If Hasbro Lost the Rights to Transformers

[New and Improved Zobovor]

The other day I was putting out another batch of fidget spinners (they're really not as popular as they were a few months ago, but try telling that to the Walmart buyers, who are always several months behind the trends). I was thinking about what I'd read about how the woman who invented them had lost the rights to the patent because she couldn't afford to renew, and now literally every company can (and does) come up with their own edition of the fidget spinner without having to pay a cent in licensing rights. It's a really sad state of affairs and I feel bad for her. It's not fair at all.

This got me thinking about a scenario in which Hasbro lost the rights to Transformers somehow. It's not really a feasible scenario in real life, but it's a fun thought exercise. So, let's say that, through whatever chain of events satisfied your logic circuits, Hasbro/Takara lost exclusivity to the Transformers brand and from this point forward, literally any toy company could design and produce and sell transformable toys and call them Transformers.

The rules of the game would therefore change significantly. Third party companies would no longer be required to skirt the rules and come up with kinda-sorta-almost versions of popular Transformers toys with names that vaguely allude to the original characters. Moreover, companies like Mattel, Playmates, Spinmaster, Funko, etc. could get into the game if they wanted to.

With all of this in mind, how would your buying and collecting habits change? Would you remain loyal to Hasbro/Takara and continue to buy their products exclusively (assuming they continued to make them, of course) or would you base your purchases based on the merits of the individual characters/toys? What if the other toy companies really started delving into the mythos and started producing "official" toys of popular characters who never got physical representations before?


Zob (proud owner of one fidget spinner)

[Travoltron]

I'd probably quit buying if there was a huge glut of merch like that.
In real life I've already sworn off buying 3rd party because there's too
much of it and it's overpriced.

Same with Star Wars, there's too much stuff because Disney grants
licensing rights to too many companies. It's just too much crap and I
stopped collecting.

[banzait...@gmail.com]

I would argue this has already happened. The third party toys are EXACT rip offs of hasbro characters. Sure they disguise the names, but outside of that their is really no difference. In fact, most of the third party toys are far superior to the Hasbro toys. Third party transformers used to be a niche market, but now I don't think there is any denying that it is eating into Hasbro's market share. I would love to know what Hasbro thinks about this, and what they are doing to combat the trend. It's possible they are pulling a Kodak and sticking their head in the sand, but I'd doubt it. Just check out tfsource.com to get a feel for the scale of the "problem".

-Banzaitron

[New and Improved Zobovor]

On Monday, September 4, 2017 at 10:41:27 AM UTC-6, Travoltron wrote:

> I'd probably quit buying if there was a huge glut of merch like that.
> In real life I've already sworn off buying 3rd party because there's too
> much of it and it's overpriced.

That's one thing about third party stuff. There's nothing to stop companies from coming up with, like, three different versions of Predaking. Or six. Or twenty-seven.

> Same with Star Wars, there's too much stuff because Disney grants
> licensing rights to too many companies. It's just too much crap and I
> stopped collecting.

I'm right there with you on Star Wars. I will collect new toys of characters from the original trilogy, if they haven't gotten action figures yet, but those seem to have basically ground to a halt. It's a problem endemic to Disney churning out a new Star Wars film every single year: There's only enough time to produce merchandise of this year's main characters until they hit the reset button and start all over again in 12 months' time.


Zob (not like I need more Star Wars action figures... or, really, more toys at all for that matter)

[New and Improved Zobovor]

On Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 8:17:31 PM UTC-6, banzait...@gmail.com wrote:

> I would argue this has already happened. The third party toys are EXACT rip

> offs of Hasbro characters. Sure, they disguise the names, but outside of

> that their is really no difference. In fact, most of the third party toys
> are far superior to the Hasbro toys.

I would say it depends on what your criteria are. What constitutes superior More accurate? Higher quality plastic? Better value for the money? Some third party toys are so far removed from the original character that they're basically "random robot with the same color scheme who also transforms into the same type of vehicle."

I will freely admit that some of the third party toys are exceptional. But I don't think any toys have ever managed to capture the characters the way the Masterpiece toys have. Feel free to challenge my assertions!

> Third party transformers used to be a niche market, but now I don't think
> there is any denying that it is eating into Hasbro's market share.

I know that some collectors will buy a third party release of a character as a stopgap measure, until Hasbro finally releases an official edition. (I admit to doing that when I spent $100 on the T.R.N.S. Valkyrie, which was supplanted by the far superior $15 Generations Arcee I got a couple of years later.) I think there are some people who are weighing their options and will select one of the best version of each character, whether it be Hasbro or Takara or third party. The onus is on Hasbro to produce the best versions of the characters they can, so the third party editions end up becoming a sad, forgotten attempt.

Realistically, we're probably never going to get official Masterpiece toys of, say, the Monsterbots. There will probably never be a Hasbro release that supplants that third-party effort. So, they're definitely fulfilling a need in the marketplace (if anybody really "needs" a Masterpiece Doublecross). Hasbro may even be gauging interest in specific characters based on the third-party releases. Think of all the huge versions of Devastator that the third party guys made until Hasbro finally coughed up their own Titan-class edition. They saw that fans were spending hundreds of dollars on these things. I don't blame them for wanting to get into the act.


