On Gimmicks, 'Play Patterns' and Fiction

Now that the Prime Wars Trilogy is officially over and the War for Cybertron Trilogy's first chapter, Siege, will be trickling into toyshops, I've been thinking a little about Hasbro's most recently closed line and, with reference to my May 2017 post, perhaps add a few further thoughts on the future of TransFormers toys...

As a collector since the original Generation 1 toys, Prime Wars - mainly in the form of Combiner Wars and Titans Return - was a very familiar concept. First we had combiner teams which were, by and large, remakes of teams from the 1986 portion of G1, but made with today's design nous and manufacturing technology, to the current Deluxe and Voyager size classes. That was all well and good and, aside from a few joint tolerance and general quality control issues, not to mention some rather hollow parts, as vast an improvement on the G1 versions as one might expect. Similarly, Titans Return pretty much amalgamated the HeadMaster and TargetMaster concepts from 1987 into the Titan Masters - small robots that transform into the heads of familiar characters, granting them enhanced stats - but, good as the toys were, something was missing.

While the core concept of G1 HeadMasters and TargetMasters made a kind of sense, both within the Marvel-driven Hasbro continuity, and within the anime accompanying Takara Tomy's releases, the HeadMaster gimmick was tied to a geared mechanism inside the toys, whereby the HeadMaster had a set of three protrusions from the base of the head mode, which pushed down on buttons in the robot's neck socket, activating tumblers behind a panel in the robot's chest, which revealed the robot's speed, strength and intelligence in the form of a bar graph. Of course, it meant the head couldn't move... but immobile heads were nothing new or unusual in G1 toys. Hell, the limbs barely moved on most of them, so a gimmick like this actually added something to the play value. Attaching the head brought a tangible, visible result, as if the robot was suddenly brought to life in one's hands. While not an active part of the western play pattern, swapping the heads on the original set of HeadMasters from 1987 revealed different stats, though the gimmick was simplified in the 1988 batch, such that the head activated a single panel featuring a pre-defined graph in the robot's chest. This meant that any head would reveal the same stats. TargetMasters added play value in that, while their interaction with the robots was limited to pegging into their hands, they were miniature, simplistic TransFormers themselves. In the comics/TV show, those robots that didn't surrender their heads had allowed their weapons to be controlled by humanoid aliens.

Combiner Wars was a concept that almost couldn't be screwed up as a toyline, though the choice to include a version of Optimus Prime which acted as a torso when the line's Megatron did not, and the failure to release an entire wave across Europe came dangerously close. They also presented nonsensical combinations - featuring Autobots and Decepticons in one gestalt - in the instructions, released Voyager class figures without teams of their own and rebooted traditionally non-combining characters and Deluxe class combiner limbs. Devastator retained his traditional six-bot team, but was incompatible with the other combiners, Ultra Magnus seemed to be from a completely different toyline, while the Seekers literally were - each one a retooling of the Leader class Jetfire from the 30th Anniversary segment of Generations. Nevertheless, the combiner toys worked brilliantly, updating the 1986 concept, and suffering only from a few instances of joints of the Voyager figures not being quite strong enough to fully support the gestalt and an underdeveloped concept whereby the Deluxe class figures came with a weapon that could serve as either a hand or a foot for the gestalt, but didn't look any good as either.

The core concept of the Titans Return toyline... didn't make a great deal of sense. Instead of Cybertronians giving up partial control of their bodies to humanoid aliens in the name of peace, we got headless robots which were somehow still independently mobile and sentient, yet reliant on smaller robots to (a) give them a head (albeit one which was actually interchangeable with other Titan Master figures, sold separately, thus - bizarrely - altering the identity of the larger robot, and muddying the core concept) and (b) upgrade their stats. Individual Titan Masters were also sold with triple-changing vehicle/beast/TargetMaster units. While the toys were far better articulated, the gimmick had been reduced to nothing more than a head-swap, and the Tech Specs readouts were printed out the backs of the collectors' cards included (or on Reprolabels stickers, if you like that sort of thing). Moreover, I cannot understand how the robot were intended to function with their base stats while headless, let alone when swapping Titan Masters for different stat boosts... It came across like a half-baked card game, but without the structure. Or the game. Ultimately, much as I liked the toyline, it was a pale imitation of the G1 HeadMasters, with only half a gimmick, and it was left up to Takara Tomy's Legends line to add the TargetMaster weapons to the handful of characters that needed them. Similarly, their HeadMasters were an update of their old 'Transtector' concept, where the Titan Master was the named robot, and the larger figure was a 'suit' they could control.

Power of the Primes was the first toyline to introduce the Engima of Combination - the pivotal yet vague McGuffin from the Combiner Wars animation - as a physical accessory to certain toys, but it did so as a fairly pointless chunk of plastic designed to be replaced by Prime Masters. These were a development of Titan Masters, but vaguely styled after Powermasters, in that they granted certain fundamental characteristics to the toys... Albeit only in the imagination of the kids playing with them, as there was not one single functional gimmick within the line. Prime Masters could be slotted into Voyager class gestalt torsos (harking back to the play pattern of Combiner Wars), or the frame of a Matrix in one of the Leader class toys - Optimus Prime, Rodimus Prime, Rodimus Unicronus, Optimal Optimus and Nemesis Prime. By sheer coincidence, they were also a better fit into the chest slots of Titans Return Overlord than any of the Titan Master figures had been. Prime Masters could also be attached to Titans Return figures as heads, though the outlandish designs of their insignia weren't ideally suited to that task.

