I would. In fact, I remember a couple times as a kid when I got a toy I already had and my parents took me to the store to exchange it.

Same here, If fact I usually got asked "Do you have this one already?" or "Hopefully you don't have this one" when ever I my mom bought one for me, and always kept the receipt if I did.

I'd probably feel bad about a duplicate. Wrong toy though? "Oh, you don't want it? We can give it to your sister."

I see what you're saying, and I partially agree. If a kid is given a toy as a gift they should be grateful no matter what it is, but the idea is still valid. If a kid got a toy he did want/like they caould always return it for exchange.

But to return to the point, I'm saying that a marketing department is going to want to lower the bar for differentiation as much as possible. The reasons for doing so are not necessarily "the lowest common denominator" like quite a few folks in this thread seem to be insinuating, but simply that the average parent probably doesn't care quite that much.

As a kid, I just got whatever Transformers my mom could find--I didn't get specific figures until I started buying them myself.

Did... did you read my post before posting your reply?

Did you read it at all?

The thing you are assuring me will not be a problem is the thing I said was not the problem.

The thing I said was a problem, you have completely ignored.

Seriously, did you read what I said before you argued with it?

Yeah, I did. And it's completely negated by the very next sentence in my post.

Let the parents be 100% positive that they're buying the right one. Their kids will instantly let them know if they've bought the wrong one. Their kids will likely have let them know that there are in fact 5 different Dinobots before they even went shopping!

And, it occurs to me today, something that seems to have been neglected; this "parent problem" was really only viable 15 - 20 years ago when TF's were basically new.
I'll admit that back in the day my parents probably couldn't point out Blitzwing from Bumblebee, but they hadn't been educated on the differences either.
Today's kids likely have parents who grew up with Transformers. Even the ones who haven't really given a second thought to TF's since they hit puberty will not be 100% clueless when they're in that toy aisle. And, especially if they are of the G1 era, they will likely recognise many, if not most of the TF names that are currently in rotation. They may look different than the way they did when they were kids, but I'm sure the basic look and colour schemes of the Dinobots would seriously jog their memories.

ahahahaha

I fear I must echo Walky's laughter, and add in a hearty "Yeah, right".

"...but it looks like they still only have this one here." Not completely negated.

Hell, only finally directly addressed now, rather than in the previous post, and even now I almost missed it because you tucked the relevance into a seeming afterthought. Don't expect me to connect the dots when you haven't actually provided the dots.

My mother would have never done this. She would either told me "No you already have that one", or just taken me to the store and let me pick out the one I wanted then questioned if I already had that one if it look familiar to her.

You're acting as if parenting is on some evolutionary scale where each generation is better than the last at picking out their children's toys.

I guess I should just be happy that my parents weren't idiots and could comprehend the words I had written on my Christmas list or trusted me enough when they said "pick out the one you want" that I myself wasn't an idiot and wouldn't buy I toy I already owned.

All my Christmas toys were bought by my grandparents. Which is good, because grandparents really do have nothing else in their lives other than trying to comprehend some 8-year-old's scrawlings. Parents, not so much.

Why shouldn't they be? Anybody who is now a parent and had grown up in the "toy culture" of the 80's, and pays any kind of attention to the things that interest their kids (as any good parent should), should have some kind of toy acumen.

My parents (both born in the 50's) grew up before there really were all kinds of toys like we had in the 80's. There the 12 inch Joes, Barbies (and the like), and then lots of tin/wooden toys. The action figure as we know it really didn't exist, and the very idea of a huge store brimming with toys was a completely foreign concept.
This is the only reason I got a Grapple when I was a kid. I didn't want Grappel! But the person who bought it for me really didn't see the difference between one car-that-turns-into-a-robot and another. This is also likely why many of us got GoBots rather than TF's as gifts.

But now that we who were born in the mid/late 70's and on are becoming parents, we grew up with a wide plethora of different toy options. The only parents of this generation who are totally ignorant of the differences between one toy and another are either willfully so, or are of the mind-set "I didn't have all this stuff growing up so why does my kid need it?".


This!

And now-a-days kids don't just have to write a list of the toys they want. These computer-age kids can make a list with actual pictures of the toys! So the only possible reason for the toy-buyer to get the wrong thing are either horrible inbreeding, or the ONE store they went to didn't have anything on the list and they didn't want to leave empty handed.

My point still stands. If Hasbro would put the DB's in the show, and make them cool; rather than just another bunch of non-show toys on the shelf, the kids will want them.

