Hasbro, Collecting, and Me...

Long-time readers will surely have noticed that 2022 was a bit of a sparse year as far as the TransForm-A-Blog is concerned. Twenty-nine posts in total, of which just 17 were proper toy write-ups - the lowest number since 2009 - which was the first full year I was posting this blog, when I was still figuring out how I wanted to use the blog, and still only a few years back into the idea of collecting as a genuine hobby.

During this two or three years, with the launch of Hasbro Pulse, Hasbro has really upped its game in terms of its Social Media engagement, hosting semi-regular livestreams catering to fans across their portfolio of brands. Hasbro has launched new toylines, new TV shows, and even started the promotional juggernaut for the first live action TransFormers movie in five years. In theory, there's an awful lot of material to blog about. One could be forgiven for thinking that now is an exciting time for TransFormers fans... But it's really not.

Not for me, at any rate, and I can be fairly sure that I'm not completely alone in all my concerns... Some of them, maybe, but not all of them.

I've written, in other opinion pieces here, about my increasing sense of ennui regarding Hasbro's TransFormers output, the downsizing, the increased costs, etc... but the War For Cybertron Trilogy, Studio Series '86 and now Legacy/Legacy Evolution seem to me to represent the absolute stagnation of the brand shifting swiftly and assuredly into active decay, along with an increasing sense that everything Hasbro does now is about maximising shareholder profits, heedless of any and all fallout, rather than creating worthwhile products... And it's not only evident in TransFormers.

Over the last year, Hasbro has attracted scorn for its machinations in the Magic: The Gathering community and, just in the last few months, the Dungeons & Dragons community. The former were up in arms over a mass reprinting of formerly rare cards which, while not valid for play, nevertheless devalued the original, playable cards. The latter had their collective nose put out of joint by proposed changes to the so-called 'Open Gaming License', the existing version of which had been described in its own text as "irrevocable". Debate over the true import and impact of the changes raged for quite some time, with plenty of people pointing out that the changes in revenue due to Hasbro (in the form of Wizards of the Coast) were only due if earnings exceeded a pretty high threshold, and that much of the change related only to licensed reprints of their copyrighted and trademarked material, none of which is actually required when producing third-party expansions/scenarios for the game. This was largely drowned out by the tide of angry people cancelling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, and talking about boycotting the upcoming D&D movie, amongst other things.

While Hasbro/WotC rallied to claim this was precisely the sort of valued feedback they had wanted all along, to help fine-tune the changes to the OGL - talking about the initial leak of the the updated license text as if it was intentionally made public through official channels - they eventually bowed to pressure, and shelved the idea of updating the license... for the time being. This isn't necessarily a good thing... but it's exactly what the community of people buying Hasbro/WotC's products had asked for.

All of this led to the stock market knocking a huge amount off the value of Hasbro's share value back in November due to its "over-monetising" of its brands, and for the Bank of America to declare just this month that Wizards of the Coast is "underperforming" while it "continues to destroy customer goodwill". No matter what optimistic fans might say in their defence, it surely says something pretty dire about the current leadership that such lofty oracles are issuing such dread pronouncements.

But how does any of this relate to Hasbro, the parent company, or to TransFormers toys and my acquisition thereof?

Well, there are a number of parallels. As far as I can see, the quality of the toys started its decline around the time Hasbro shifted its manufacturing from China to Vietnam, to avoid the tariffs imposed by a certain former US President. Materials have felt cheaper; molding defects and mold flashing have become more prevalent; toys have been far more prone to breakage; engineering has regressed to early 2000s standards in service of minor improvements to articulation; paint applications are more miserly... and yet prices have continued to escalate at a time when most people are finding their disposable income curtailed by the increasing cost of the necessities. This seems to run contrary to the perception that these are kids' toys - an idea frequently floated by apologists in response to collectors expressing disappointment with the products. Further confusing the issue is the argument that Hasbro (and other mass-market toy manufacturers) have to meet certain quality and durability standards in their products, which Third Party companies - those who are expressly creating products for adult collectors - do not. If the toys are demonstrably less durable than those from, say, ten to fifteen years ago, how can it be that Hasbro are still meeting the quality and durability standards for children's toys? And how is increasing the price of these toys going to attract more children (or their parents) to buy such increasingly crummy products? TransFormers used to be pocket money toys back when I started collecting in 1984/5, with a few that one might have to save up for over the course of a few weeks... they're certainly not that anymore.

