So the dude has no memories, but is still certain that he's cooler than everyone else? Who he may not remember?

What an asshole.

 

But these toys are really no more offensive than the current 1-step, 3-step RID junk that's out there. It's not intended for collector's, so you know there will be an ABUNDANCE of these.

There's the vinegar to your eye: when you can't NOT find these toys, but you're still looking for a Voyager Hungrrr!  

 

It isn't the simplicity that makes these awful, it is the price. These should be $10 toys for what you get.

Hasbro is killing the toy industry by making expensive garbage. Have you seen the new $30 Millennium Falcon? It is an abomination. The max cost of producing that thing is a little over $2 and it winds up being $30 at retail. The $100 Millennium Falcon is a piece of garbage as well. Hasbro added some LED lights and a small vibrating motor to a $25 toy and thinks that warrants an extra $75 at retail.

Don't claim "increased labor or materials" when you can buy a motorized tank with real tracks that has lights, sounds, a firing weapon, and a 12 point articulated GI Joe knockoff figure for $35 at Toys R Us. If Hasbro made that thing, they'd put a $299 retail price on it like the AT-AT that sat on the shelf for three years and couldn't even move at $99.

 

Also, he's YELLOW.

Kids like primary colors. They are attracted to BRIGHT COLORS.

Any other character could be as popular? Maybe a Huffer or Hubcap; not so much a dark-blue Soundwave or Megatron.

Ironically, this is the same sentiment I have for movie-line figures: why the f*ck are they shades of bland gray, brown, and black???   As soon as Bruticus comes around in his G2 colors, fans are giddy to mock the bright colors and dub him "Fruiticus"!   I don't know what happens between childhood and adulthood, but apparently bright colors become a thing of absolute shame. Don't believe me? Go buy a car!   Unless you shell out some big bucks for a sports car or hybrid, your color choices are: gray, darker gray, gray with specks of gray, white, or black. Literally. There are at least THREE choices of gray per car!   WHY????

 

Hasbro is charging more overhead, though. They want you to pay for failed products, and the poorly-placed marketing/commercials for these things. Then you have to remember how large Hasbro is: they have a myriad of executives (all paid a high salary) to manage everything (badly).

So, in essence, you're correct about the TRUE HEROES stuff being superior in most ways; the difference is that Hasbro is a bloated MEGA-CORPORATION with a lot of redundancy in its operations. You are definitely going to pay for that, and since such a thing as copyright and patent exist, they're technically the only company to buy these things from!

 

I dont understand why people like 30 or more years old say "Oh, looks so bad" and they cant see that are TOYS FOR KIDS. They have a two mods, gimmick, some have lights or sounds and some are tiny to play with a lot and others are big to play like, i dont know, monsters. Are toy, and are funny for kids, no for adults.
When you are an adult who buys toys and complains that other toys do not meet your expectations, you look like a child, but at the same time you do not act like that, because children have fun and that's it. Do not you remember how you were at five or six years old?
Anyway, Shockwave looks perfect for my legion of Cyclopes, and I think I want a Screamer, but the Warrior does not seem to articulate his knees.

 

I suppose it all depends where you are and what the local demographic is. I dont think i've ever seen another lone adult looking at the Transformers in a store, just parents with their kids. I checked out what was left in my local TRU. All the kid aimed figures had gone, but still more than a few TR and TLK leaders, loads of wave TLK voyagers and Last Knight exclusives, and the same Titan Masters that have been there for months. Oh and Masterpiece Bumblebee and the G1 movie anniversary Platinum edition sets. My nearest Smyths had loads of the same w1 TLK voyager and wave 2 deluxes last time i was in there, but barely any RID stuff left.

Except the vast majority of parents are not fans of whatever franchise they're buying, they just want to buy the character their kids ask for and aren't all going to fork out £65 on a leader class figure.

 

G1 were toys for kids. G2, Beast Wars, RID, Armada etc. All excellent toys for kids.

Stop making excuses for trash.

 

These are obviously for very young kids.

Stop making trash excuses.

 

Hmmm? I Like the box art work. But we need a trailer.

 

Oh yes, The throttlebots that you cant move because no articulations, no arms and no legs, or BW with an animal on back that the fans says "no, giant backpack is trash", or Armada some toys cants move legs correctly. Or, Animated toys, A line of toys very good in engineering but that adults did not like for being caricatured. Make no mistake, some adult fans tend to change the arguments in relation to what suits them.

 

That's true.
It doesn't bother me so much anymore, but at first I felt the movie designs were very boring color wise. Especially the Decepticons.

 

Transformers is for kids & the older fans. Transformers Animated had it just right. It was for kids & older fans. It was a mix. Lets hope Cyberverse can do that?

 

I think one of the problems with debates like this is that adults assume that kids have no taste.

Kids are critical. They have opinions about things. Think back to your childhood. Did you really not care about the qualities of your toys? Of course you did. In fact, as a kid, these small meaningless things were much MORE important to us.

I'm an original 80s kid. I wanted my toys to look cool. I wanted them to have at least a bare minimum level of articulation. I wanted them to have convincing alt-modes and distinct robot modes (and ideally, a nice quick, clean transformation between them). I liked having a variety of colours. Not just BRIGHT colours, but also rich colours, realistic colours, dark colours, etc...

Why do I collect modern Transformers? In most cases, it's because the Transformers as we have them now are the toys I always wanted as a kid (or close to it).

THESE Cyberverse toys? Too soon to say, but based on the pictures, 8-year-old SMOG would have given that a disapproving thumbs-down. 