My parents weren't stupid about things back then, and they ran around all sorts of places to get me stuff.

I'm just mystified that someone at the corporate level thinks kids won't want to have an army of robot dinosaurs.

Do kids even like dinosaurs anymore? They're at nowhere near the level of toy saturation that they were back in the 80's and 90's. EVERY toyline back in those days found a way to work dinosaurs into it. Now? Kids care more about their fake-dino Whatevermons and Bakumans.

With today's nostalgia based toy lines it is. I look down a Wal-Mart toy section and I see Thundercats, Transformers, Marvel Heroes, and G.I. Joe just to name a few. Even for some one that is not as into toys as I am it's not hard to know who their kid wants when he says "I want Panthro".

Oh they do. IF there was more saturation there would be even more dinosaur fans. There's this over brimming idea that they're ridiculous, I guess? I have no idea why dinosaurs have been backed off of, but kids do like em.

My mom and Grandmom would go to great lenths to get me what I wanted. One of my mom's favorite stories is her trying to find the Ghostbuster Firehouse, becuase I had apparently told her "It's okay if you can't find it, Santa will bring me one!" which sent her into a big panic. She had all her co-workers even look for if one came in to tell her immediately. She did eventually find one. She may not have known what everything was, but if I told her I wanted something for birthday or christmas; she did her damnedest to get me it.

Parent's aren't totally ignorant, unless they just really don't care that much about their kids. Kids aren't stupid either. If a kid lets them know what they want, a parent will try to get it, they will reach out to friends and family members letting them know "hey this is what my child wants, could you help me find it?". I've seen this with every branch of my family (Not a small family by any means) and my friend's families as well growing up. Very few kids will get everything, but a smart attentive parent will know their kids know what they have and don't have and will pay attention to a list a child gives them or when they point out stuff in the store.

Evidently the turtle van was a huge endeavor and I never knew until I was in high school the mad scramble that caused.

And you're right. Every kid won't get everything, but that doesn't mean their parent or caretaker didn't know what to look for.

It was so easy in the Beast Wars days when the toys were entirely different species. It was so easy to tell parents what to get.

I'm not saying that parents are either morons or horrible. But I think we're talking about different things. I'm leaning on the side of impulse buys, with the recognition that the only times my mom wanted to make SURE I got what I wanted was my birthday and maybe Christmas. That leaves 10 months of the year when it was nice if I got a toy, but be damned if I told my mom EXACTLY what I wanted. Maybe my background is just different, but any kid who is able to do so on a regular basis just sounds really entitled to me.

So I find all this stuff about "the parents don't care about their kids" or "they're inbreeding" to be horribly offensive. I have wonderful, loving, attentive parents who also gave half a hug what toys I wanted. I sure as hell don't remember asking for Scattershot or Twintwist or Runabout, but that's what I got. You guys are projecting what you would be like as parents (and I understand that some of you are even like that as parents, which is commendable), and that's understandable, but I'm looking at my parents and the random parents I meet at Target who are pretty clueless about toys and it just seems like a confirmation bias of being around a bunch of other die-hard fans to say that parents are getting better at picking out toys for their kids.

Sounds like the Technodrome story for me. Care to share?

When He-Man first hit shelves my Mother bought one, looked at the back of the card and went on a mad hunt across the city to get me everything on that card.
My He-Man collection was more complete than any other toy series I ever had as a kid. I wish I still had all those guys... and play sets.

You know, this would just be easier if we could accept Dinobots not sharing the same basic color scheme. They're Dinosaur robots, so they're cool regardless, right? I'd certainly like some color variance to go with that species variance.

(Also add Paddles to the team because the Dinobots need him. And a Baryonyx. And an Ankylosaurus. )

How many of you are parents?

Other parents grew up with TFs the way you grew up with AirRaiders or Centurions - yeah, you bought it when you were 7, but haven't thought of it since because it's stupid toy crap. You did not inherit awesome toy clairvoyance. And even if you did, I assure you other parents did not.

A whole series of same-color dinosaurs at once really might not be the best idea.

I really do question the wisdom of second guessing the decisions of the company handling the multimillion dollar brand that shows no signs of going under any time soon. I mean really, I'd think they know the market better than some online fans.

My parents once got me Gobots Bugbite for Christmas and tried to pass him off as Bumblebee.

They probably saw tiny yellow volkswagen and large yellow volkswagen and went with the larger one.

