I'm not generally inclined to make direct recommendations here - links over on the side are as much for my own convenience as to suggest further reading to visitors - but I recently had a video from the YouTube channel Valaverse pop up in my feed, and found it quite fascinating. It seems as though the guy behind the channel is a former Hasbro toy designer who - along the same lines as the folks from Boss Fight Studios - decided to take a big risk and go it alone. Rather than create a wholly unique action figure toyline (and then let it stagnate, its most interesting concepts left unexplored, while churning out licensed products left, right and centre) he purchased the license to 'Action Force' (which is what the smaller GI Joe toys were originally called in the UK, being a spin-off of the larger format 'Action Man') and produce his own characters, costumes and accessories for that.
Several of his videos lately have been commentaries on the state of toys these days - which echo many of my opinions - with a particular focus on the increasingly poor quality of Hasbro/Marvel output.
One specific video that caught my attention, because it touch both on his own experience of knockoffs and customs which use his figures as a basis, and on a more general consideration of the Third Party toy industry that has grown dramatically over the last couple of decades, with a significant reference to TransFormers. It makes for interesting watching, particularly as he acknowledges the hypocrisy of owning and enjoying Third Party action figures while denouncing their existence as both illegal and hugely damaging to smaller operators like himself. Interesting also that, as a creative, he's openly unsure how he feels about people customising his figures: they are all he wanted them to be, and that should be enough... yet he admires the work itself. But, here, watch for yourself.
When it comes to the discussion of TransFormers, it's particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it's a question that's come up before (sort of), and secondly, it's coming from the point of view of a former Hasbro employee who is now an independent toymaker, building the Action Force brand beyond a simple GI Joe spin-off.
The key point of the video, for me, came during the part where he was discussing Third Party TransFormers with Mark Weber - another former Hasbro guy, who actually worked alongside the likes of Aaron Archer on TransFormers. Archer, it seems, was a big proponent of Third Party products that supplement the toys - Toyhax/Reprolabels are namedropped - particularly improved accessories like replacement hands and feet for combiners. If anything, it was felt that accessories that augment Hasbro's products, in ways that Hasbro couldn't (or wouldn't) do, it was actually helping Hasbro sell their original toys.
Weber later quotes Jerry Jivoin who, at that point in the story, was Global Brand Marketing Director for the TransFormers brand. He'd asked Jivoin why Hasbro tolerate Third Parties and what is essentially IP theft, and Jivoin's response sums up the situation perfectly:
"If we're making the right toys, then [Third Parties] don't have a market."
This is an especially astute observation when I look back over the last 20-odd years, because I got back into Capital-C Collecting back in 2003/2004 with Binaltech and MP01: the very quintessence of "the right toys". Now, granted, I bought Takara's rather than Hasbro's... partly because they seemed to be available earlier than their Hasbro counterparts, partly because those counterparts ended up being not as good - Alternators being all plastic, with more limited paintwork, for example.
But these toys were but a gateway drug, and I was soon collecting Energon toys, then Galaxy Force (there, again, I went with Takara's superior paint jobs), then looking back to Armada before being gifted my first year of membership to the (Fun Publications) TransFormers Collectors' Club, and seeing the arrival of the first live action movie in 2007.
For well over a decade, Hasbro were - by and large - making the right toys... Though I frequently spent a little extra to import Takara/Takara Tomy's version until Hasbro forced 'the Unification of World Brands' upon them.
Knockoffs gradually became more prevalent, but also upped their game in terms of quality, eventually reaching a point where they KOs were better - both in terms of build quality and the extent of paintwork - than the official output. Meanwhile, companies like Perfect Effect and FansProject sprang up, at first supplementing existing toys (in those ways that Hasbro tacitly approved), then eventually making their own versions of Hasbro's IPs, with a particular focus on the toys/characters that Hasbro were not producing themselves. Third Party combiners were a thing long before Hasbro took its first, faltering steps back into full-size gestalts after the disappointing, underachieving Energon and Power Core Combiners. Insecticons and Junkions sprung up from Third Parties long before Hasbro deemed them worthy of revisiting and, if you ask me, the Studio Series '86 Junkions, starting with Wreck-Gar in 2021, are essentially cheaper, mass-produced KOs of the KFC Toys Junkions which had emerged about five years before.
And that's one of the most interesting aspects of Hasbro's relationship with Third Party manufacturers: it's so very rare that Hasbro take any lessons from what their competition are doing that something like the SS86 Junkions stand out. They don't look like something Hasbro have produced. Now, granted, the Generations Wreck-Gar from 2011 did something new and different, while also introducing the play value of a robot that can ride the vehicle mode of one of its compatriots. I enjoyed the asymmetry of them... but they were flawed, fussy and, in places, quite fragile. SS86, meanwhile, goes back almost to the original G1 toy - and certainly the G1 animation model - to create something eerily reminiscent of the KFC Toys Masterpiece-analogues, albeit simpler. However, that's still a very isolated case.