Aside from a trio of Amazon exclusive sets and one San Diego Comic Con 'exclusive', Prime Masters were sold separately, along with 'Pretender Armour' which could both hide and protect the diminutive figures, but also functioned as a TargetMaster weapon which could be powered up by attaching the Prime Master externally. As a play pattern, it made a lot less sense even than Titan Masters, and the lack of any real function to plugging them into the larger figures made them effectively redundant, and certainly not an essential purchase within the toyline. The Pretender Armour was simply an attempt by Hasbro to appeal to G1 fans' nostalgia for a concept first presented in 1988... and only eight of the Thirteen Primes were made available at mass retail. One came only with the Predaking boxed set, with the remaining four packaged with the SDCC2018 'Throne of the Primes' set, as well as duplicates packaged with the Prime Wars Trilogy Amazon exclusives. Hasbro have come under fire before for allowing key toys to become exclusives, thus making it unnecessarily difficult for Collectors to complete a set... so it seems as if they learned nothing.

To accompany the Prime Wars toylines, Hasbro forged an alliance with Machinima, a now-defunct YouTube 'network', to create short-run series of animated shorts (about 5/6 minutes apiece for Combiner Wars, about 10 minutes apiece for the later two) which were each derided as much for their distractingly low framerate as for their bland storylines, clunky, stilted, overwrought dialogue, and for failing to base their animation models the toy designs in the majority of cases.

While the 'Fan Made' gestalt - Victorion - appeared in the cast of Combiner Wars, there were characters in the fiction who were not made available in toy form - not least the Mistress of Flame - as well as many toys which weren't included in the story - the Combaticons, Protectobots and Aerialbots, Cyclonus, Sky Lynx, Ultra Magnus... all of the old G1 Autobots who became combiner limbs. Of the teams that did appear, only the Constructicons were seen in their individual forms, and then only briefly. For no apparent reason (beyond plot convenience) Megatron actually transformed into a gun - rather than his toy's tank mode - in the last episode. Based on the implied passage of time in the eight episodes, it seems the 'Combiner Wars' lasted less than a day, and barely featured any combiners. There wasn't even really a war, just a secret plan by Starscream to take control of all the combiners via "the Enigma of Combination" - a Matrix-like McGuffin that somehow created a super-combiner by turning each of the handful of gestalts in the show into one of its limbs. This plan was, in fact, so secret that there was nothing in the story to suggest it was a plan until it actually happened and Megatron announced that it must have been the plan all along. The disparity between the animation and the toyline was ridiculous and, despite negative feedback from the fan community, it didn't get any better.

Machinima's continuation of their epic saga barely acknowledged Titan Masters as a concept, let alone as the toyline's central gimmick or a key plot point, nor did it explore the relationships between Titan Masters and the larger robots, or the triple-changing units. It carried on playing fast and loose with the animation models (for example, Hot Rod had a battlemask and a gun integrated into his arm, movie-style, rather than the two hand-held guns included with the toy, while his vehicle mode resembled a Dodge Viper), and introduced another character - Megatronus - who was not made available as a toy, while completely ignoring the vast majority of characters present in the toyline. It was as if they hadn't even considered featuring the toyline's intended play pattern. The titular Titans were Metroplex (actually released in a Generations toyline several years ahead of Titans Return), Fortress Maximus (a retooling of Metropex, with the G1 toy's dual HeadMaster gimmick intact) and Trypticon (winner of a fan poll), only one of whom had a toy-like HeadMaster relationship with a Titan Master in the story.

Similarly, the Power of the Primes animation created by Machinima continued its trend of paying little or no attention to the toyline's gimmick - Prime Masters and their Pretender shells - preferring instead to send Megatronus (still not available in toy form, other than a Prime Master which bore no relation to the on-screen character and came with the Bomb-Burst Pretender shell) off in search of the Requiem Blaster (a reference to Armada which, surprise surprise, did not appear in any form in the Power of the Primes toyline) in order to create a doomsday weapon. Any kids still watching must have been utterly baffled that this TV show bore no relation to what they were seeing on shelves. The introduction of Optimal Optimus, from Beast Wars, was pretty much glossed over in the worst tradition of the G1 animation, where characters from the toyline were shoehorned into 'spotlight' stories purely because they were part of the next wave of toys that Hasbro were trying to sell. Optimal Optimus appeared in the toyline because... he was chosen in another fan poll to be the next bearer of the Matrix. The Pretenders didn't feature at all, and only two Primes appeared: Megatronus and Solus Prime.