My mother only bought me Transformers occasionally. She was a bit of a miser when it came to toys.

"I'm not buying you that, you got a Playstation for Christmas!"
"But it's July..."

She did get me Scorponok and Snapper though.

I wish I knew what happened to Scorponok's legs...

Sounds like my mom. Except her quote was "What do you need a Playstation for? the Atari still works."

What do you need an Xbox for? There are still sticks on the tree out back.

What? Sticks? Do you think trees grow on trees? Just close your eyes and imagine something.

I was really into Battle Beasts when they were on the shelves, and my mom would buy a new set for me when she would go to the store. I think she had a list of what I had (he's got the octopus, the turtle, the lion, etc, etc) so when she sat a new animal she'd buy it. Of course she'd open then and throw away the swords because she didn't want my toys having weapons, but she tried.

I wish I still had those guys but I would aLways end up breaking their arms off, curse you 6 year old ham hands

I can imagine someone like that doing the same to Beast Wars toys or others that have their weapons heavily integrated into their alternate mode. They would be throwing half of the alternate mode away.

I was lucky on this front. My father was a hard core collector of anything that might be collectable. So it was not infrequent that if he found out there was a new toyline that seemed cool he'd try to get us all of it in one giant swoop.

The first time this happened was MoTU. When it came out 81(?) and never having even heard or seen of them before I got the entire first wave of products and accessories for my Birthday. All the first group of figures, and vehicles and Castle Grayskull, the whole shebang. It was pretty amazing as a little kid. (My dad is also an artist and hand painted Castle Greyskull to look like the awesome box art. Every time I see the toy's natural state to this day it seems like a cheep knock-off to me...)

There were drawbacks of course, when my Dad didn't have the best concept of what toys we thought were cool and got us a complete set off all Flash Gordon Defenders of the Earth figures and Robin Hood Prince of Theives figures all of which both remain in their packages in a box to this day.


-ZacWilliam, and sometimes it was just redundant, like when he got us all the G.I.Joe Battle Force 2000 stuff for two holidays in a row when he forgot he'd already done it.

By the time I really got into collecting (Beast Wars) I was 13 and mom longer had a say in the matter.

It was weird too, because she would take away the Battle Beasts weapons, which were just like spears, but not the Ninja Turtle or GIJoe weapons. Maybe it was an age thing? I dunno.

There is not a "THIS!" image that properly expresses the level of "THIS!" that I feel. You guys who are talking about parents with any amount of toy acumen are quite frankly delusional.

Growing up in the "toy culture" of the 70s or 80s means jack and bupkis to knowledge of them today. Try to keep in mind that as fans/collectors, 99.9% of what you know about the toy aisles is wildly irrelevant and completely inapplicable to the vast majority.

It's true I don't have kids, but the people I've known since *we* were kids all have kids and they still know how to read and recognize shapes. It's rather a moot point in that regard though since they only ask for and play with video games rather than toys.

How can that be Kal? Surely you know having a kid is like taking a sledgehammer to the skull, as soon as its over, you're not gonna be able to recognize anything anymore!

Hyperbole sure is a good form of argumentation.

Y'know Hyperbole isn't a bad name for a Transformer...


-ZacWilliam, Prime Rumble, you are now "Hyperbole!"

Yeah, he hangs out with Hype, Distortion, and Superlative.

And are probably worth LESS than when they were new.


M "And Remember... WE Are Abnormal. We Are A Fraction Of A Fraction. Our Experiences Do Not Equal The Majority's" Sipher

I want a Drill based Transformers named Hyperbore.

What it basically amounted to was my ma asking every family member and some family friends if they could keep their eyes open for it, but they never could find it. And neither did she, which was a task because she would always buy things months in advance, so this hunt went on for a long ass time, until she randomly stopped in a toys r us on Christmas eve and there it was staring her back in the face. To make the story more dramatic we'll say it was the last one, as it might have been but I'm not entirely sure, but if it wasn't for that last stop this young man would have had no turtle van. Evidently rampant toy hunting is in my blood, but I'm still shocked she found it. What are the odds?

Can he speak in a stereotyped Japanese accent?

The Decepticon Press Division!


-ZacWilliam, is it wrong that I totally think that's a great concept? Although "Hype" is probably better as a knickname for Hyperbole. Maybe replace him with "Propaganda."

Hyperbole (Hype), Distortion, Superlative, and...Propaganda doesn't sound quite robot-y enough. How about "Agitprop"?

Spin-Zone.