Something like Unique Toys' Peru Kill has a fairly simple transformation that - I still maintain, despite the nay-saying of many a fan online - could be downscaled and simplified to create a far more accurate - and potentially far more poseable - Deluxe class interpretation of live action movie Lockdown than even Studio Series provided. In fact, compare and contrast Studio Series #11 Lockdown with Studio Series #93 Hot Rod, and you'll see what I mean. Hot Rod was, perhaps, a little too ambitious with some of its smaller parts, but it did a damn fine job of being a Deluxe class toy, accurate in both vehicle and robot mode, while having excellent articulation and minimal wastage in its backpack. Lockdown, by comparison, had an almost G1-level simplistic transformation, which left it looking clumsy, with the range of motion in its joints hindered by a huge chunk of vehicle shell folded up on its back.
Meanwhile, Hasbro takes a mulligan on the Studio Series #18/#20 Deluxe class Beetle Bumblebee with #116, and it's still hopelessly inaccurate, with most of the vehicle shell concertina'd into its back, yet a Third Party company is able to present a more accurate, better articulated robot mode at approximately half the height of a current Deluxe, and even shorter than a Core class figure... all by following Unique Toys' example of cheating certain details to improve the fluidity of transformation.
Now, obviously, Third Party products that don't obtain a license for the vehicle mode don't have to worry about the vehicle manufacturer freaking out about transformation seams, but Hasbro and Takara Tomy would surely have the experience and the manufacturing precision to minimise such seams?
So, to the real question: Are Hasbro still making the right toys? Or, taking it even further, are they even trying to make the right toys anymore?
For my money, the answer is "certainly not". Legacy was a huge wasted opportunity to fully celebrate the brand's 40th Anniversary, seemingly palmed off on the least audacious designers at Hasbro and Takara Tomy, resulting in a series of extremely dull toys and excessive re-use of clunky, ugly, lazy molds like Skids. Age of the Primes appears to be a simple rebranding of Legacy, with the addition of dull-looking representations of the 13 Primes, each with an ugly, nonsense 'vehicle' mode that carries no visual cues of the robot.
The increased costs, set against the decline in material quality, design and engineering, paintwork, etc. just doesn't work. Why should I pay £25 Hasbro for a Deluxe class toy, £35 for a Voyager, £56 for a Leader, that looks as shoddy as they currently do, might break or discolour within a few weeks, and is discernibly smaller and less intricate than in the days where I could pay £18 for a Deluxe, £25 for a Voyager and £40 for a Leader, when I can pay £75-£100 for a Third Party figure that is substantially better by every metric? And then, in the Masterpiece versus Masterpiece-analogue lines, Hasbro are charging in excess of £150 for figures that seem to be on a par with a 2009/2010 Leader class toy from the movie lines (particularly in terms of their woefully inadequate paintwork), where Third Parties offer things like Red Fantasy for a little less than £100 and Red Dasher for £85. Hypercomplex Masterpiece-analogue figures like Newage Duel (DotM Megatron) are on a par with Hasbro's Titan class, Haslab, MPG and MP Beast Wars offerings at approx £250, which is a far better deal than Hasbro's £55 for the blocky, basic, hollow, underdecorated and undersized Studio Series #34. Frankly, if the Third Parties had the same production runs as Hasbro for their original products, their prices would likely be far closer to those of Hasbro's mass-produced slop.
What's been most interesting - and disappointing, to be fair - is the so-called 'Fourth Party' movement. Where there used to be upscaled and improved versions of Hasbro's Masterpiece toys, they've more recently scaled back to 1:1 reproductions - flat plastic, miserly paintwork and all. Sure, this means you can get a KO MPM Brawl for less than half the price of the real thing, but it has exactly the same incomplete lacklustre paintwork... and even less paintwork for certain elements (the damaged arm, for example). Anecdotally, this appears to be because they've realised that if Hasbro can get away with charging the same - or more - for less effort, that should be perfectly acceptable in a KO.
I had been looking into replacing my 2007 Leader class Brawl - which went missing in transit when I sold it on some years back - with either the Black Mamba Storm Pioneer (the upscaled, better painted Studio Series toy with improved management of its vehicle mode kibble), but now I think I might go with the KO MPM. Bonecrusher, meanwhile, I recently ordered the official MPM figure from Game, who are offering a 50% discount on its RRP. In both cases, I'd have preferred a better paint job... but it seems as though that's no longer on the cards... at least in the foreseeable future.
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