I should preface this by saying that I don't consider this blog to be 'a news site', but I have occasionally reacted to significant news, and offered my own personal thoughts. To this end, I'll simply acknowledge Mr. Goldner's passing here, with commiserations to his surviving family, and add my own thoughts after the jump break.
It was quite shocking news to wake up to this morning, though it appears he had been battling cancer for about a decade. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Goldner's leadership was instrumental in developing Hasbro from its humble beginnings as a toy company, to the multi-media entertainment company it is now - with Hasbro Studios producing movies, TV shows and videogames related to their toy properties. I believe it was Goldner who announced, some years ago, that Hasbro wanted to be identified as "an Intellectual Properties company that also makes toys."
From my perspective, as a collector, the TransFormers brand has lost much of its sheen - and certainly a lot of what made it unique - as Mr Goldner ascended the ranks, from the interminable reboots of Generation 1 in poorly-developed three-year cycles, to the "Unification of World Brands" which saw Takara Tomy (where the real design and engineering talent resides) forced to release toys with the same dull plastic colours and increasingly miserly paint jobs as those released in Hasbro's markets (most conspicuous with the so-called Masterpiece lines), to the increasingly delirious live action movies directed by Michael Bay, to the decision to de-license the TransFormers Collectors' Club and BotCon in favour of promoting its own rebranded webshop, Hasbro Pulse (which only became available outside the US this year) and its own multi-brand fan convention, HasCon (which, to this day, has been a one-and-done, poorly executed event that failed to satisfy the fans of any of its many brands), to the recent news that Hasbro were planning to branch out into NFTs.
While it's inevitable that material costs will rise, and Trump's brainless attempt at a trade war with China forced many manufacturers to switch production to other countries to avoid further cost increases, Hasbro's choice of plant in Vietnam has led to increasingly pronounced QC issues, and the expansion of Hasbro Pulse has yet to provide collectors significant benefits within the US, let alone abroad, due to Hasbro's inept distribution strategies and poor stock control.
It is universally true that the bigger a company gets, the less capacity it has to actually care what its customers think of its products, versus what its shareholders want, but one would hope that a company created to make children's toys would maintain some semblance of interest in making good children's toys. I suspect the laser-focus on G1 was a decision intended to please the shareholders, since the original 1984/5 toyline remains one of the most instantly-recognisable, even today.
All this may seem churlish, under the circumstances, but it's not intentionally so: I simply have no personal connection to the man, but feel that his role at Hasbro and his impact on the TransFormers brand was not entirely positive.
It would be nice to think that a change in leadership, even in such tragic circumstances, might precipitate a change in direction, and that the brand might now be free to 'transform' as it did after Generation 1 concluded, 30 years ago.
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