That made me chuckle.  

 

Jazz was supposed to play a big part in Season 3, unfortunately Scatman died.

 

What killed the TF line is the same thing that killed the GI Joe line. People in charge!!! The ones that make desicions. Who in the hell wants to see lime green and florecent orange GI Joe stuff and stupid colored TFs? I blame the powers that be.

 

Well said. Damn well said.

 

That's EXACTLY how I felt.

 

Yup.

 

You ain't lyin'. I used to wish for Galvatron to crush Rodimus Prime and rip the Matrix from his shell.

 

The new transformers didn't work as good for me.

I lost intrest. I still watched it every now and then but i watched the reruns for the first two years more.

Nintendo and ninja turtles took thier place.

I think hasbro messed up by not putting the new transformers in the show before the movie.

If kids knew kup or blur before the film came out they would've liked them more.

Plus we didn't get the cool target 2006 comic tie-in the uk got that made the movie look like it was part of the comics universe.

I didn't get to see the film untail AFTER prime came back to life, so i didn't get the shock of his death you guys did.

Kids at school told me about it anyways so i knew about it anyways.

 

I don't think it's the movie that killed G1. If it did, why would they have bothered putting out an anniversary edition of it? What I think brought about the end of G1 was that everyone lost interest in it. Perhaps it had something to do with those "Rebirth" episodes?

 

I think Hasbro did a poor job of trying to follow trends rather than focus on what the core competency of Transformers is -- i.e. robots that change from one mode to another. I don't have sales data of different lines to do comparisons of the success of different lines, but I doubt that head/target/power masters were a failure by any stretch. Perhaps they didn't sell as well as G1, but they were probably successful. I really think the decline became much more pronounced as they moved further and further away from the "robots changing from one mode to another". Hasbro became trend followers trying to capitalize on the success of Micro Machines and other more traditional action figures like TMNT which were gaining in popularity. These trends, however, didn't work very well with the core of what makes Transformers great -- "robots changing from one mode to another".

It took them a while, but they seem to have figured it out. During the beast era at least some of the demographic information must have said that kids were into bugs, animals, and dinosaurs -- not vehicles -- so Hasbro found a way to make that work for Transformers. Then, as someone mentioned they tried bringing back vehicles because the data probably indicated kids would react favorably to that -- obviously this is something Transformers is very good at. Finally, they capitalized on the "gotta catch 'em all" mentality of kids in the early part of this decade by coming up with the minicon gimmick.

So, I don't think it was the movie that nearly killed the line per se, but more the move away from what made giant transforming robots great -- the fact that they are transforming robots -- and not dolls with robots inside, bases for micro machine-like vehicles, etc.