Wouldn't RID Megatron in hand mode be the first fully articulated hand in Transformers?

 

Hun-gerrr, super posable for the time.

 

I didn't know Aaron was watching ToQger! I watched it last year and really liked it. I almost, ALMOST went on a similar spree on DX Resshas, but I just bought the mini-pla.

 

I can't speak for Wreckage, since I've never handled one and don't even remember him, but for me the pinnacle of articulation from the '07 movie - and one of the all-time most poseable Transformers ever, really - is Preview Optimus. You know, the giant gray space spermatozoa. That guy is on par with what one expects from most modern non-transforming action figures.

 

G1 Venom has pretty well articulated legs.

 

G1 Articulation: Don't forget Omega Supreme's arms, with his non-existent leg articulation it's easy to forget that he had great shoulders and elbows. A lot of G1 had elbows prior to the Headmaster era, like most of the Autobot cars.

Movie 1 era: Protoform Prime and Landmine, one of the first and one of the last, each were pretty amazing for their time. Wreckage probably defines the line overall (like maybe Concept Camaro BB), but Landmine was the standout and was often compared to Classics Mirage at the time, possibly due to the overall balance in addition to the articulation, but either way it was impressive.

 

Vangelus, how could you forget Reveal the Shield Laser Optimus Prime for possibility from that era? He's the best non 3rd party sword wielding Transformer ever.

 

without the "movie money" I think Powercore Combiners would have been the mainline of 2010.

also Animated may very well have lasted until 2010 without ROTF there to abort it.

 

I can definitely see Animated having run for another season or two than it did. Especially since no movie money would have meant that Hasbro wouldn't have the capital and/or impetus to create The Hub.

 

Hmm.. no love for Human Alliance Bumblebee or Jazz?

 

Also the Longarm Prime/Shockwave review was my first Vangelus review and I still believe in Longarm Prime!

 

What a amazing ep!

I loved the MP Ironhide segment the best.
I also enjoyed when beast wars figures came up.

More beast wars discussion! Maybe a blast from the past segment in future eps?!

 

One thing that we should remember about the '07 Movie line was that at the time, even Hasbro didn't think it was going to go anywhere. The line originally only had product for a few waves, and what they did have they didn't produce in large numbers because they didn't figure the movie was going to be THAT popular. Have we already forgotten how there was a few months were there was literally no product hitting the shelves because the factories were not turning them out fast enough?
Anyway, that's why we got the All Spark repaint line and had several repainted toys that were original earmarked for a form of "classics" line used as exclusives to fill the gaps.
With that in mind, I think after a failed '07 Movie line, we would have had a repaint heavy "classics" line as a stop gap till Animated (probably going under it's original "Heroes" name) showed up. After that I'm not sure. Someone suggested Powercore might have happened, but the aesthetics on that, and the Universe 2.0 line had major influence from the movie. So, if they had happened, I don't think they would look like they did.

 

for g1, snapdragon had some of the best articulation for sure. Only really missing head motion. Shoulders, elbows, hips and double jointed knees

 

I got back into Transformers at the VERY end of Energon, but I definitely agree with Energon Landmine - though I prefer the white/brown "Landquake" recolor. I never got Sprung/Bulkhead (no kidding, what an awful name!), but Landquake/mine was superb for Energon. For Cybertron, I'm with you, Vangelus - I think I prefer Megatron to Optimus, but holy crap, they're both so awesome. That was such a fun line to collect! I like Crosswise/Autovolt, but I think as far as Deluxes, I think Hot Shot was a little easier to pose. Oh man, I sold a lot of mine a long time ago, and now I want them back!

Movie 1: Wreckage lacked bicep swivels. That always bugged me. Hate to say it, but I think I'd have to say Concept Camaro Bumblebee.

Animated: I never had the Optimus, but Prowl and Rodimus were amazing. Rodimus is still one of my favorite toys, so I'm biased.

Movie 2: Oh man, I love your description of Mixmaster. IT'S SO TRUE! I'd like to give a shout out to Lockdown, but it's hard to really vote for him because his ball joints like to pop off and it's really frustrating. Aside from Leader Prime, Sidearm Sideswipe is another honorable mention.

After that, Evasion Mode Prime for me. Scorn is awesome, too.

Prime line... FE Cliffjumper comes to mind, and the normal Vehicon. I never got the FE Starscream, so I can't comment, but the Voyager one is also excellent. I'm a fan.

06/Universe Classics: Yep, Mirage. No thigh swivels, but you don't even notice. He was SO easy to pose. I feel SO DUMB for talking crap about him at prototype stage.

Generations/RTS: Galvatron!! No, I'm kidding. Um, Tracks and Jazz come to mind... I think Jazz was more posable. OH! And DRIFT! Holy crap, I LOVE Drift - he's so much fun to pose. They really put effort into being able to hold his sword with two hands, and being able to cross-draw his smaller ones.

CW: It's hard to argue with Rook. I was about to say Hot Spot, but you talked me out of it.

That was fun!

