Gawd dammit Takara ! I wanted that pink Allicon ! He was gonna be the leader of a troop of Hasbro Allicons. I got $100 for any factory worker who can smuggle me out one of those pink Alllicon test samples, lol.

 

Transformers Prime was a big blow.

The series didn't just do poorly there, it literally sank the brand. The toys sold so poorly that most chains stopped putting them on shelves and turned Transformers into a requested product item; that is, you had to ask an employee to get the figure from the back because they don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space. The TV series did so poorly that they altered a season finale into a series finale and then stopped airing it, instead choosing to make their own out of pocket TV series and repurposed some of the Beast Hunter toys and a few originals to make up a new series instead.

Which is quite the difference from Animated, which was so successful that they had no issue finishing production on figures the US didn't get to and were able to use it as a combination nostalgia brand and entrypoint for new fans thanks to the new family segments they added at the end of the episodes, with a G1 fan dad talking transformers to his kids. Or the movies which sold very well there as well; though the last movie cemented it as a dead brand for most venders.

The damage has been lasting; no series has had a good mass shelf presence since Prime's failure. Legends (Titans Return, etc.) were still products that if you wanted you either had to specially pre-order at a store or took your chances at them having in the back when you requested them and hoped their limited assortment of product were the one you wanted. Part of the reason most of the products end up being mall exclusives is because that's the surest way Takara has to make sure fans can actually reliably get the products they want, because they don't have vendor confidence to really stock the shelves anymore. In Japan, product space is a harsh battle, products sell well, they get space, they do poorly, they get punted to the back and stores stop ordering it, and it's a battle that Transformers hasn't been able to bounce back from after Prime.

 

Yes the show that won emmys and regarded not just by fans but by broad non transformers audiences as one of the best transformers shows of all time and was critically praised for its animation and voice acting was a failure...

 

In Japan it was.

 

I don't think quality necessarily represents performance in this case. The toy line was a total flop.

 

Highly regarded in the Western side

I have not heard good things about how Japan handled the transfer over

 

because again, Japan can’t sell shit. They try to shoehorn shit into established continuity for no good reason. They tried for over 20 years to cram everything into G1 and it took sakamoto in a manga 15years later to have it all make sense and even then it was still a mind fuck. They crammed animated into the movie universe! Why? No one knows but they did Or they take perfectly good cartoons and dub them into having comedy gags for no reason. Prime over here did great. It was the face of transformers for 5 years.

 

I can confirm that in Japan it was also a mess.

Ratings wise it was a lose leader in it's time slot



Included also is the top animation programming in Japan of that 2012-2013 season to give an idea of numbers. Of course Doraemon, One Piece, Crayon Shin-Chan and even Pokemon take the top spots

But in Transformers Prime's time slot both Gyrozetter (a similar transforming robot show) and Danball Senki (Known as LBX / Little Battler Experience in America) had much larger ratings than that of Transformers Prime.

The show in Japan had a big import push with idol group Tokyo Girls Style as well as it's own unique marketing campaigns. All of it didn't pay off.

But that's a whole other story.

 

Transformers are also a niche franchise in Japan. Its eclipsed by a lot of much bigger brands. I think you've heard of Evangelion, Macross, Code Geass and of course, the franchise that will outlive all of us, Gundam. So in conclusion, I give Takara a lot of credit for working hard with the brand but ultimately, they needed the brand unification to keep it alive (IMO).

 

Prime made the least amount of revenue of any franchise incarnation at that point in the last five years. Investor reports had a wonderful graph showing that, as seen here:





A toyline that had such a sales drop that they literally had to rebrand the series as Beast Hunters to convince vendors to keep carrying the product, then still had to release the end of the line products as a Target exclusive because no one else would touch it.

A TV show that cost so much and went so overbudget that it literally consumed an entire other HUB shows budget, forcing UNIT-E to mothball and forced the entire staff to be laid off, all to pay for Prime. I'd link the panel to the behind the scenes panel at a TF Convention, but I'm not seeing it right now, and I don't care enough to keep hunting for it, someone else probably can. However, even the TF Wiki goes into it in some detail, Transformers: Prime (cartoon) - Transformers Wiki ; in short, they deliberately didn't play ball with Hasbro's plan, some episodes cost nearly 2 million to make, that great success?

Part of the reason RID (15) was such a change was to not lose as much money as they did with Prime with such a bloated cost show and such a limited appeal toy line. It may have been a critical success, but it was not a financial one for Hasbro.

 

Right?! I thought the pink was pretty rad actually. And for me at least I thought it still fit in with the general Quintesson aesthetic.

 

【国内：タカラトミーモール限定】ER EX-11 フューザー＆ブラストマスター＆【国内：タカラトミーモール限定】ER EX-12 エアウェーブをチェック！

 

Agreed. I was thinking of the Igear sharticons that had the purple leader figure.

 

【公式】トランスフォーマー情報局 on Twitter

 

Welp, that\'s it for me, TT all the way on this one.very nice.

 

nice stock render

 

Can't wait to buy those micromasters! So cool!

Huh? These are pictures of actual figures. Takara doesn't use renders like Hasbro.

 

It’ll be the same from both hasbro and takara

 

Source: Vector Sigma

 

But... Hasbro and Takara's releases are the same...