Andrew Frankel at Iacon One
crazysteve
product team that handled exclusive product from the late beast era
into Robots in Disguise. I think he's attended Botcon as both a guest
and a fan but either way I think he's teh awesome. He did a short 15
minute speech and question & answer session at Iacon One that I have
attempted to transcribe here. I did have some problems with my recorder
with crowd noise and other things beyond my control. Somehow I lost
about a minute's worth of his speech due to equipment malfunction. But
whatever, I figure I'll just do my best and throw out what I have.
Standard disclaimers apply-this is an unofficial fanmade transcript and
as such it is subject to errors or innacuracies. I have edited out most
verbal pauses, redundancies in speech, and other things for sake of
easier reading. Comments from audience members are paraphrased since
without microphones I can't exactly hear what they're saying. Some
comments may have been omitted due to crowd noise. I may have
misspelled some words. I may have omitted whole words or sentences by
accident or because I couldn't make them out. I have omitted many
verbal pauses such as 'umm','you know', and 'like' when I felt they
distracted from the flow of the sentences. In short, if it's wrong or
missing it's either my fault or my prerogative. Words in parenthesis or
brackets are my own-they're added to clarify meanings or describe
actions taken during speech. I have included a few footnotes that are
referenced in the body of the transcript.
-------------
[announcer] First up we have Andrew Frankel who's a longtime fan and a
friend of mine and used to work at Hasbro during...which years?
Andrew Frankel: The Robots in Disguise/Beast Machines (years)...a
little bit of Beast Wars. [audience applauds] So as the man said, I am
Andrew Frankle. Right now actually Scott's eating himself in the front
row. I don't know what that's all about. [audience laughs] I did work
at Hasbro from about 1997 to 2003 and I can't say anything bad about
it. It was a great company. I'm not supposed to be here right now.
[audience laughs]
audience member: They're your team.
Andrew Frankel: Exactly. It was a great company. Basically I was on
the team called Hasbro Direct. We did exclusives-we did Letter of
Credit product which is what is supplemental to the main line. So for
example, if Robots in Disguise was out as the main line which all the
retailers get, we would do things like provide Wal-Mart with several
exclusives at one time, help them with their plan-o-gram. I'm kind of
using all these different terms from marketing.
audience member: Yay marketing!
Andrew Frankel: Yay marketing. But the idea is, what my role was, was
to; Number one-appease and provide good product to the customers, which
is us. And number two is to make sure that the retailers were getting
what they wanted. They would have meetings with us, tell us, 'Okay, we
need a 9.99, we need a 20 dollar SKU,' and then we would come back with
our ideas and actually try to partner up and make it happen.
What I'd like to do very quickly-we have some very awesome images here
that I don't want to delay-Lemme go through a little bit of a stream of
consiousness. This was from the airplane ride from Montreal to Chicago
today, so...and by the way right now I'm at Megabloks which does the
Dragons range, Pirates of the Carribean [audience applauds]
Scott McNeil: I'm working on Dragons.
Andrew Frankel: Oh right, yeah, you were in our film 'The Metal Ages'
[see note 2]. Very good.
So I'm still in the industry and I still use what I learned at Hasbro,
but now I'm fortunate actually to have Transformers as a hobby, but
then also be able to work in the industry on something different.
Scott McNeil: You can tell when...[unintelligible]
Andrew Frankel: Yes, I know you have many voices that you do. For me,
it was hobby and career all as one and it gets a little confusing, so
there you go.
My stream of consiousness is projects-tech specs that I worked on. So
it's kind of a trip down memory lane, so clap or boo when you hear what
names I give you. Tech specwise, my very first one was Buzzclaw. There
was nothing really remarkable about it, but that was kind of my first
foray into 'Wow! I get to write a Transformers tech spec!' [audience
laughs] Other ones that came through were Cybershark the Transmetal II.
There was actually a reference to the pirates from Beast Wars Second.
What I liked to do or what I had done was really tie things back in to
one another and that made me feel proud that I was shifting teh fandom
into the actual canon. Transmetal II Ramulus-I did him as a
survivalist. I got sneak previews of Cheetor and Dinobot Transmetal II
so I kind of put the text to what I knew from the show. Knowing that
Scott was going to be a zombie, a clone, now seeing him in real life I
guess that's how it is!
Scott McNeil: Yes, yes, it's more true than you might have imagined.
[audience laughs]
Andrew Frankel: Depthcharge-that one was a favorite of mine to do.
Rampage as well. And really when I say 'I did them', I was the one to
write the text based on what the Hasbro Transformers team told me what
they were gonna do in the show. And then they took what I had written
and polished it up. The Optimal Optimus redeco-was it Primal Prime?
