i admit my imagination is bad, so every time i watch transfomers episode first to study the moves then i watch it again to play with the transformers toys because i cant recreate from my memory,

has anyone here relied on the show to play their toys, not when it first comes on like rewatching the rerun episodes to play with them?

 

I don't know about actually playing with them like we did as kids, but there are many who "play" with them by staging fights, scenes, and whatnot in displays. Either that, or recreating scenes for gifs/video using the toys. So, when it comes to those things listed- yes, people rely on the show.

if you go on Youtube, there are people who play by making stop motion videos using the toys, and they deviate from the source material more  

 

Nope. Never did. Obviously I used the personalities from the show. But the show was never required for play.

In fact, I delighted more often in the characters with the least exposure. These were the times I could imprint my own ideas on the toys, based on the tech specs, rather than confine myself to show expectations. In almost every scenario, I'd kill off Rodimus Prime because the show made him out to be a worthless leader...and the replacement was ALWAYS more interesting. When I was younger, a friend of mine and I used the white Prime in Ultra Magnus as the leader (the trailer was a power-up mode). When I got older, another friend and I made Rapido the leader of the Autobots.

 

I didn't. But one of my friends circa 1986 wouldn't play with or allow anyone to play with toys of any character that died in the movie  

 

HOLY SHIT my cousin used to do stuff like this. Not just Transformers either, if a character died in a later game he would FLIP if you tried to pick them, that type of stuff, used to drive me nuts.

 

I don't remember ever really playing with my toys based on stuff from the shows I watched when I was a kid. I mean watching the Unicron Trilogy did make me want to buy toys of the characters I thought were cool, but I don't think I ever tried to recreate scenes from what I saw.

 

I didn't. At first the cartoon was not shown so I did not know the backstory to Transformers and had to make up my own story and later when I saw the cartoon I had virtually no character from the show.

 

With Beast Wars I usually played it straight, but GIJoe was a totally different story. I had a gang of Crimson Guards who had a spy agency and drove around in a Sgt Savage jeep fighting a giant talking Velociraptor, all the Joes were idiots, Hydro Viper was a chupacabra, etc. I gave the non show Beast Wars characters their own personalities of course, but the show bots stayed the same.

 

Nope, I've always been a creative person. As a kid most of my favorite figures weren't even on the Beast Wars tv show.

 

The only scene that I ever recreated was the 1986 fight between Optimus and Megatron, but I used Cybertron Optimus and Energon Megatron because they were the best versions of each character that I had at the time.

 

I 100% ABSOLUTELY need the cartoons to incorporate with the toys. I wouldn't have the slightest clue what the characters personalities would be like otherwise. I don't have a creative bone in my body.

 

I watched the show and incorporated the characters personality into my toys but I don't recall ever staging plots directly from the cartoon all that often. I've always been more into coming up with my own ideas.

 

Well, I rarely had enough Transformers figures, but when I managed to get DOTM Starscream for Christmas and DOTM Ratchet, Sideswipe, Barricade, and Shockwave (in addition to DOTM Bumblebee and Fireburst Optimus Prime). I kept recreating scenes from the movies. When I got FOC Soundwave, I loved recreating the fight scene between Bumblebee and Soundwave from DOTM, and I also liked recreating Grimlock's transformation sequence from FOC with his AOE figure. These days, most of my figures stay on their shelves, while I do always have a Bumblebee figure in hand to play around with. Occasionally I bring down a few to pose with him, but I rarely, if ever, try to imitate a specific scene anymore. I just use my imagination to find a decent pose for them to stand in until I pick them up and play with them again.

 

Not really. The shows are good enough on their own. When I used to stage battles they tended to be like the Bay films, just mindless destruction until only a few were left.

 

I became a fan with the 2007 movie so those were the toys I had started out with at 13, but that was around the age I began to not play as much anymore. I didn't know about any previous shows or movies at the time even though Animated was about to start so whenever I did play I just used whatever my imagination could come up with and went with it lol

 

I play in two ways, I play with my son which normally involved my most powerful Transformers laying waist to his little city of play sets, or I make my photo comic (links in sig).

 

I used to play like this a lot too, but as I got older a friend and I discovered the magic of home movies. We would use GI Joes and Transformers for "special effects" which usually involves jump cuts to like, a GI Joe hanging onto a remote control car as we provided voice overs, or a transformer used with the smaller Joe's as a "giant mecha," and our favorite, strapping model rocket engines to one of the huge electronic bugs from Starship Troopers!

Model rockets were probably the thing that pushed me away from toys come to think of it. One time we filmed a scene with a "jet pack" which was two rockets attached to the 12" Destro figure (the metal mask protects your face!) and it turned out to be pretty incredible. He really looked like he was flying towards the camera and angling away at the last second. We had to tell our parents he was tied to a string so they didn't realize we were routinely almost killing ourselves.

One time we had a "bomb" set to go off in an "abandoned building" (they had built the foundation of a house next door, then stopped when they ran out of money, it was an incredible film set) so I rigged up some model rocket engines, a lighter, some matches and toilet paper all soaked in kerosene In a tiny Pringles mini-can. We lit the fuse and ran upstairs to the porch next door to film it, thinking it would just flare up and poof. Half way up the stairs we hear an earth shaking BOOM - as we step outside we can see the giant fireball reaching taller than the house. The amount of smoke was mind blowing, and how police or fire never showed up still baffles me to this day. Everyone thought it was just a couple smoke bombs because we managed to miss filming anything but the copious amounts of smoke billowing out of the hole in the ground. Ah childhood, back when a robot could be a gun and a child could blow his hand off without big government trying to "protect" us from powerful explosives triggered by the tiniest of sparks. Good times.

 

During the Cybertron era, the toy only characters still has really solid interesting toy bios and characterization so I never needed to do anything unique or different.