Generations 2027: No More Primes! It is the Age of Evolution!

[LordGigaIce]

It was more the fact that they wouldn't stop badgering him about it that I was pointing out, to emphasize to The Predaking's point about how there were people who had such care about Machine Wars.

MW is a funny thing. By the time I joined the online fandom in the early 2000s everyone regarded it as a joke and a mistake. Of course you have instances of this three-four years earlier where some people clearly did care if they were asking about a tv show.

Then it seemed once we got what people wanted from MW in the first place- modern redoes to classic characters- people started to come around and appreciate it more.

The 2013 BotCon set was ahead of its time in more ways than one. In one way it tried to revisit MW before they had access to appropriate moulds to do proper homages. And in another way it hit just before it seemed like people were ready to reevaluate Machine Wars as a line.

I think a lot of it came down to Beast Wars and its perception. While BW had a very strong launch in 1996, 1997 was still early enough that the "G1 or nothing" crowd was still in full force and so while MW wasn't the G1 revisit they wanted it was close enough and they were willing to champion it a bit.

By 1998 though? BW has had an amazing run on tv, and the Agenda multi-parter paid enough homage to G1 that the Geewunner crowd could finally feel seen, and accept BW if only grumpily.
BW's success, followed shortly by RiD '01 and Armada doing the return to vehicles closer to what those Geewunners wanted then MW ever did left MW just feeling like a weird, awkward thing. Anyone who did care in 1997 had been won over by BW or sated with RiD '01 and the UT.

It really did take close to a decade of Classics, Universe, and Generations giving us modern updates of G1 over and over for people to either discover MW or rediscover it and appreciate its weirdness.

And as @CoffeeHorse pointed out, it laid the "two retail lines, one for the collectors" template before even Universe 1.0 or Classics.

I for one am happy it's being reevaluated because it's awesome. Especially now that we know Starscream is coming, and Megatron presumably will be as well since he's part of a combiner.

My one fear left is that they try to "fix" the mistake from 1997 and do Megatron in Megaplex's colour scheme.
Megaplex looking more like Megatron than Megatron back in 1997 may have been a mixup, but it's part of the MW charm. They need to stay true to it.

Which makes it even funnier.

Me trying to talk my way past a US Boarder Patrol agent by myself at ten to get to BotCon would have a hoot.

 

[The Predaking]

Me trying to talk my way past a US Boarder Patrol agent by myself at ten to get to BotCon would have a hoot.

It would be worthy of the sitcoms of the era!

 

[Donocropolis]

My one fear left is that they try to "fix" the mistake from 1997 and do Megatron in Megaplex's colour scheme.
Megaplex looking more like Megatron than Megatron back in 1997 may have been a mixup, but it's part of the MW charm. They need to stay true to it.

I never understood people's objections to that. I mean, the whole POINT of Megaplex is that the enemy thinks that he's Megatron. What better way to do that than to have him painted up in Megatron's colors while Megatron is painted as Generic Background Decepticon #7?

 

[Jackpot]

That's what made them so fascinating to me. I grew up just outside of Toronto. MW was just this weird vehicle centric Transformers line I only ever saw once in Florida. And given that it was G2 and not BW that was my entry point into Transformers? That was big for ten year old me. It was just this one off memory of these cool post-BW vehicle Transformers I was half sure I imagined until I found out no, they really were real years later.

I had the geographically opposite experience as a young G.I. Joe fan on a visit to Canada at around age 10, where I saw this for the only time in my life, at a Zellers. What made it even stranger was that for whatever reason, it wasn't featured in the pack-in annual catalogs. I had a similar experience of later wondering if my childhood imagination had concocted it, then the internet confirming it. (Same for this not long after, though on a trip still in the States.) The world was a more mysterious place when there was no online.

MW is a funny thing. By the time I joined the online fandom in the early 2000s everyone regarded it as a joke and a mistake.

Not everyone!

The 2013 BotCon set was ahead of its time in more ways than one. In one way it tried to revisit MW before they had access to appropriate moulds to do proper homages. And in another way it hit just before it seemed like people were ready to reevaluate Machine Wars as a line.

That set was another weird beast on top of the first one. If they'd put me in charge, I don't even know what I would've done with it. I mean, Obsidian and Strika were awesome additions to the lore, such as it is. But as for the rest... like I said in another post, it seems weird to me to make new versions of the originals when the originals barely had their own moment to shine. So what's to be done, put the "Machine Wars" label on a whole bunch of Obsidian-and-Strika-style additions? That seems weird for anyone who was hoping for upgrades. Maybe there could've been more "bridge" figures like Mirage - the latest molds of some/all of the '97 characters with their MW decos? It might've been cool to have seen what that looked like, but would that have mostly just stripped away half of MW's janky charm? I don't know. But I do know that I had to look that set up on the wiki to remember what any of them looked like, and I had almost no recollection of, say, this. What's gained through its existence?

[EDIT:] Okay, I just thought of an approach to at least a few of the figs: If FP had had access to the molds, redecoing/remolding Laser Optimus and Falcon to look like the MW Optimus and Megatron/plex packaging art could've been part of it. Big "if", though - I have absolutely no idea how doable that would've been.

 

[Undead Scottsman]

Machine Wars suffered from being ahead of its time, but they definitely made some unforced errors. They were clearly trying to appeal to the crowd who grew up with G1 and weren't digging Beast Wars, but went about it in a way that seemed counter-intuitive to that. We're talking about people who didn't like that Primal, while looking like Prime, turned into a gorilla; for some reason Hasbro thought an Optimus who didn't even look like Optimus would fly in that environment. Meanwhile, Megatron was relegated to a tiny cyberjet who Prime towered over and was utterly dwarfed by Starscream. And don't get me wrong, I'm not against Megatron being short, but you got to do it in a Wolverine kind of way: you have to do SOMETHING to make him imposing, Cyberjet Megatron didn't even have a big gun!