I think there's a recurring misconception that "more articulation and better alt modes" is the same thing as "overly complicated and inappropriate for children"... which is nonsense. We have legends-class figures that can deliver decent alt-modes and worthwhile articulation. There's no reason we can't scale that up.

And what about old classic figures like (a personal fave) G2 Laser Prime? That one is an awesome rugged toy truck, a distinct awesome robot with articulation almost on part with current Voyagers, and can be transformed back and forth by small hands in a matter of seconds. Have we lost the ability to make stuff like that, which can appeal to BOTH young kids and adult collectors?

While I disagree with your point about kids and bright colours (especially the abusive presence of Bumblebee yellow on shelves for the past 10 years), I'll agree with you about the movie-line figures, and that assortment of utterly banal, ugly, boring grey plastics they've been throwing at us. Man, I am so sick of that colour.

Don't get me wrong... colours are great. But you want some nice variety, rather than just hammering on YELLOW and other primaries constantly. There's a very large palette of colours to choose from - amping up the chroma is not always the best result.  

Also, trying to assert that "dark" characters like Soundwave, Megatron, Skywarp, and others like them 'aren't popular' with kids is not going to get you far. In my experience, those are some of the most beloved and iconic characters of that era; Snake-Eyes... Cobra Commander... Destro... Skeletor... Darth Vader... Boba Fett... Batman...

 
zmog

 

These are really growing on me design-wise, really think kids might like them. And the mid-transformation quick changers are kitschy enough that they seem fun and celebratory of the characters.
Looking forward to how the warriors line grows though. That's my preferred size class style. But the Aux side stuff looks fun, and I really like how that Grimlock, Prime, and Megatron turned out.

Bumblebee doesn't seem like the best version yet, but with him being the star of the show, he'll likely get a ton of new versions along the way to pick from.

And much of G1 toys didn't survive to present day. And very few had any articulation at all, they broke rather regularly which is why original complete intact molds have high aftermarket(nor did many look like the toon which a lot of us complained about as kids, yes I know the toys came first, but kids want media accuracy to what they are watching). Early BW had a lot of spring stretching and breakage too. BW didn't really get good until Transmetals and some of the best selling of those were simpler than these like TM Cheetor. Armada had its fair share of issues as well and was heavily gimmick-laden too(Blurr had no leg articulation plus despite what Archer had said about the line never needing minicons to transform a normal figure to robot mode, same as wheeljack and a few others could only be transformed with a minicon, DLX prime had articulation but details stopped it from working on the upper legs, original Hotshot was simpler than even these, Scavenger was a giant brick, smokescreen was even simpler than these, same to Hoist), old RID was half new and half re-released recolored old stuff. NuRID was actually pretty good, but it also took time for the line to prove itself before they gave it a bigger budget, oh, and some of the best sellers of NuRID were the gimmick figures that appealed to kids. That's not to say those lines didn't have their standout good figures too, but they weren't as plentiful as you seem to suggest.

So...

Kind of applies to your examples. You might want to take off the nostalgia shades. These are about on par to those, with the only exception being a handful of Old RID, Cybertron, and NuRID. Which considering this is only the early releases, give it some time to get some wider figures out still.

These even include some of the best features of those. Prime with matrix revealing action would have been awesome as a kid to have. That grimlock is all kinds of fun looking. Megatron with massive transforming cannon looks fun too. It's like G1 and Animated had a love child, and I think the toys might really grow into that combined aesthetic over time as a celebratory line.

Though yeah, I kind of have to agree on Warrior class Bumblebee, but like I said, I'm pretty sure we'll get many versions of him over the course of the line with different action features. Early on they do kind of have to avoid spoilers.

Fans tend to whine non-stop about anything new or different, then later praise it. Been true for almost every series. Some of the loudest whining happening during Animated and it ended up being one of the most loved series made yet outside of the original, and animated had some of the best toys. Even it had some simplified for kids approaches and gimmicks. (Gravity Drop prime, Supreme class prime.) The whining and hyperbole is about as old as the fandom itself, yet every time later lines get praised or missed and used as a comparison to demean whatever the newest thing is. Rinse, recycle, repeat.

Worked for Rainbow Dash and her popularity.

 

Again with the excuses. “Such and such toy from the 80s/90s didn’t last forever therefore we must make them blobs of plain plastic now”

Okay  

 

Offtopic: matte black cars are beautiful.
I got a CW G2 Briticus some time ago, he looks cool in-hand.

 

''Picture this: Me, on Earth, still cooler than everyone this side of Optimus Prime, but I’ve got zero memories. Now I’m on a mission to recover my memories and discover all of my awesome powers. I’ll have to battle Decepticons, outrun an explosion or two, and be heroic- basically, I’m in for one epic ride across the Cyberverse. -Bumblebee''
Um...is Bumblebee the Goku of Transformers?

 

Lol. We survived those dangerous G1 toys.

 

Perspective. Things were waaaaay different back then.

That's because from our perspective, the best of our 30 year old kids toys seemed much more like a serious effort or feel in comparison. Although the articulation was crap and the toys were highly fragile, the original toys typically had tech specs written by a Marvel writer, realistic alt modes, rubber tires, no day-glo bright colors, guns and missile launchers. As unthinkable as that sounds, those were for kids. Sounds like an adult toyline, right?

In our eyes, these newest toys look like Playskool-level figures. Imagine if Generations was the ONLY TF toyline? No Rescue Bots and no Cyberverse? Little kids have to buy the things designed for the slightly older boys. There was no "dumbed down" version of G.I. Joe for little kids. If they liked watching Duke and Snake Eyes, they had to buy those detailed ARAH figures and vehicles--the only G.I. Joe toyline. That's where we were at.