[some audience members applaud] We had just seen the show where
Quickstrike takes the fake Optimal Optimus suit and uses it to control
Optimal Optimus and so I wanted to put that back into the lore. The
idea there was that the suit became this Primal character.
Exclusives. The next few years I was there I actually started working
on the product and I did some very fun projects. Tripredacus Agent was
the first one I worked on.
[Equipment malfunction. The audio returns as he's talking about
Jhiaxus. See note 1]
What happened there was we had some slots to fill at KayBee and one
character that I was burning to do was this character from the G2
comic. Unfortunately my time at Hasbro came to an end. I decided to go
and the team that was left over picked some kind of funky colors I
think. But at least we got the character out there and we're happy
about that.
audience member: It's ironic that you picked the name...
Andrew Frankel: Gee-ax-us. Right. The joke-'ax us'.
Just a few quick ones here-the camoflauge Combaticons-the first release
where it had the camo-the urban camo. Spychangers. We did a whole
battallion of them. [audience laughs] I think once-it was Botcon '02 or
'03 I mentioned we tried to get Brave Maximus imported over and there
was a drop test failure. People were saying, 'What? It falls on kids,
it hurts kids?' No. Drop test is when you're shipping the product the
actual box gets damaged and it's because of the product being too
heavy. So literally they were not able to pass the test that they used
to bring the product into the market.
Other just quick things. The Deployers, the Beast Riders-they were kind
of sideline items that my team had done. That was actually the first
mention where the Quintessons came into a tech spec. There was gonna be
an Oracle playset, which was a little strange. We Gee-axed that as
well. [audience laughs] Actually the whole Beast Machines ride that I
got to be a part of-there was a little bit of a conflict between the
real brand team and the LC group where they didn't want us to do
transforming toys. With all due respect-you weren't there so I'll say
this-but the reason being, it was a strategic reason. They didn't want
too many transforming toys to kind of dilute the market. They wanted to
have their main line. What happened was we ended up doing little
accessory backpacks and vehicles that they could ride. So I think with
the kind of restraints we had we did pretty well.
The other thing that I'll mention-I'll turn it over to the good
stuff-is that when R.I.D. came out-the Robots in Diguise show, I again
was blessed to be able to edit some of the scripts. SOme of the things
that you see or hear in that show, like Augie Canay references to the
race car driver, Energon, even Headmasters with the Fortress Maximus
toy-that was probably me recommending to put some of that stuff in. So
I'm totally being...[portion of speech drowned out by audience
applause]...a lot of your support. The reason I did it was not so much
(to say) 'Oh, look at what I did,' but it was knowing that you guys
would appreciate some of that stuff.
audience member: The Heroes of Cybertron?
Andrew Frankel: Yup, that too. The Heroes of Cybertron-the little two
inch PVC figures-we brought those over, repackaged them from the
japanese Takara product.
audience member: The light piping was cool.
Andrew Frankel: Thank you.
audience member: The R.I.D. Air Attack Optimus Primal-beautiful toy.
Thank you very much. His mouth is molded like in a scream. Is there any
particular reason for that?
Andrew Frankel: This is my honest answer. The product, the tooling was
all done. It was actually planned to be in the main line, so what my
contribution was-what the team that we did was-we just brought it,
basically a finished toy, repackaged it and brought it to market. But I
have a feeling that the designers at the time were very much into
getting expression and personality into all of their characters. I
think they actually started that with the Transmetals. Like Rhinox kind
of was grimacing and they kind of carried that through the entire beast
range. It might have lit up originally...light vomit or
something...[audience laughs]
audience member: The Robots in Disguise story editors mentioned at a
previous convention that they would get scripts back from Hasbro with
things-I guess from you now...
Andrew Frankel: [laughing] Yes.
audience member: ...penciled in saying 'Add this reference to older
continuity in'
Andrew Frankel: Yup.
audience member: ...and some of them were so obscure that they actually
refused. Do you know what those were?
Andrew Frankel: I'd have to look again. I probably emailed myself a few
of them. I could take a look when I get back home, but most of the
things that mattered to me that you guys would get, I think they pretty
much put in. There were some references like to 'D-whatever the number
was' when they trying to identify...
[audience member] Destron Five.
Andrew Frankel: What? Destron Five? So it was again tying it back to
the japanese Takara numbering system. Things like that-I think they
actually did get that in eventually.
audience member: Can you tell us anything about the cancelled Oracle
playset? Because all we ever see is a listing for it.
