That's so true, kids nowadays barely even play with toys, their faces are always behind a screen

 

Bold of you to assume they wouldn't

 

Kids these days! Harrumph! Back in my day, we played with sticks and rocks and we liked it that way!

 

I know if I was a kid and picked up Kingdom Rhinox I'd probably be confused as fuck as to what his weapons are. They're not the length of guns, but he holds them like guns, but they look more like buzz saws and are way taller than they are long.

Just because kids don't know of the source material doesn't mean they're stupid or completely lack analytical skills. It's not that Rhinox's guns aren't accurate, (T30's weren't exactly 1:1 with the show) it's that they don't look like guns.

Before TRU closed I saw a kid walk out with ER Grapple of all characters. I saw a little boy looking at the ER Runabouts. (coincidentally the same day I got mine) I remember once walking through Walmart and a kid was carrying Shadow Raider, the Lockdown redeco from SS, and explaining to his mom how this was the guy with the gun face. This was years after AOE came out.

Kids don't have to have nostalgia to like a toy, and for as much as people say they're buried in their phones... well, yeah, how do you think they find out about this stuff? It's not like G1 is some coveted, forgotten secret text only available to children of the 80's. You can search up these characters, series, etc with ease. A kid could walk into a store, see Rhinox, Google him, and learn more or less everything about the character in the store and walk out with his toy if they were so inclined.

Kids aren't dumb, kids aren't clueless, and kids

 

Someone has to post this meme.
Might as well be me.

 

This is… just wrong. A LOT of collectors are teens, and I’ve seen kids buy transformers first hand almost every time I go to target. I legit once saw a kid spend fifteen minutes convincing his dad to let him get 86 Grimlock.

 

Ha, I saw a little boy practically drooling over Grimlock once. This was back when SS86 just started and he was, perplexingly, the only SS86 figure my Walmart got until just last week.

In fact I'd say about seven out of ten times I go to the TF aisle there's a kid there looking at them. Also somewhat unrelated but there's a boy who shops at my work with his mom, can't be more than six years old, and he always has some toy with him. I think he had a Halo Spartan once, and recently he's had a lot of those Lightning Collection Power Rangers from the old shows. Seems nobody told him he's not supposed to care about them since he didn't grow up watching the shows.  

 

Rescue Bots lasted 10 years with Prime and Bee being at the periphery of the cast. My four-year-old has only ever asked for one BB toy compared to his full collection of the Rescue Bots cast (including multiple alt modes), while his only Optimus toys were things people bought *for him* because when they went shopping for robots they bought the names they recognized.

"Toys aren't for kids anymore..." is the single most oblivious and entitled thing a collector can say these days. It's peak gatekeeping.

(And those screens have stuff like Paw Patrol and Transformers on them...which is why those toys sell)

It's also funny to say "kids only care about TV these days!" as if the reason most of you want the characters you do and want them to look a very specific way isn't because it matches a cartoon you watched on your screen when you were kids.

 

Peak Space Bridging

 

Yeah for the size of the figure, SS72 Starscream has an insane level of engineering. Even so, it's a pity they still had to cheat the upper part of his chest with the fake jet canopy.

 

Wave 3 has already arrived in some stores, check the link.

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View attachment 29099776

 

Has this been seen at US retail?

 

FACT BOMB INCOMING. DUCK AND COVER!!!!

It's been THIRTY FIVE YEARS (or 25 in the case of BW) and the CURRENT TF TOYLINE is ALL ABOUT creating the characters in the very specific way we remember from that screen we were stuck in front of as kids.

(Also, let's not pretend that kids are on screens more now than we were back then. The idea of "too much screen time is bad for you" wasn't even mainstream in the early 80s. I knew kids who literally watched TV ALL DAY. At least now kids can watch what they want instead of just what's playing)

 

When people talk about how 80s focused the Transformers mainlines are now, they need to remember that the designers and marketing teams right now probably grew up watching the same cartoons we did. They're literally creating their own dream toys. As new members join the team, we'll see other eras being covered as well. We've already started slipping through the Beast era. I personally, even being a G1er, am looking forward to seeing some of the Armada designs reimagined with better engineering. They were fun at the time, but a lot of them looked horrible in bot mode. Sorry, I know for some horrible = quirky. Like Costanza. Quirky.

 

HasLab Unicron was not a good start.

 

Got charged for the Ark by BBTS today.

 

ERITO SENSHI
GINYU TOKUSENTAI

TOKU-SENTAI
TOKU-SENTAI
!!!