Furthermore, there was a report, back in December of last year, which indicated that 'kidults' - a lazily styled demographic loosely defined as 'anyone of 12 years and over' - make up a quarter of the toy market's consumers, and are the biggest driver of growth in the industry while younger children eschew action figures, etc. in favour if digital entertainment via phones and consoles, particularly the portable kind like the Nintendo Switch. This is no doubt because such devices been used by parents for years to placate noisy, hyperactive, irritated kids, while the so-called 'kidults' grew up in simpler times, when such options, if available, just weren't as common, and toys were still one of the primary means of keeping kids entertained and occupied.

The apologists are also inclined to point out that Hasbro is a business, and its primary concern has always been making a profit. While factually accurate, in saying this, they are basically trying to convince others that nothing significant has changed in Hasbro's business practices. They tend to say that cuts are inevitable, and that it's all part of an effort to strike a balance between production costs and RRP of the toys themselves. One can't deny the underlying truth of that statement, or that there certainly are external economic factors at work behind the scenes, not least the cost of oil - the most fundamental constituent of all plastics - but the fact remains that Hasbro used to at least give the impression of pride in their products, and of concern for their durability.

Any discussion of the simplification of transformation inevitably loops back to the disagreements over Hasbro's intended target demographic, via the oft-reported claim that it is the result of customer feedback - specifically (allegedly) from parents - to the effect that the toys had become too complex, often referencing the 2009/10 Revenge of the Fallen toyline. Here again, though, if the toys are truly intended for children, simpler toys that keep breaking aren't going to be any more popular with the parents who might be paying for them, let alone the kids playing with them. One way to lose customers is to sell them shit, and I'd say that tends to be even more true of parents buying toys for their children: if they know the product is unreliable, they will be inclined to avoid it in future. However, if they're intended for an older demographic of collectors - some of whom, lets face it, don't even remove the figures from their packaging anymore - they can be perceived as more forgiving, especially of problems they will never actually encounter with their MISB collections. Those that actually remove their toys from the packaging, these days, seem to be more inclined to attempt repair rather than simply throw the toy away. But the bottom line is, if Hasbro et al are actually targeting older children and the adult collector market - that is, to punters who are used to handling potentially more delicate merchandise, and who have a more discerning eye - why do the toys look and feel so cheap, while costing so much?

When toys break, there are two choices: buy a replacement (if available), or accept that the toy is fundamentally flawed and prone to failure, and move on. It's all very well if a toy breaks during extensive and active play, but some of them have broken during the course of normal transformation. Sure, we've all had the occasional tab break off... but entire limbs? The number of photos I've seen of figures whose legs have sheared off at the hip is surprising enough, but then factor in the simplicity of the transformation that caused it and it becomes utterly insane. If Optimus Prime has to raise his legs by 90° at the hip to achieve his truck mode, you would never expect that 90° of movement to be enough to cause his leg to detach - neither for the peg to pop out, nor for that peg to tear itself apart.

These days, it's plainly obvious that their products are being manufactured on the cheap, and the markup applied to decide the RRP is higher than it has ever been. If Hasbro can afford to cut the price of certain products by 50% - even for just 24 hours, as was the case in their 2022 Advent sale - you can bet they're still making more than adequate profit on those sales, meaning the toys are, without doubt, grossly overpriced.

