Hasbro PulseCon 2021 Post-Mortem

OK, this is quite a bit later than intended, but I ended up watching Hasbro PulseCon Day 1, live, and almost in its entirety... And, as a TransFormers fan, I can honestly say that I was excited by the Power Rangers reveals (John Warden's new gig). And the Ghostbusters reveals, to be fair.

The TransFormers segment - which lasted about 50 minutes - kicked off with a brief lead-in from Anthony Ramos, star of the forthcoming Rise of the Beasts movie, who turns out to be a Beast Wars fan himself. As an aside, it always makes me feel so old whenever I learn of people who discovered TransFormers via Beast Wars... but Ramos' enthusiasm at least seemed pretty genuine. I'm a little concerned that the film is going to be an absolute mess, but will reserve judgement till the trailers arrive, so I can make a decision over whether or not to bother seeing it.

Studio Series #75 Jolt

It doesn't surprise me in the least that it's taken seventy four other toys - most of more prominent or popular characters from the live action movie franchise - before Hasbro finally got round to their third attempt at Jolt. The character seemed to have been hastily edited into Revenge of the Fallen, as an afterthought, in certain shots only, had barely any dialogue (none that couldn't be attributed to another character), took no active part in any battles... and yet somehow became key to preparing Optimus Prime for his final battle with The Fallen. Without fanfare, Ratchet simply called out "Jolt, electrify!" and his whole raison d'être was made clear.

And this is the problem when your whole movie franchise is built on little more than deals made with vehicle manufacturers. If they have a car they want to promote, it'll have to be shoehorned in somehow, logic and narrative coherence be damned.

Nevertheless, he was in the movie... Hasbro's previous attempts at Jolt weren't great, so let's see if it's a case of "third time's the charm", or if this is just another forgettable robot, from a forgettable film, made out of a forgettable car.

DNA Design DK-18 SS-56 Upgrade Kits

DNA Design have produced some truly excellent upgrade kits for the Studio Series line, though most are for figures I've not bothered picking up, or just don't quite add enough justify the expense to me, personally. I've yet to write up the first two kits I bought, for Studio Series Grimlock and Ironhide, despite them both offering substantial improvements over the stock figure. I'll get around to them eventually, I'm sure, but this one for Studio Series Shockwave - which I'd been eagerly waiting on for since its announcement around the middle last year - really earnt its swift write-up.

I finally received notification of despatch in the early part of this month, from which point it was almost two full weeks before it arrived from China. Now that I finally have it in-hand, let's see how big a deal it turned out to be after so long a wait.

Buzzworthy Bumblebee/Worlds Collide Blackarachnia

(Femme-Bot Friday #78)

The Buzzworthy Bumblebee line has become a source of seemingly never-ending puzzlement for me. Quite apart from the fact that Hasbro still insist on pushing Bumblebee as somehow central to the TransFormers brand - perhaps moreso than either Optimus Prime or Megatron - they have created a whole new toyline whose express purpose is to put as many different versions of that single character on the shelves, and they somehow fail to see a problem with that.

But then, not content with shoehorning perfectly good Beast Wars reboot toys into yet another of their interminable ostensibly G1-rebooting toylines, they've created a Buzzworthy Bumblebee boxed set that takes two Kingdom beastformers and jams them in with a five-years-late Titans Return toy and a repaint of Earthrise Cliffjumper as Bumblebee, even though there was a perfectly good, dedicated Bumblebee mold in the War for Cybertron Trilogy line (released as a Walmart exclusive in the US, but seemingly more widely available in other territories) which they could have used.

Then again, this is the same company that made both a Bug Bite and a Shattered Glass Goldbug out of the Cliffjumper mold, neatly missing the point of the choice of molds used in the predecessors.

So. Worlds Collide: a Buzzworthy Bumblebee boxed set, exclusive to Walmart in the States (availability in the UK still to be confirmed) comprising Nemesis Primal (a character who did not appear in the Netflix show, and who may be Nemesis Prime cosplaying as Optimus Primal or Optimus Primal corrupted by Unicron), Fangry (a Titans Return retooling that was seemingly - and bafflingly - the main draw of this set for many fans), the aforementioned Bumblejumper (or would this be Cliffbee?) and a reworking of Kingdom Blackarachnia based upon the the appearance of the original Beast Wars Blackarachnia's toy.

As you can imagine 75% of this set was of zero interest to me... and when reports of the QC problems - ranging from insanely loose legs on Fangry to insanely tight arms on Nemesis Primal - emerged, I felt my lack of interest was vindicated. Naturally, though, those gullible fools who bought the set for just one of the figures started splitting it up and trying to make back their money via the secondary market. While I found one UK seller looking to offload his Blackarachnia, their Buy It Now price was seriously over the odds (approx. half the price of importing the full set from the US, with UK shipping on top of that? Seriously?) and they declined my offer (approx. one third the price of importing the full set from the US, so pretty fair, I thought). Thankfully, I found a couple of US sellers offering a much more reasonable price (slightly higher than a standard Deluxe) and with acceptable costs via eBay PackLink shipping, and so I snapped her up.

And so, coincidentally exactly nine months after I wrote about the Kingdom toy, here she is!

TransFormers Legacy: already a joke

So, Hasbro have chosen to pre-empt their own online PulseCon event - running Friday 22nd to Saturday 23rd October - by revealing a couple of toys from the upcoming TransFormers Legacy toyline: new versions of Skids (from G1) and Bulkhead (from TF Prime). It's a bold move... but also means they can get a feel for the fan reaction without their own servers being bombarded.

Call me a cynic, but I think that might be the main reason... Because, if these two toys are representative of what TransFormers Legacy is going to be, Hasbro have pretty much lost me as a customer.

Brian Goldner, Hasbro CEO, dies aged 58

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."