On Kingdom, and John Warden's exit from TransFormers

OK, so this week has brought a couple of big pieces of news to shake the world of TransFormers toys to its very core...

Hyperbole aside, for the announcement of the name of the final chapter in the War For Cybertron Trilogy to be followed so swiftly by the news that the franchise's Design Manager is leaving the brand and moving over to the Power Rangers team is quite a bizarre turn of events. The part of my brain that thrives on puzzles and mysteries is intrigued... if not quite threatening to spiral down into full-on conspiracy theory mode...

So, Mr. John Warden, having been working on TransFormers since 2014 and, it would appear, having now completed work on the third and final chapter of TransFormers: War For Cybertron, has transferred to another franchise with giant transforming, combining robots and designs on a cinematic franchise. He'll also be working on Ghostbusters, apparently, but the Power Rangers angle makes a lot of sense. Based on what little I know of Power Ranger toys, they will see no end of benefit from Warden's time with TransFormers. I can forsee increased articulation and more dynamic poseability, without sacrificing the structural integrity, articulation and poseability of the giant Megazords... Just for starters.

His page on TFWiki is mostly comprised of a list of toys which it states, rather cryptically, he "had a hand in designing". This could mean anything from initial concept art, through offering constructive criticism on aesthetics or engineering, to actually designing the entire toy from start to finish, so it's a rather vague measure of his actual impact on the franchise. However, given that, I seem to recall, he said most of the heavy work on designing/realising the toys was done by the teams at Takara Tomy, based on sketches provided by Hasbro, I'd imagine it's more of the former two.

It's not even possible to be certain how deeply involved he was in the transition from the varied - not to mention daring and frequently quite elegant - content of the ongoing Generations line from Thrilling 30, through the Prime Wars trilogy and into the latest G1 rehash, War for Cybertron. It is clear that he "had a hand in designing" a whole host of excellent figures... but also a number that were utterly mediocre or, if not outright terrible, then certainly underdeveloped. In a way, that serves as an adequate description of TransFormers toys, generally, over the last six years and under Warden's guidance...

The brand reached its zenith in terms of technical and aesthetic achievement back in 2009-ish, and has been steadily backpeddling ever since. Granted, the Revenge of the Fallen toyline was positively opulent in its execution, so toning things down is both natural and understandable... but when you have a line like Combiner Wars, where almost everything transforms the same way and all the molds were retooled and reused several times over, going up against Third Party interpretations of the same gestalt teams which were unique and distinct in every way (even FansProjects' take on the Stunticons, which predated Combiner Wars, made its individual robots more visually distinct, despite two of them sharing near identical engineering), it's self-evident how many corners Hasbro cut at every stage. It becomes quite embarrassing when comparing Hasbro's Aerialbots to any one of the many Third Party alternatives, each of which had more convicing jet modes - even for their Silverbolt-analogues - to go with their distinct robot modes... and none of them went cheap by substituting one of the jets with a helicopter which went on to be used as the Protectobot Blades and the Combaticon Vortex. Similarly, Hasbro's Technobots were all mediocre retoolings of existing molds, where the Third Parties made all kinds of Sci-Fi references, such as the TRON-style Light Cycle in MakeToys Quantron.

Everything about Hasbro's output - from the engineering to the paint jobs - since about 2014 has screamed "cost-cutting". Sure, let's rejoice that ankle tilt became pretty much a standard feature... but let's not forget that the toys became all the more simplistic to accommodate it. Long gone are the days when new features were enabled by increased complexity of engineering.

Let's also not forget that the brand has had a laser focus on remaking Generation 1 for more than a decade now - getting close to two - and ever more finely-tuned since Combiner Wars arrived. When it first started, it was quite welcome... but it was running alongside new takes on the franchise, and Generations at least acknowledged the pluralisation of its name and shook things up a little by remaking toys from Beast Wars/Machines and Armada once in a while. Now, if it's not Studio Series or another G1 reboot, it's an even-more-simplified kiddie-oriented line like Cyberverse Adventures or frickin' BotBots. Admittedly, this narrowing of the brand is kind of what I advocated in one of my previous opinion pieces, but not quite.

Since Combiner Wars, the non-G1 entries into the toyline have been very much token gestures rather than anything that suggested a plan. After Megatron got an Armada retooling, almost everything remained steadfastly G1 until, for no apparent reason, the final chapter of the Prime Wars trilogy chucked in a Beast Wars character, in the form of Evolution Optimal Optimus - an underwhelming remake of a toy that could barely have been described as a TransFormer in the first place, and which cut the original's best features in service of the line's poorly-implemented main gimmick.

Seemingly as a nod to that, the final chapter of the War for Cybertron trilogy - titled Kingdom - is set to include a whole load of Beast Wars characters... Which, at this point, makes it feel like Warden is making a last-ditch effort to shoehorn ideas for two toylines into one, doing neither any justice. That, or they just never really thought through how War for Cybertron could work as a three-chapter narrative/toyline... Which isn't hard to believe, given that the first chapter didn't get anywhere near completing the even core cast of the 1984 toyline before rebooting from the hyperdetailed boxy aesthetic of Siege into the neo-G1 of Earthrise.

Given the shockingly poor narrative of the Machinima shows that loosely accompanied the Prime Wars trilogy, I have a nasty feeling that even the bigger budgets and improved marketing clout of Netflix are going to struggle to explain how G1 and Beast Wars can coexist without utterly screwing up the established canon - that Beast Wars begins in Cybertron's far future, but travels to Earth's distant past - unless it goes in for a full-on time travel schtick... Perhaps that's why we now have a Back to the Future crossover? Since the first series, based around Siege, has yet to air (in the UK, at least), I can't see how they're going to get from that, to the G1-circa-TransFormers-The-Movie vibe of Earthrise, involving Quintessons and Unicron (but seemingly not Junkions?), and then into a Beast Wars crossover in the final chapter... It just feels messy, like a concept borne of ADHD.

Looking back over the last six years, I can't see anything outstanding that can be attributed to the outgoing Design Manager. TransFormers has been stagnating in an attempt to re-live the glory days of the mid 1980s, when the brand first emerged and captured the imaginations of a whole generation (or more) of kids. Nevertheless, I wish him well in his new role, and certainly hope he can bring something new - in terms of improved engineering, if nothing else - to the Power Rangers line. What anyone can do for Ghostbusters as a toy franchise is up for debate... and likely very dependant on the success or failure of Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

For TransFormers, I can only hope that the next Design Manager wants to take the franchise in a new direction. It's a risk, certainly, but I'd rather they take a chance on something unique than keep trying to remake what was done in the past, and release the same characters, year after year after year. Back in 2018, at TFNation, former designer Aaron Archer admitted that he felt the brand was saturated with vehicles and that he'd have been aiming to remake Beast Wars, which is just switching one remake for another.

I won't pretend that I have any idea what they might try as something completely new... but I'd even settle for a continuation of a previous line - perhaps Car Robots/Robots In Disguise - expanding upon the existing material, but with the current level of engineering. Taking another crack at TransFormers Prime would also be good with me: improved versions of Knock Out and Airachnid being my priorities (the latter ideally being a Voyager). Alternatively, they could simply resurrect TransTech as a continuation of Beast Wars/Machines... If ever there was a concept that deserves to be revisited, it's that one.