Zob (still haven't gotten an auto-scout toy yet)

[Steve L.K. Macrocranios]

New and Improved Zobovor wrote:
> What if the other toy companies really started delving into the mythos and
> started producing "official" toys

They'd have 35 years of engineering to catch up on. I'd wager the first ones even from big name companies of today would look pretty terrible. That is if they even cared to try. There is probably a reason the current toy companies beside Bandai don't have competing transforming robot lines. Everyone is so entrenched in their own not-robots toys that getting them to come out of that would probably be really awkward.

What could we expect from whatever companies are around nowadays? All Mattel knows is toy cars and Barbies. Maybe they would separate transforming from the characters and market costumes made of car parts for Barbies as their spin on Transformers. Optimus would be a Ken doll wearing truck parts. Bandai would have a bit of an engineering edge but they're not used to creating transforming robots with much complexity. What other companies are there? Lego? Playmates? McFarlane? None of them strike me as being able to pull off transforming robots. It would be pretty funny to see them try, though.

Hasbro long ago swallowed up anyone who would have had the potential to engineer and manufacture transforming robots. If Kenner and Tonka were still around as independent toy companies maybe this would be an awesome idea. A giant two foot long metal Tonka Optimus Prime would have been killer.

> of popular characters who never got physical representations before?

Who is left really? Spanner? I would love a Spanner.

[New and Improved Zobovor]

On Saturday, September 16, 2017 at 7:34:04 PM UTC-6, Steve L.K. Macrocranios wrote:

> They'd have 35 years of engineering to catch up on. I'd wager the first
> ones even from big name companies of today would look pretty terrible. That
> is if they even cared to try.

That's probably very true. The first generation of transformable toys was pretty samey in a lot of ways (many early GoBots, Zybots, etc. had a lot in common with early Transformers) but it's a whole new ball game nowadays.

I take a great deal of interest when other toy companies branch out into transformable toys because it's a whole different design team, often with very different ideas and goals than what we tend to see from Hasbro and Takara.

> What could we expect from whatever companies are around nowadays? All
> Mattel knows is toy cars and Barbies. Maybe they would separate transforming
> from the characters and market costumes made of car parts for Barbies as
> their spin on Transformers. Optimus would be a Ken doll wearing truck parts.

There is a whole contingent of fan artists who draw cute anime girls dressed up in Transformers-themed costumes. The artwork I'm talking about is a little more revealing than Mattel would probably do with Barbie (think Sailor Moon in a Starscream bikini) but I wouldn't actually be surprised by this at all, in our hypothetical license-free world. They've done Ken dolls dressed like the Cowardly Lion or Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz so this is essentially no different.

> What other companies are there? Lego? Playmates? McFarlane? None of them
> strike me as being able to pull off transforming robots. It would be pretty
> funny to see them try, though.

LEGO would probably do the same type of themed building sets that they currently do for licenses like Star Wars or Marvel Comics; i.e., slavish recreations of specific movie scenes in brick format. Too bad it's not an anniversary year, because LEGO sets based on, say, iconic scenes from The Transformers: the Movie would probably be a big hit with fans. The Autobot and Decepticon characters would probably be traditional LEGO minifigures, but maybe larger characters would be represented as building sets, the same way LEGO has offered giant buildable versions of Clayface from Batman or the Hulkbuster suit from Iron Man.

Playmates has actually done dozens of "mutating" toys over the years (the most recent of which were from a couple of years ago, with Leonardo and Raphael action figures that actually split apart into a pair of katana swords and sai daggers). Some attempts have actually been pretty good and some have been... not so good.

(As an aside, Playmates has recycled their old Mutatin' Turtles twice now, having updated the sculpts once for the 2003 Fox Kids! series and again for the 2012 Nickelodeon series. It's the same engineering every time, just differently-styled Turtle faces. What's funny is that the transformation isn't even really that clever, but apparently nobody at Playmates has been able to improve on it in almost 30 years.)

I admit to being out of the MacFarlane loop, but my memory of their toys from the late 1990's suggests that they would do crazy action figure versions of iconic characters. Samurai Optimus Prime. Medieval Optimus Prime. Zombie Optimus Prime. Incredible sculpted detail, but badly glued together.

Moose produces the Shopkins and Grossery Gang toys, so I suspect they could produce cute, cuddly mini-figurine versions of the characters, similar to the licensed Star Wars Squinkies we got a few years back. The advantage of this is that they could produce a huge number of characters, numbering in the hundreds, for very little expense.

> Who is left really? Spanner? I would love a Spanner.

It would have to be a whole space bridge playset, wouldn't it? Palisades did some spectacular Muppets playsets back in the day. So much loving attention to detail. They could have come up with something amazing and dynamic and very accurate to Marvel Comics.


Zob (always wants to call them Xybots for some reason)