On Jun 16, 6:46 pm, William Rendfeld <
WARendf...@aol.com> wrote:
> To be fair to Hasbro, they did repaint Movie1 Stockade as Gears for RotF,
> and I'm content to accept that toy for the time being.
I don't accept that as a true update any longer. We're way past the
point where Hasbro can just slap a G1 name on a toy and call it good.
We need a new toy that's specifically, purposefully designed to
resemble Gears—preferrably with the head and face he had in the G1
cartoon, since we've never gotten that before. (I remember that a lot
of people used to say that Gears was special to them because he was
their first Transformers toy. Granted, this is probably because he
wasn't as cool as Bumblebee or Brawn, so he ended up being the
pegwarmer that parents bought their kids in 1984 when there was nobody
else left. But still.)
>> To me, though, he's sort of a non-character in the way
>> Overdrive and Downshift and Camshaft are.
>
> Yeah, though how much of that is due to the G1 cartoon?
Well, uh, probably all of it? Really, though, it's just the nature of
the beast. The cartoon made the toys come alive and made them
memorable. It's due to the cartoon that we remain fond of the
characters to this day. It's not because of the toys' color schemes
or clever transformations. Otherwise, we'd all be sitting here
begging for reissues of Roadbuster and Whirl and GoBot Puzzler, and
that's clearly not the case. Skids gets a pass since he was
technically in the show, but he's not nearly as meaingful to me.
> As I recall he was a little more prominent in the comics, and he's
> got some more prominence going in the newer comics now.
> Maybe his luck's changing.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but characters stopped having a
truly meaningful, lasting impact on me after I was out of my childhood
years. IDW could do a freaking twelve-issue mini-series called
Spotlight: Skids and that wouldn't magically rescue him from the
annals of obscurity, in my eyes.
> I'm reserving judgment on the new Combaticons until we actually have them in stores
> and can fiddle with 'em.
I don't even care about the engineering or the transformation schemes
at this point. The toys don't look like the Combaticons. I get that
these new editions are supposed to be their Cybertronian forms (which
is meaningless to me since they were built on Earth in the cartoon;
that's like giving the Stunticons a Cybertronic form) but the end
result is that the toys resemble the original characters in only the
most superficial way. That doesn't appeal to me at all. If I have to
be told that this is the new edition of Swindle or Brawl rather than
it being a patently obvious tribute to the original character, then it
just doesn't do it for me. I would have gladly accepted a new set of
Combaticons if they looked like their cartoon selves, and I wouldn't
even have cared if the combiner schtick was poorly-realized. Now, I
don't think I'll ever buy them. (Well, maybe if I just happen to have
sixty bucks that I can't think of anything else to do with. And
already own Masterpiece Soundwave.)
> For the time being, I think that third party release is the closest we'll get.
> I'm not thrilled about that, mind, but hopefully Hasbro will see how folks respond
> to it and put out their own version
I really don't think that Hasbro pays a lot of attention to what the
third-party guys are doing. Yeah, maybe in a roundabout sort of way
to gauge what G1 characters other folks are paying tribute to and
which characters fans are really interested in, but I don't seriously
think they go, "Oh, well, these guys came up with fake Constructicons
that cost a hundred dollars each, so there's no point in us mass-
producing affordable versions now."
Zob