Andrew Frankel: Yeah, sure. There was a lot of spring loaded features
to it. Again, no transforming unfortunately. But the idea was-if you
guys know Raiders of the Lost Ark-the Well of Souls [see note 3] toy
from Kenner back in the early eighties-it looked like that in a way. It
was like a rocky floor, not Iraqi, rocky [audience laughs].
I'm back in the US I can make these jokes.
The idea was that, is you took your figures and characters, you would
activate different things that would pop up-different features that
would spring to life.
[audience member] The initial names of the Deployers was 'Pet Probes
Weapons' which I assume was an original development title that sounded
funny. There was a listing for those three and also a desert vehicle.
Do you remember anything about what that was? Was it a kind of a tank?
Andrew Frankel: Yeah, I think it actually looked a little bit like-I
believe the character was Mol, the drill guy. But this one would
be-would have been-for the desert with more like sand skiff kind of
guide rails. Probably the reason we killed it-that's the terminology in
product lore-was either there was too many products or SKUs, or we were
gonna save him for a refresh after the redeco wave. So the product did
well, but then I think by the time we had done the second wave of
redecos, the line had moved on to R.I.D. Anything more? Because we have
some...
[audience member] Did you work for Transtech?
Andrew Frankel: Transtech? No. There's a guy at Hasbro named Steve
Drucker whose in charge of all the IP-the intellectual property-that
they do at Hasbro. I think he's still there. That braichild came out of
his group and the brand team at the time. Some of the very cool models
that we've seen on the internet, et cetera, I don't know anything but
what we're kind of getting glimpses of from the new movie-and I'm not
saying this for any...I have no knowledge-but I have a feeling that
you'll see similar models to that eventually. Those models are very
cool.
[audience member] I just wanted to say thank you for Cryotek. I think
that was one of the coolest exclusives I ever came across.
Andrew Frankel: Thanks.
[audience member] Did you have anything to do with Nemesis Prime?
Because that would be my second favorite. Either which way I appreciate
it.
Andrew Frankel: Well the original-the Scourge character-was it Black
Convoy? Dark Convoy?
[audience member] Black Convoy.
Andrew Frankel: Black Convoy in the R.I.D. show. That one I brought to
Toys R Us as an exclusive. But the Nemesis concept-that was I think was
Aaron Archer, other team members. Actually the brand team at the time,
they were very much wanting to put Scourge into the main line but once
we had promised Toys R Us, we couldn't really break an order.
[audience member] You were given a credit in the Armada series. Did you
actually do any (work on it)? Is that when you were moving out?
Andrew Frankel: I was moving out at the time. I actually ended up also
with a few on Superlink, or umm, what's the..?
[audience member] Energon.
Andrew Frankel: Energon-thank you-which I had nothing to do with.
[audience laughs. There was a comment from the audience I didn't catch]
Yeah, sure, except with that show I don't know if I wanted to be
associated with it. [audience laughs] Just kidding.
So anyways I have to be honest I do feel a little uncomfortable. I'm
very happy to talk to you guys. But if you do have questions I'm happy
to answer them seperately. I just wanted to share with you what I had
done. It's kind of, 'Where is he now?' I'm up in Montreal, still in the
toy industry and happy to talk to whoever has any questions. So I do
want to now turn it over to some real information. This is a behind the
scenes sneak preview of some things that have happpened, some things
that haven't happened. I'll turn it over...
[At this point Joe Kyde takes over. Audience applauds]
-------------------------------
[Note 1] At this point I lost one minute of audio due to equipment
malfunction. I do remember he mentioned that the Kaybee redecos of G2
Hero Prime and Megatron-Scourge and Bludgeon-were his.
[Note 2] The trailer for the Dragons Metal Age movie is here:
http://lionsgate.arcostream.net/lionsgate/hv/dragons_metal_hv_300.wmv
[Note 3] You can see a picture of the Well of Souls boxed and loose
here: http://www.ihatesnakes.com/raiders.html
--
crazysteve with rubber tires
Kil - Michael McCarthy
news:1152990532.4...@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...
> Andrew "Swiper" Frankel, a one time ATT regular, was on the Hasbro
> product team that handled exclusive product from the late beast era
> into Robots in Disguise. I think he's attended Botcon as both a guest
> and a fan but either way I think he's teh awesome. He did a short 15
> minute speech and question & answer session at Iacon One that I have
> attempted to transcribe here. I did have some problems with my recorder
> with crowd noise and other things beyond my control. Somehow I lost
> about a minute's worth of his speech due to equipment malfunction. But
> whatever, I figure I'll just do my best and throw out what I have.
Thanks for another great transcript!
-Kil
-----
Michael "Kil" McCarthy
http://kil-michaelmcc.livejournal.com
http://hometown.aol.com/michaelmcc79