I both hate and love micromasters. Love : For their potential. Hate: For "all of the above" and then some. The "then some" is that it would have been amazing to have the G1 crews in such size to open the possibility of getting playset type class, with bases, with the ships done for them. But the WFC ones I got were very loose and uninspired...and only 2 jets?
I know they went with the deluxe Weaponizers bases, but they could have made it much more cooler. Leader or Commander size bases perhaps? For me, they were annoying to transform ... at that size, the the ball joints always pop out of sockets.
I loved the figures for the most part. The designs could have been better since a lot of the figures had some serious compromises when it came to joints hitting other parts and stuff. That plus they were way too expensive. $7.99 should have been the maximum price.
John Walmart wrote me a personal letter stamped with his official coat of arms. No, wait, lots of us just saw them completely disappear from Walmart shelves and planograms long before they were discontinued elsewhere.
It's criminal we only got two molds though. And I didn't like that Omega Supreme doubled as Countdown's rocket base.
Do you remember the feeling of placing a Batman toy into a Batmobile, and swooshing him around? Yeah, basically Hasbro could not recapture that feeling. Also, for Collectors, they were not planning to complete their Teams at all; Road Police is supposed to be part of a Combiner Team, but his toy did not combine.
I can’t say exactly why, but I think it has to do with that they are not good as toys, or as collectors items. Their whole thing is that they’re small, whats fun about that? Unlike Fossilizers, or weaponizers, or even battlemasters, they don’t really have a gimmick, they’re just…small. It doesn’t help that they are also not exactly good small figures either, most of them were kibbly, had little to no articulation, and were just generally not great. They crashed and burned right along with the modulators, shelfwarmed EVERYWHERE for two years (you can probably still find them now in some places) and were subsequently replaced with the core class in Kingdom after bombing in both Siege and ER. Clearly they didn’t sell well, with exceptions like the Cassettes.
All of the above except maybe price. Maybe. Fragile things with largely uninspired designs (and heavy reuse) that are meant to work with toys they don't scale with.
The limbs popped off with no effort at all on several of mind, and I handle my figures with care. I imagine giving these things to kids meant a TON of lost bits/pieces. Plus it seemed like we only got a couple with half a dozen repaints of both molds. They're fun to play with if you got all the Titans but the bulk of the people buying these things probably weren't the Titan buying crowd as these were the cheapest of the cheap. For all the endless shipments of these things clogging up Ollies and Hasbro's own Ebay store, I sure wish they had repacked more of the cassettes. Those were always highly sought after. A very rare sight in the wild though.
Retailers refusing to buy the things in the first place is what killed them. As to why the retailers refused, we have no idea, nor are we ever likely to know, because how would we find out? But the timing of when they started vanishing seems to indicate that the decision was made ahead of the point when poor sales might have become a consideration in the decision-making process.
They weren't fun, they were fiddly and fragile meaning if kids got them they would have probably lost a leg or an arm quickly, not to mention poor qc Primes Cyberverse line did it better, it was the peak of 'legion class' scale figures. If they had put that much love into micromasters it would have been so much better. The few i got look 'good' on the shelf but thats if i can get them to stand, and thats all they really are, small things on the end of my shelf in front of dia atlas and company. They needed something more to justify them in the line because the weapons were dumb As posters have said previously more/better bases, more mold variety and just more effort being put into them would have helped, id have rather
Way too pricy for their size. I recall they cost half as much as a Deluxe in my country. Do the math. In what world should 4 Micromasters be worth as much as even ER Cliffjumper? By contrast I think they should’ve been integrated in with Deluxes and Voyagers. They should’ve served as the new Minicons like DOTM Soundwave with Laserbeak or Blackout with Scorponok: little accessories to complement the bigger guys. In regards to Cliffjumper, especially, given his tiny size adding a pair of Micromasters to work with him I think would’ve been a good way to make him seem more worth his price.
I am always a sucker for pack-ins. Your case is especially true for Hubcap/Bumblebee/Bugbite where the bazooka and sleds weren’t a reference to cartoon visuals…but I suppose those parts are gang molded with Cliff (but maybe could have been repurposed for another figure?).
Whoops meant the transports. This is what happens when I get rolling on a rant. Think about it for a higher price point they could have released the transports that could have been not just bases for the micro masters but also add on armor/weapons for the big guys. Think something like Energon Landmine or the DOTM Cyberverse commander Op and Megs that came with the trailers. It would have worked with the whole modular theme they were going for. Work your way up to leader class for the larger vehicle bases, ultimately culminating in the commander class Rocket Base.
That's why I'm going all in on Dr. Wu's micromaster scale transformers. They're everything I hoped Micromasters would be. I just hope Dr. Wu goes deep on the characters.
Personally I would have liked it if micromasters were more like botbots. Everyday items. Not food or anything but smaller mechanical things. What I never liked about micromasters were that they were all super tiny cars and planes. Didn't fit in with the larger bots. Scooters, bicycles, vending machines, refrigerators, etc... would have more perked my interest, though I get that isn't what the original micromasters were.