 

My question was to help with a research paper detailing the change in design of Transformers over time. For the primary research, I had to find a way to measure the range of motion for every joint in a figure and combine those numbers into one number that represents a figures posability. It took 48 hours to develop a formula that could do this for just 16 figures. I have no idea if it worked or not, but let me tell you, measuring the degrees of movement of ball joints is not fun. i then had to adjust the numbers based on the type of joint. Obviously, a theigh swivel that has 360 degrees of motion is not better than a hip ratchet that has 180 degrees forward and back and 90 degreesto the side. 360 vs 270 does not accurately represent how much those joints contribute to the posibility. To correct this, I had to standardize the different joint types data sets into a single data set with the same Standard deviation. doing this makes all these numbers, which were all in the low thousands, into ugly decimals floating somewhere between -1 and 1 with a few outliers. To make these back into nice numbers to look at, I added 5 to the yucky number and then mulitplied by 100. This gave me mostly the 3 digit whole numbers I wanted with a few 4 digits as well. Then came a branch. I could take these numbers (one for each joint in each figure) and then sum them. You could also divide them by joint total at this point to get a measure of how good their joints are compared to each other. THe other path at the branch is to try to weight based on the importance of the joint. The other choice gives you a total that treats an amazing shoulder joint as being on the same level as something like Combiner Wars FIrefly's shoulder hinge for the arm mode. I felt that that didnt work. As a result, I decided to weight things such as hips, heads, shoulders, elbows, knees as all being the core joints and recieving a x4 weighting. Next came the other joints that are very nice to have, but dont on their own drastically alter the overall pose like a shoulder or knee. THese include biceps, waists, thighs, wrists and such. I personally think a waist joint is completely unecessary and I never feel that it adds much. I know others might disagree and I mentioned that in my paper. I think that a diagram joint is one of the sexiest joints ever, but doesn't typially fit on a Transformer. Things like generations scoop's toe articlualtion fit either as a x1 or a x.5. Things like Stockades finger joint are definately a .5 because honestly, I've had him since I was a kid when he first came out and I didnt know he had finger articulation until I examined him for this paper. After you weight the joints, you then add them together and get a sum total. For all of the figures I did this too, I got a 5 digit whole number (after rounding). I like 4 digits, so I divided by ten for all of them. As before, you can also divide the total by the number of joints to get a comparison of the average quaility of each joint, but with the weighting, this becomes a bit pointless. I did it and got a bunch of numbers that were on thousand and... some varying hundreds digit. I didn't find that comparble enough, so I multiplied by 10 and subtracted 10,000. THis was done without dividing the weighted sum by 10 before dividing by the joint total as mentioned before. Its a complicated system and I am not the type to try t reduce things to one number, but for the sake of the paper I had to. I figured that some of you guys might find this intresting so I thought I'd share.
In regards to the incompleteness of the list. Yeah, its pretty bad. Sending in thatquestion was the first thing I did, because I wanted it to get answered before my papers due date came up. Because of that, it was pretty rushed and sadly isn't really usable for my paper. I am a Unicron trilogy kid so most my experience of pre Armada is a huge mass of knowledge on G1 (gotta love what it all came from),ownership of two Beast Wars 10th figures, and a few viewings of heavly edited episodes of Beast Machines and Beast Wars off from Hasbro's website back around 2005 or so. In other words, its not much. I always forget that RID existed and I know very little about the beast era and G2. however, I do have a love affair with g2 bruticus, and plan on spending the rest of my ramen noodle budget on the g2 superion Combiner wars box set. The rotf/dotm/aoe thing was fixed by time I started doing the research and I had a good laugh when I realized that I had put those as one. In the final paper, articulation is not the only focus. I am including approximate piece count, the number of colors of plastic in the toy (I am putting major focus into analyzing everything I can find that relates to the mold breakdown aspect of the design process. I noticed the mold color breakdown at the bottom of the designers desk thing in the combiner wars packin comics. Obviously, parts count is an important thing when it comes to the cost of making a figure and can limit the other things hasbro/takara can put in the figure. However, the part I didnt know was that its not just parts count, but the entirity of the mold breakdown. THis includes not just how many total parts, but also what plstic colors are used in each mold. This led me to wonder if Hasbro/takara design the molds and the color layouts of a figure to work with all the planned redecos and such. When they planned and created the plastic color layout of alpha bravo, did they make those decisions based off the plastic color layouts of blades and vortex? ALso, the more I learn about this, the combiner wars seems less suprising in its remolding and reuse. My theory is that in preporation for combiner wars, they designed a universal deluxe design that they then basicly made a bunch of copies of and then CADed them into their different forms. If you look at these figures, they are all the same layout and basic transformation ideas. Legs one end, torso and body form middle or other side, some big part of the vehicle (typically a peice that forms the other end of the vehicle), and the arms form the sides of the vehicle. We all know this though. I mention this here so that I can add what I have noticed in my analysis for writing this paper. I analyzed Firefly and Air Raid and I noticed that they both use very few plastic colors. They also both have realtively low parts counts, but Cybertron Hot shot still had approximately less. Looking at these toys very closely I found that the thing that I find most impressive about the combiner wars toys as a whole is the increible use of paint. I think FIrefly is one of the sexiest things I have ever seen, but take his paint off (which compared to older deluxes he does not have that much of, and hes really pretty ugly. COmbiner wars seemed to make a change in the focus of the design process by puting less into making unique toys and put a lot of effort into making the toys increibly attractive. These toys are all very simular, but there were more lookers in 2015 than ever. I feel there was the role of making it look good has shifted from the hands of the engineers more onto the hands of the people in charge of aestetics. I wonder if I am right about some form of universal concept being created before individual toys, than maybe that gave Hasbro more time to put effort into the looks and aestithics of the toys. Not having to start from scrap each tiime but still having the same time to design it could be responsible for why these figures look so good and why they use their paint so perfectly.
This probably is too long and out of place. This is my first post on TFW2005 and I planned on lurking for a lot longer so that I could kinda learn how to do it without bothering others or being annoying, but my question came up and I started talking about the thing I love and once that floodgate opens, few things can close it. This is probably so long nobodies gonna read it anyways so oh well. Those are my thoughts and Im gonna go back into lurk mode so that I do this better next time. Thanks if you read this!