Alongside this, Hasbro launched 'HasLab', a crowdfunded production model for all their brands, where fans are invited to pay egregiously inflated prices, up front, for a figure that may or may not live up to its full, intended potential, depending on whether or not certain targets are reached. If baseline production is fully funded by the requisite number of backers, bonus features are floated in an attempt to secure additional backers... and it's here that Hasbro seem to fail to read the room, offering features - and, in some cases, full figures - that are neither appropriate to the main project, nor desirable by fans. For Hasbro, it is clearly all about what they can do most cheaply, rather than what they can do to make the most of the project. One of the most recent TransFormers 'successes' for HasLab was Victory Sabre/Victory Leo, which seems like a great set... except for a handful of QC issues, not least scuffed paint and chrome due to the careless way the figure was packaged. Given the cost and the limited run, such QC issues are evidence of a fundamental lack of concern.

This has bled through into the main toylines several times, and in myriad ways. Aside from the slew of ugly, boxy and very basic G1-style toys, The War For Cybertron Trilogy, and the continuation of its themes under the Legacy banner, has seen a number of remixes - more specifically, downgrades - of toys Hasbro released in the past. The original 1996 Waspinator mold was clever for its time, and had a reasonably clean beast mode, but wasn't one of the greatest Beast Wars toys. The 2014 Generations/30th Anniversary toy was of a similar size, but vastly more complicated, incorporating a geared wing-flap and a (simple) transforming weapon. Its robot mode looked great; its beast mode somewhat less so, because the robot's arms hang down its sides while the legs ended up hanging under the abdomen with the feet folded up and tabbed in under the head. Seven years later, the Kingdom version of Waspinator is not only smaller, but less complex and - somehow - even less tidy. While the robot's arms fold in under the abdomen now, the lower legs don't fold in as cleanly, the robot's feet stick out at a weird angle from below the head, and the chubby insect legs are amateurishly sculpted with cartoonish 'hands' at the end. About the only advantage it has over previous versions is that the beast mode head and mandibles are mobile. On balance, I don't think that's a significant enough benefit to compensate for what has been lost.

Wholly new molds have been little better. Elita-1 has been getting a raw deal since Hasbro first started making toys of her, but the War For Cybertron version was just a repaint of the utterly dire Arcee mold that was released later (itself a positively criminal reworking of the Generations toy). Adding insult to injury, the Legacy version - quickly revealed to be a pretool for Minerva - is conspicuously blocky and ugly, even in a line that has made a virtue of being blocky and ugly "because G1". As a Collector, I should be excited by new Femme-Bots... and the idea of a Legacy version of Minerva certainly had the potential... but the reality of the toys has been invariably disappointing. I was cautiously pleased to learn that RID2015's Strongarm is getting a Legacy remake... but then I look again at Legacy Elita-1/Minerva, and a suspicion forms in my mind that Strongarm will just be a partial retool of that same mold.

Legacy Metalhawk was show in one of the recent Fanstreams, and a virtue was made of the fact that it's a partial retool of Kingdom Cyclonus - specifically, because they had one partial retool remaining unassigned in their production schedule, and one of the designers was convinced he could make an adequate Metalhawk out of Cyclonus. On the surface, it may not seem too bad... but the vehicle mode really stretches credulity, and the choices of plastic colour for molding its parts means that there is some extensive paintwork in areas it really shouldn't have been needed. The sample shown exhibited signs of underpainting and overpainting at various points and, while it could be argued that this was a pre-production sample, virtually all of the products shown in a similar state in previous Fanstreams have ended up looking precisely the same when they reached the shelves. Frankly, Metalhawk is a fringe character at best, who needn't have appeared at all until Legacy turns its focus more specifically to Masterforce, given that his main appearances have been in that Japanese extension to G1 and in the IDW comics. All they've done here is force him through early on a limited budget... and that doesn't do anyone any favours, least of all the consumer.