As with their partnership with Paramount, Hasbro seem to have taken little interest - let alone creative control - of what Machinima produced, leading to dull, incoherent stories voiced largely by YouTubers and minor celebs (though Judd Nelson's return to the Hot Rod role, and scoring the likes of Mark Hamill and Ron Perlman were admittedly a massive coup) that reflected little of the toylines' core concepts. As advertisements, they were worse than useless, and as entries into TransFormers fiction, they were easily forgettable.

All of this brings us to War for Cybertron... Which, based on its early releases, features another half-baked play pattern - Micromasters, Battle Masters and 'Deluxe Weaponisers' acting as weapons for the larger figures - which reminds me equally of TargetMasters (from 1985), Armada (from 2002-3) and all those bizarre superhero figures that come packaged with oversized armour, weapons and other accessories to further limit their articulation and distance themselves from the basic idea of the character. The toyline feels cobbled together. It includes a single Duocon (so far), but handled differently from the Power of the Primes Duocon - more akin to the original G1 concept - so there's no continuity there. The Deluxe Weaponisers are an interesting concept - Deluxe class TransFormers in their own right, which break apart to become weapon sets - and with vehicle modes which look substantially more 'Cybertronian' than any of the other figures thusfar revealed. But then the new Shockwave figure seems to be an offshoot of that concept, developed in parallel. Packaged as a Leader class figure, it's clearly a Voyager with a not-quite-finished Battle Master concept thrown in as upgrade armour. It looks as though Shockwave built a clone of himself, then broke it apart and turned it into a power suit. Similarly, having started the line with a Voyager class Optimus Prime, images have already surfaces of a new, Leader class Optimus Prime toy, based around the WfC Ultra Magnus mold... and it's a pale imitation of the Galaxy Force/Cybertron figure from 2005. Two obvious questions present themselves: Why make another Optimus Prime figure so soon after the first? Why homage Galaxy Force/Cybertron in a line that's derived directly from G1?

It looks increasingly as though the War for Cybertron toyline is simply a dumping ground for otherwise unused concepts, and an excuse for mixing up established alternate continuities. It's a case of "how can we do this again, but cheaper?", rather than a truly new phase in the franchise. There's been no real innovation since Combiner Wars, and the only real innovation in that toyline was the improved articulation. I know it's unfair to compare Hasbro's output with that of the Third Parties, but Combiner Wars clearly happened in reaction to Third Party combiners, yet the official CW Devastator isn't a patch on any of the myriad 3P offerings, Menasor is pathetically misshapen in comparison to FansProjects' Intimidator, and Betatron/Computron is made up of retoolings of Aerialbots and Protectobots rather than being his own unique product like MakeToys' Quantron.

Compare and contrast both Prime Wars and War for Cybertron with Armada, where larger robots were packaged with Mini-Cons which could attach to myriad points on the larger robot, with at least one on each figure activating some spring-loaded mechanism, lights and sounds, etc. Mini-Cons were a more active part of the play pattern, even though they were a thinly-disguised Pokémon rip-off, with the core concept of the line being "Gotta catch 'em all!". Mini-Cons were also sold in loosely-themed 3-packs, some of which could combine into weapons to be wielded by the larger robots. The toyline offered a great deal, but was accompanied by one of the worst TV shows in the history of the brand... and I'd still rate it higher than War for Cybertron.

As I've already noted, War for Cybertron could have made perfect sense as a continuation from the Prime Wars, but Hasbro have instead chosen to turn it into a reboot, setting it before the Autobots launch the Ark and arrive on Earth, four million years in our past. It limits what they can do with the brand and which characters they can use - essentially, they're asking us fans to buy new versions of characters we've been collecting since the Classics line began in 2006, many of which don't look sufficiently different to their previous incarnations, are smaller, more simplistic and offer no substantial improvements beyond ankle tilt, as standard, across the line. I don't understand the intended play pattern, not just because I'm an adult collector rather than a child, but admit it has some dramatic potential. However, I'm suspicious that Micromasters and Battle Masters have been introduced to get punters used to even simpler, smaller-scale figures as a cost-saving measure for future TransFormers toylines. Hasbro had a chance to take a bold new direction, the same way they did back in 1996, with Beast Wars, and in 2002, with Armada, yet they're largely playing it safe. Classics was G1 redone with contemporary sensibilities, War for Cybertron is simply a reboot of Classics with a few ill-conceived ideas tacked on, and covering a period of TransFormers lore that (sort of) featured briefly in the most recent live action movie.

On the upside, Hasbro have chosen to let IDW create a comic book series to cover the story angle, so I'd imagine it'll make some internal sense and actually reflect some aspects of the toyline's intended play pattern, because IDW's writers actually seemed to enjoy writing about TransFormers and what they can do. Of course, there's an all-new creative team behind the War for Cybertron comics, so it could go horribly wrong... but I'd like to think it won't be anywhere near as bad as the Machinima series.

We can only imagine what the next two chapters of the War for Cybertron toyline will bring, and the comic series has yet to begin. My expectations of the toyline are low and I doubt I'll read the comics... but I'm hoping that the next TransFormers series will offer something new, original and innovative - something to refresh the brand, rather than let it stagnate by repeating 1984-88 again, or dilute it with pointless dross like BotBots or, God forbid, new Action Masters.