It really ruined the character.

Well, Dreamwave got a lot of things wrong. But, I think a modern Sunstorm would still sell. We got the G1 "reissue" and an Animated version, but I don't think we ever got a proper neo-G1 toy of him at all.

> Lime Skittle was Acid Storm though, and Blue Skittle was… oof, these were
> forgettable. Some kind of storm thing? Raspberry SlushieStorm?)

There was an Ion Storm and a Nova Storm. I forget which is which.

> Doesn’t Obi-wan have an R2 unit he keeps calling R4? There’s some overly
> complicated backstory to explain it rather than just “Obi-wan isn’t much of
> a droid guy”

There's a story behind this, actually. I read somewhere, or watched a behind-the-scenes clip, where George Lucas wanted Obi-Wan's droid to be called R4, and somebody reminded him that the R4 droids had the lampshade heads, and he was just like, "Well, call it R4 but give it the round head" so they had to invent some kind of explanation for her after the fact. Evidently, in-story, her head was replaced at some point with the dome from an R2 unit..

> Whoever let the accurate version of Bumblebee be a Wal-Mart exclusive
> screwed up. But I don’t assume all the exclusive contracts are the same.

That seems like a bad move to me. In my mind, store exclusives are generally redeco toys. Not wholesale remolds like Netflix Bumblebee or Netflix Soundwave.

> Would it piss off toy collectors, or would it piss off toy investors?

A little of both? I think there's a perception that Unicron is special, and doing a second production run on the character (especially if they fixed the colors a little, which a lot of people were pissed off about) will make some people feel like owning one is less special.

I mean, it actually kind of reminds me of the Ninja Turtles Ultimates by Super7. They said the toys were going to be made-to-order, so only the people who pre-ordered them were going to get them. I knew there would be some people ordering them just so they could resell them, of course, but for the most part there wasn't going to be a strong secondary market presence. So, I knew I had to get in on the ground floor if I wanted them at all.

And then they did a second production run a little while later on the four Turtle characters, which kind of makes "made-to-order" feel like a lie. Or, at least, an incorrect assumption.

> The whole droid naming suggests there were only 260 R2 units made. We’ve
> seen about half the production run at this point.

I think the full name of Obi-Wan's droid was R4-P19, which opens up the possibility for more alphanumeric combinations. So maybe, assuming they were going in order, the droid following R2-A9 was R2-A10. That creates a little more wiggle room.

Zob (saw a Buzz Lightyear toy ship today that looked like the love child of G1 Cyclonus and Animated Starscream)

On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 2:50:34 PM UTC-4, Gustavo Wombat wrote:
> Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > It's kind of funny that we're getting so many non-vital Autobots lately
> > (Cordon, Deep Cover, Spin-Out, Tigertrack, Lift-Ticket, DK-2 Guard, etc..
> > etc. etc.) and yet there are generic Decepticon jets who actually
> > appeared in the cartoon that Hasbro still hasn't touched. I guess the
> > heritage Diaclone color schemes trump the existing Sunbow color schemes..
> > Also, I suppose a twentyish-dollar toy of an unimportant character is an
> > easier sell than a thirtyish-dollar one (all the generic Decepticon jets
> > would be Voyagers by default), but in a world where they're selling us
> > random extra versions of Galvatron and Ultra Magnus (fitty dollah a pop),
> > I imagine the fandom's collective wallets could probably handle it.
> They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
> time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
> Sandstorm?)
>
> And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
> Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)
>
> That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.
>
> That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
> always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
> a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.
>
I really like that idea. Hasbro might not like the risk of it being based on time, but maybe if they just produced say 300 of them and actually had a countdown of how many were left. You'd get a lot of sales just based off of FOMO.

I know this, logistically, would be a nightmare - but imagine if the webpage had some sort of interface were you could color your own seeker and they would send you that customized figure.

BJN

On Thursday, February 16, 2023 at 11:28:33 AM UTC-7, Brian Nelson wrote:
> I know this, logistically, would be a nightmare - but imagine if the webpage had some sort of interface were you could color your own seeker and they would send you that customized figure.

If they let me build the background seekers from the G1 cartoon, I would buy all of them. I'd get like 20 of them, easily.

Zob (it's a tragedy that Sunstorm is the only one that got a G1 "reissue")

On Thursday, February 16, 2023 at 12:28:33 PM UTC-6, Brian Nelson wrote:
> On Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 2:50:34 PM UTC-4, Gustavo Wombat wrote:
> > Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > > It's kind of funny that we're getting so many non-vital Autobots lately
> > > (Cordon, Deep Cover, Spin-Out, Tigertrack, Lift-Ticket, DK-2 Guard, etc.
> > > etc. etc.) and yet there are generic Decepticon jets who actually
> > > appeared in the cartoon that Hasbro still hasn't touched. I guess the
> > > heritage Diaclone color schemes trump the existing Sunbow color schemes.
> > > Also, I suppose a twentyish-dollar toy of an unimportant character is an
> > > easier sell than a thirtyish-dollar one (all the generic Decepticon jets
> > > would be Voyagers by default), but in a world where they're selling us
> > > random extra versions of Galvatron and Ultra Magnus (fitty dollah a pop),
> > > I imagine the fandom's collective wallets could probably handle it.
> > They shoved out 8 versions of the Earthrise Seeker mold in a very short
> > time. (Have I missed anyone? The standard six, plus G2 Ramjet and
> > Sandstorm?)
> >
> > And before that, 9 versions of the Siege Seeker mold (The big 3, the
> > Skittles, Red Wing, Dead Guy, and Shattered Glass Starscream)
> >
> > That’s a lot of jets. And tetrajets.
> >
> > That said, it’s been a little bit, and I wouldn’t mind a policy of “there’s
> > always a Seeker available on Hasbro Pulse” or something where they pull out
> > a color scheme for a background jet every 4 months or so.
> >
> I really like that idea. Hasbro might not like the risk of it being based on time, but maybe if they just produced say 300 of them and actually had a countdown of how many were left. You'd get a lot of sales just based off of FOMO.
>
> I know this, logistically, would be a nightmare - but imagine if the webpage had some sort of interface were you could color your own seeker and they would send you that customized figure.
>
> BJN
That was basically what one of the early TF Expo Custom Class figures was, you pick one of each part from their giant bin of seeker parts from all the classics seeker molds they bought on ebay.