Then, by contrast, we have Jazz... a central G1 character - one of Optimus Prime's lieutenants, no less - who somehow failed to materialise in any form during the War For Cybertron Trilogy. A new figure was eventually released in the Studio Series '86 line, concurrent with the WFCT, but it was typically simplistic and fragile, with reports of its roof breaking off quicker than even that of the G1 toy. In all honesty, the only thing making him look distinct from, say, an Earthrise release was the dearth of 5mm ports that had been consistently and extensively used throughout Siege, Earthrise and Kingdom toys to facilitate the Weaponiser and Fossiliser gimmicks. It almost feels as though the intention was for him to substitute for an Earthrise Jazz, but the fact that there was no Siege Jazz in the first place was an absolute travesty. What we're now getting, instead, is Origin Jazz - a figure in the Buzzworthy Bumblebee line, as a direct follow-up to the Origin Bumblebee toy, and similarly designed to mimic the lazy Cybertronian animation model which turned a vehicle that looked like a wingless Viper from Battlestar Galactica (or, as people have pointed out, certain brands of hand-held vacuum cleaners) into a robot that nevertheless has the front end of a Porsche 935 Turbo (or its closest animated analogue) on its chest. Bad enough that we're stuck with years to come of G1 variants, but to deliberately reference - not to say celebrate - the absolute bullshit of the G1 cartoon feels like an abject waste of time and resources for Hasbro... And yet both Origin Jazz and Legacy Metalhawk are being praised in exactly the same rose-tinted, blinkered, fanatical way that Legacy Blitzwing was praised for its fidelity to an animation model that wasn't consistent with itself, let alone the latest toy. Origin Jazz just makes me all the more glad I own the Generations/Reveal the Shield toy.

Throughout all of this, over the last few years, in part due to my finances, I've been buying less and less... I've been finding less to get excited about in the future of Hasbro's TransFormers output... and that has very much translated into less enthusiasm toward blogging about my existing collection, let alone the tiny handful of new purchases I've made. While I bought a fair number of the Kingdom Maximals and Predacons, I barely touched the preceding chapters. Legacy is now starting its second chapter and, until recently, I'd bought just one figure from the line. Even on the line I've sunk the most money into since its inception, Studio Series, I've bought just a third of the line's total output to date (though, facing facts, about a quarter of it has been Bumblebee variants). Almost every one of my purchases over the last two or three months has been bought at a huge discount... But sometimes even that has not been enough to entice me. The Entertainer has dropped the price of the X-Men/TransFormers Collaborative figure, Ultimate X-Spanse, to a mere £20, about a quarter of its original RRP, just to get rid of its remaining stocks of the misjudged and poorly executed figure.

I recently found that GAME UK (and other retailers in the same group) had started listing some TransFormers products at massive discounts - much like the 50% discounts Hasbro offered in their Advent sales. Much like Hasbro Pulse, if a third-party retailer can afford to apply a 50% discount, the markup of the RRP must have been huge. Ultimately, I ended up ordering the Buzzworthy Bumblebee Creatures Collide boxed set of WFCT/Legacy repaints, even though I was only really interested in about half the set. I was quite keen on Goldbug, because it neatly circumvents my reluctance to buy new Bumblebee figures by being a homage to the G1 Throttlebot, using the licensed VW Beetle vehicle mode that had been effectively a limited edition due to Bumblebee appearing in the Netflix-liveried portion of the War For Cybertron toyline. I was vaguely interested in Scorponok because, where the Beast Wars reissue was recoloured to better match the CGI from the TV series, the Buzzworthy re-release of the Kingdom mold was recoloured to better match the original toy. Skywasp was appealing to me for the same reason I liked Timelines Ultra Mammoth - a silly, beast-related pun name - though I already knew the toy would be disappointing in-hand... And Ransack... Well, Ransack was of zero interest because it's a low-effort repaint as homage to a G1 Insecticon that had a unique mold and was never even available in the UK. In hand, I'd say the set is barely worth the £45 I paid, let alone its £93 RRP... But I'll get into that in another post.

