Exactly! It was one of those double purpose figures FunPub threw at us like SG Wheeljack / Classics Slicer or SG Tracks / Classics Road Rage.

 

Fubpub was quite fond of those, gave you more incintive to get it, but I thought it hindered some figures a lot IMO. Shattered Glass Galvatron is a good example of that IMO. He’s designed to be G1 Galvatron, and looks like such, robbing SG Galvatron of having a unique colorscheme.

Like this. (Unicron of Light colors.)

 

I lovee these arts. Especially Demolishor.

 

I want Archer back. I miss back when creative visionaries would reinvent and innovate the brand. nowadays all we have are talentless hacks who constantly rehash 1984

 

Famn that looks great, I really want another larger Armada Starscream figure.

 

I don’t know about that. CW gave us the 1986 combiners we’ve waited so long to get. TR gave us Headmasters after all this time. We’re finally getting things we’ve been asking for for years. Aaron did some great stuff. A lot of great stuff. But to call the new guys hacks is really harsh. Sometimes you have to move on and let the new guys do their thing.

 

Im not talking about Generations. Im talking about the cartoons and tie in merch for those. what is supposed to be the Main Line focus. Beast wars, the UT, Animated, Prime and Bay films had wildly different design aesthetics. and new characters.

we have 5 different lines right now and all of the characters, and designs are flavors of Geewun.
Generations, Cyberverse, Cyber Battalion, Authentics, and Masterpiece.

Archer gave us something unique every couple of years.

 

The difference between them and now is that Generations is now the MAIN line. I agree about the cartoons though.

Animated is what really started the G1 reinvigoration. All shows after it were basically “G1 except a different esthetic and a few changed up or new characters”.

 

starscream from middle to the end of that show, is what I enjoyed. he didnt turn out so bad in the end. and proved he wasnt a coward, faced up Galvatron and sadly in the end got blasted down by unircron./ or sideways... still a honorable swordsbot he is, and the great jet fiqure if i can recall, his minicon gimic, and that sword from his wing, and those laser cannons  

 

His tenure was certainly a mixed bag. He never really "got" TransFormers though and it showed, especially in his early work. A lot of Armada figures didn't only lack articulation, they didn't function properly (joints that made no sense, parts that are way too large forming parts that should be small, etc) and they looked bad. Not just goofy or different, but bad. Sideswipe, Smokescreen, Hot Shot, Thrust, etc all suffer from this. They looked like they were designed and produced in 5 minutes, which we hand't seen since mid-G2. Add Hasbro's corner cutting on paint and their ridiculous random name reuse and you have a line that failed to meet it's potential and doesn't have the legacy today it could have had. The concept was sound, and certainly some of the features were fun, but features don't leave the lasting impression that good fiction and art does. It's on display in our fandom right now. The reason we are still G1 dominated is twofold - that is the core of what TF is and always will be because it came first like it or not, and second we have never gotten anything that could rival it except maybe Beast Wars which is still in continuity anyway. Armada and it's throwaway continuity are largely forgotten except for most small TF's being branded "Mini-Cons" (another example of the ignorance at the brand back then - if you want a true third faction, using -bot or -con completely defeats the purpose and and destroys 16 years of brand synergy in one moment).

That said, the trilogy got progressively better on the toy side and Cybertron was a great toyline. Largely forgotten again because of the careless cheap treatment of the fiction. So he did improve over time in some regards. We never went back to the Armada level of bad, which speaks to how bad it was probably even in his eyes. The efforts of Alternators and Classics were nice, but the first was a poorly planned disaster and the second not ambitious enough as is clear today.

Keep in mind no single person can really be held to the fire at a huge mega corporation like Hasbro. There are likely tons of things he wanted done differently for the better, while at the same time there are other mistakes he would have made if someone else hadn't cleaned them up. But as far as I see the brand's history, his tenure is best described as not meeting it's potential, for whatever reason. His was the tenure of "nothing really matters." We're still paying for that with the embarrassments at the cinema.

 

I don't know, I think most would argue his tenure was more a time of "Transformers actually matter again".

 

Energon Ravage

 

His creativity has never been matched since, that's for sure.

 

Am I the only one that looked at the picture and heard him yodel?

 

Armada sold through all of it's toys so much so that the tail end of the line consisted of quick retools of beast wars toys to have new product, so from Hasbro's (and Archer's) perspective it lived up to it's potentential.

Armada was a successful line, so much so that the next toyline was conceptualized to build off of it. Also Archer wouldn't be doing fan art of his Armada designs now or remembering them fondly if he hated the line.

I agree with your complaint about reusing transformer names, though. In hindsight he should have just come up with new names especially because they are different characters.

 

Energon Dreadwing, not Mirage