So I've been on a Beast Wars II and Neo kick and been buying them all back and rewatching the shows.

I've been reading the Wikis and came across this:
Super Lifeform Transformers: Beast Wars Neo (toyline) - Transformers Wiki

Particularly this part:
"Neo did not fare well sales-wise. Japanese fans at the time cited the overly-complex toys being too difficult for the younger age group Transformers had been traditionally aimed at in Japan. On top of that, the Cybertrons lacked appeal to kids as they largely had benign, not-exactly-combat-ready beast modes (likely why Hasbro has left those molds alone). Reportedly, Neo sold so bad it actually poisoned the well for the incoming Metals line, as kids largely left Transformers alone... which would force Takara to make some drastic changes a little later on."

While this makes sense Neo selling poorly, the part of kids leaving TFs alone seems kinda strong. Is there a source?

Thanks

 

I don't know if Neo was part of kids walking away from Transformers in Japan, but they have more or less walked away from it, as have adults.

Even Sentai/Power Rangers is having trouble getting a foothold with that demographic. Kids want trading card games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. (Honestly? I'm not even sure they're into those, now. Kids evolve so much, so fast, you don't know what they'll like Friday and today's Monday.)

Only die-hard older fans such as us G1 and BW age fans provide a market for TFs over there, which is part of why Masterpiece exists. Same with Sentai, to a degree. (If you look at current and recent Sentai, they're really low in price because they're constantly on clearance.)

Last I heard, two years ago (roughly), is the age of the consumer 3-6 is why Sentai has focused on dinosaurs so much as of late. Dinosaurs get kids interested.

I'd imagine the complexity probably did have a hand in pushing kids away. I guess Hasbro convinced them it was okay with the movies and made ROTF a mass retail version of a 3rd party designer's fantasy. Those figures were sometimes stupid complex and Studio Series proved you didn't need all that.

I'm assuming this whole thing is why Takara-Tomy messed with Prime, so much, and added the Minipla elements to the line, to entice kids back to the stores. (If that's incorrect, so be it.)

We can blame it on complexity, but the world keeps moving, desires change, life carries on. I don't think we'll be talking about Transformers in our 80s.

 

So wait, Neo didn’t sell well because of complexity, then they proceeded to make Speedbreaker?

 

I always assumed it was unpopular because the toys were often the very pinnacle of shellforming.

 

To be fair, TFWiki is written/edited by that one person that tries hard to be funny and clever. Where it was cute for like five minutes and cringy the rest of the time.  

 

Yeah, some of those late 90's/early 00's designs were something else.

It was one of the turn offs for me.

Yeah, but they're neither, so...

We really need a proper Wiki with legit talent and knowledge, not a snark-filled self-important wannabe. I'm not sure why a proper Wiki hasn't been made...

 

Being snarky and being knowledgeable are not mutually exclusive.

 

Snark always works better when there's intelligence behind it. Otherwise, it's just @$$y. And right now, it looks awfully full of @$$ on the Wiki.

 

Beastwars Neo failed because it sucked in everything. From the show to the toys to the story. That is the jist of it.

 

They’re not, but TFWiki often sacrifices one for another.

Speak for yourself. I can’t wait to be bed-ridden in a retirement home, hooked up to oxygen as I sit and suffer in frailty, then furiously paging the nurse who bursts in frantically. “What’s wrong?” She asks me. Then I open my crusty, toothless mouth, tugging aside the respirator only to utter:

“Our planets are in danger!”

 

God, that sounds like the life.

 

OUR WORLDS ARE IN DANGER!

 

Fuck.

See I was gonna go with "Hot Rod was fucking framed" but I think TFW hates me enough already. I'm 80 anyway I can't remember that shit it was 65 years ago.

 

It's more of a partial truth to my understanding.

The toys didn't fly off the shelves, but that was due to a few reasons, first was that all the show characters got double dipped; they had a single release and a release in VS packs, so there was more then one option for how to get main characters at the same time. The toys themselves were largely on the harder side, while I love toys like Big Convoy, and Heinrad for being that mix of lots of steps and actions and getting an effective change, others such as Magmatron and Mach Kick are more like forms of child abuse, while others weren't all that much fun or even articulate despite being loaded with points of articulation because of all their shell bits getting in the way.

However, the poisoning the line AFAIK is a fabrication or an unsupported postulation. Metals not doing well had nothing to do with Beast Wars Neo and more to do with other competition at the time and Beast Formers being 4 years old at that point and having kind of played out the "gimmick cycle". Car Robots was a move to a fresh cycle; if the toys had been a problem, we wouldn't have gotten the car brothers as we did, they'd have been simplified to an extreme.

Contradictory to that statement on Beast Wars Neo, the TF Wiki article for Metals states that sales had been trending down for 2 years at that point, so Takara opted to skip Beast Machines in favor for Car Robots and doing something new.

 

Yeah right, I'll have dementia anyway, I can just talk to myself.

 

Cringe.

 

BW Neo toys aren't just shellformers, they're maddening to transform. Everything has to be aligned exaaaaaaactly right to work, and the way it aligns is really counterintuitive, and it's not even in service of two radically different modes, they're complicated shellformers; why would you ever want that. Like look at Dead End, you have a robot folded up in two literal shell halves. The robot mode is just a guy with the two shell halves on his shoulders. Sounds simple, right? Ha ha oh my no, it's surprisingly frustrating.

 

Sometimes I feel like the only one who actually likes the TFWiki...even the failed attempts at humor.

 

I like it.

 

It's better than Fandom.