Far be it from me to point fingers but, over the last ten or more years, back under the leadership of Brian Goldner, but more clearly discernible under the new CEO, Chris Cocks, Hasbro has perniciously reduced the quality of its output, according to several metrics, while pricing itself into irrelevance... and not only in the TransFormers brand. They have engaged in some dubious tactics in a clear attempt to gouge ever more money out of the wallets of several fandoms. Certainly, they still have their rabid loyalists, who seem to feel both joyful and fortunate to be offered such low-effort crap, and ever-ready to praise "the best G1 we've had in years" and snap it up upon release... but I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, long term. Sure, they'll keep making TransFormers toys, and movies, and TV shows... but most of it will continue to be low-effort crap if Hasbro are rewarded for producing low-effort crap.

For the same money Hasbro expected me to pay for Ultimate X-Spanse, I bought La Hire from the Third Parties. Alternatively, Hasbro's Deluxe class Studio Series version of TLK Hot Rod is £26, but smaller, less well engineered, more fragile and sorely underpainted. Sure, it's cheaper... but do you even get what you pay for?

I bought Haiku for about £110, yet similarly-priced offerings from Hasbro are absolutely mediocre - the Jurassic Park Collaborative set, Tonkanator (an utterly superfluous UK G2-adjacent repaint of the 1985 G1 Devastator set, itself a repaint of an even older Diaclone set) or, for a little less, there's Commander class War For Cybertron: Kingdom Rodimus Prime. Meanwhile, Hasbro has no direct equivalent version of Drift - no Masterpiece Movie figure (yet), only two separate Deluxe class Studio Series figures - the helicopter one is a remold, the car a repaint of a figure from an older line - both pretty simplistic, the former selling for about £26, the latter closer to £30 thanks to the unnecessary addition of Dinobot baby figures.

I didn't bother buying Hasbro's Masterpiece Movie Ratchet at its circa £130 RRP, and instead bought Rescue Pioneer for a little over half that, getting a much better-looking product... Obviously, Rescue Pioneer could not exist without MPM Ratchet... but at a time when original figures from the likes of Unique Toys are so far advanced in comparison to the official Masterpiece figures, in terms of both engineering and paintwork, Hasbro's output no longer lives up to the brand name of 'Masterpiece'.

MP01, first released in 2003, was a genuine Masterpiece, and still is a marvellous figure, despite now appearing rather dated. Even MP10 was better than I'd expected, but more recent entries try to turn cartoonish robots into realistic vehicles, which results in a jarring, frustrating mess of a transformation and a figure with more panel seams than sculpted details. There are now those who feel the main toylines, certainly from War For Cybertron onwards, make the Masterpiece line largely redundant because of the disparity between cost and quality... But then Hasbro produces things like Legacy Needlenose - the quintessential 'robot stuck to the bottom of a jet' that Hasbro has been defaulting to since G1 in the mid-1980s - even though they could have completely redesigned him to be more efficient with his mass. It has been almost 40 years since the TransFormers brand launched, and I tend to think that 'G1, but with better articulation' is no longer acceptable, even as a bare minimum requirement. At the current asking prices, virtually every Legacy release so far has been an easy pass... and what little I've seen of the Evolution chapter hasn't been any more attractive.

But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.

I started out eagerly watching Hasbro's Fanstreams live, but quickly shifted to watching them retrospectively, so I could fast-forward through most of the presentation to get a look at the toys, because there were so few 'reveals' that hadn't already appeared online, sometimes weeks or even months ahead of the official reveal. Eventually I just stopped watching entirely due to the content of the presentation getting reposted everywhere else within minutes, sometimes even during the presentation, making the presentations themselves largely irrelevant. These streams are full of forced enthusiasm for toys that simply aren't as good as their output from just ten years ago, along with desperate cherry-picking of the one or two examples of positive feedback from a chat log that's full of complaints that they're 'revealing' products that have been known about for weeks or months (due to leaks) or little more than repaints, or generally more of the same. Hasbro's audience have been whining for years about Hasbro not doing enough to show off upcoming products, of failing to make adequate use of social media for promotion, but now they're whining about having to wait so long after the toys are revealed for them to appear in shops. Leaks have become so common some fans get confused as to why they can't find new figures in their local toyshops, when they're still months away in Hasbro's distribution schedules. For Hasbro, it's very much a case of "damned if they do, damned if they don't". If they reveal things officially any earlier, there will be more complaints about the delays before products hit the shelves. If they carry on as they are, their Fanstreams will seldom have any exclusive reveals.

Considering I first got into TransFormers via Generation 1 back in the 1980s, it often puzzles me how my expectations and preferences are so different from other self-professed GeeWunners. The major distinction seems only to be that my exposure to the brand came via the toys first, and the crummy cartoon second, thanks to its inconstant scheduling within the UK's incipient early morning television broadcasts. I genuinely hope that I'll find some Legacy figures worth buying (there were none in the most recently-revealed crop), and I'm sure I'll find a few more Studio Series figures to add to my collection, but I'm not sure I can consider myself a capital-c Collector of Hasbro's TransFormers toys anymore.

Based on the two short movie trailers thusfar revealed, the new movie is coming across as Bayverse Mk II rather than a continuation from the Bumblebee solo movie, despite being pitched as a direct follow-up, set in the 1990s. The first handful of toys revealed - both in the standalone RotB toyline and within Studio Series - look like misshapen messes with budget-level engineering that barely qualifies them as 'robots in disguise'. SS Airazor is a retooling of the Kingdom toy so lazy and ill-judged that it no longer fits together properly, while the standalone RotB version would look great if it weren't so brown. By contrast, the Deluxe class RotB version of Cheetor is a lazy retooling of the Kingdom toy that somehow manages to look better, albeit more Beast Machines than Beast Wars, while the Voyager class SS version is a blocky mess whose beast mode proportions are more simian than feline. SS Scourge is a skinny, hollow mess with most of its vehicle mode cab flattened out on his back. The Mirage figure just revealed, as I write, seems to have similar levels of excessive leg kibble as the Studio Series version of Jolt, yet the fact that it barely resembles the on-screen CGI almost counts in its favour because it appears to have sufficient mass to support its vehicle mode.

There have been moments, recently, that I've looked over my collection - particularly figures like Kingdom Tigatron, whose white plastic is rapidly turning greenish-yellow in places - and wondered why I've sunk so much money and taken up so much space with products made by a company that now produces ever higher proportions of crap... A company that signed off on Michael Bay's delirious, hateful, misogynistic and adolescent vision of TransFormers as a live-action movie franchise, and almost consistent blunders with its other brands' faltering attempts at cinematic breakthroughs... A company that gaslights its customers, and has little genuine impetus to do anything truly innovative with the TransFormers brand while the most vocal majority of its consumers are satisfied with an ongoing sequence of substandard reboots of their glory days. I've said it before but, as far as I'm concerned, no TransFormers is better than shit TransFormers.

And did I mention that, ignoring the '86 abominations, Studio Series is almost 25% Bumblebee, and yet Hasbro deliberately scheduled #100 to be their Rise of the Beasts Bumblebee figure?

It's utterly enervating.

I mean, to be fair, 2022 wasn't a great year for my mental health generally, and that may well be a contributing factor in my fatigue... but, until something changes, I'm dubious as to whether I can sincerely describe myself as a TransFormers fan, let alone a Collector. I shall ever be a fan of the concept of 'robots in disguise', certainly, and remain a Femme-Bot Fanatic... but the TransFormers brand has started to putrefy, and its merchandise has become a largely contemptible shadow of its former self, put out by a company that long ago ceased to care about anything beyond its own social media echo chamber. And if the beating it's likely to take in the stock market isn't enough to change its trajectory, I don't know what would be...

However, and, again, if it's any reassurance, there are still a lot of TransFormers toys - old and new - for me to write about on this blog... For the time being, though, I suspect my updates will continue to be as scarce and sporadic as they were last year.