There were also unavoidable problems just due to the nature of the line; being aimed at collectors, who were a much, much smaller fraction of the audience than today, they needed KB Toys to partner with them, which ultimately greatly limited its reach. Additionally, making animated fiction for a line exclusive to KB Toys didn't make a lot of sense, especially one that was kind of cobbled together quickly out of old Euro G1 and canceled G2 figures. Maybe they could have done some comics, but even Beast Wars didn't have any comics at the time. (Outside of the occasional pack-in) and the fiction was a big part of the appeal of the toyline.

Arguably RiD '01 was a similar idea in how it was a line of new, modernized figures and then a bunch of reused of older figures, but avoided both the limitations and misjudgments that caused Machine Wars to vanish almost as quickly as it arrived.

 

[The Predaking]

RID did it better, but to be fair, it was a prepackage thing they could bring over and then supplement. Man, I loved that line.

 

[LordGigaIce]

I never understood people's objections to that. I mean, the whole POINT of Megaplex is that the enemy thinks that he's Megatron. What better way to do that than to have him painted up in Megatron's colors while Megatron is painted as Generic Background Decepticon #7?

Oh I agree but you know fans.

 

[LordGigaIce]

The world was a more mysterious place when there was no online.

Oh absolutely. And being the age I am, I didn't even get access to the internet until I was thirteen. So there's a very clean dividing line for me where the wonders of a world where you couldn't just look stuff up on a whim is firmly planted in my childhood, while adolescence for me lines up with the web making all of this easily accessible.

Not everyone!

That set was another weird beast on top of the first one. If they'd put me in charge, I don't even know what I would've done with it.

I've thought about it a good deal. The main problems are...

1) aside from BotCon 2011, which was specifically about following up Animated, most of BotCon's sets were focused on augmenting your Generations collection and...

2) ... FubPub in 2013 didn't have access to moulds needed to do proper Machine Wars homages in a CHUG style. Like you posted that BotCon 2013 MW Starscream that doesn't evoke MW Starscream at all. It's got nothing on the AotP option, which does a much better job of homaging the original. It's just not a mould that was even in existence back in 2013.

There's no real alternate set of moulds that would have been "better." @Sabrblade had the idea of using the theme to do a belated wave 2 of MW, and I really dig the idea. I'd take it a step further though. And granted this idea is based on a very big IF, but...

... assuming Hasbro and FunPub still had access to Euro G1.5 and G2 moulds.... do a set of figures done off of older moulds that could have been used for a second wave of MW had the line continued.

It's 2013. You don't have the moulds to do proper Generations homages. "What if?" wave two designs done off of CHUG and PRiD moulds won't fit with the original figures.

So why not see if you can churn out the old Boss, Flash, Falcon, and Skydive moulds as... I donno... MW Bumblebee, Tracks, Scourge, and Cyclonus? Maybe a few flipchanger moulds? Get creative (and seemingly random) with the colours. Make the comic about your hypothetical "wave 2" meeting the original wave 1 MW guys, and use it to flesh out the story.

I didn't object to Generations style Stryka and Obsidian in a MW set in and of itself if you could surround them with good MW homages, but since that couldn't happen? Commit to retro moulds and use Styrka and Obsidian to anchor a subscription service wave.

It would be a radically different sort of BotCon set. One that very much wouldn't be meant to augment a Classics shelf. And the idea is entirely dependent on those moulds still being available.

I'm just saying it could have been an interesting direction to take a dedicated MW theme in, given the options for moulds they had at the time.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

That terrible Starscream was the idea that inspired them to do a MW set. They thought it was brilliant. Having better suited molds available wouldn't have mattered. They were on a mission to make a bad MW set and nothing was going to stop them.

 

[lastmaximal]

Jackpot makes good points here acknowledging that the club was always up against something, in addition to the uneven spread of good and bad choices they made on their own. Sometimes the problem was that the bad ideas got greenlit, but sometimes the good ideas weren't feasible, or the support wasn't there. But IDK about the alternate box set suggestions. There were verbal riots over making the Seekers exclusives to the convention; I can only imagine the hilarity of "they're charging convention prices for FLIPCHANGERS?!". (Then again, the GI Joe convention charged convention prices for 80s tooling for years, who knows.)

I think branding that year "Machine Wars" was the error, but if they hadn't built expectations with that and instead had a different theme that happened to feature MW-homaging designs, it could have helped. I liked the stories (between the convention comic and the subscription service promoting one), once I shrugged and decided not to hang my expectations on it delivering on whatever I thought of as "Machine Wars". That, or make more of the year's stuff actually Machine Wars-heavy or made other choices (then again, idk what was feasible). Why was Electro made instead of Hubcap? Where was Prowl? Funny enough, we could have gotten a Machine-Wars-Starscream-out-of-Prime-Skyquake a decade early, and the head sculpt would even be a bit closer. Would absolutely change the story up though.

But ultimately, all of this just reminds me of what I've said elsewhere before: I remain eternally grateful to be in a time of variety and quality tooling, AND a mostly mass-market (store-exclusive and bigger event-exclusive capsules at most) way of getting these collection-expanding redecos and retools out there, especially beyond the US.

I lived through that entire period of the club wanting to do more homages that would sell, not really ever having a consistently great slate of molds to do that with, and being confined by a comparatively miniscule release venue and format that would inevitably lock out a lot of people (myself included). I do not want to go back to that ever again.

 

[Blot]

Why was Electro made instead of Hubcap?

I will forever be salty at that one since Hubcap was the one Machine Wars toy I even owned growing up.

 

[Sabrblade]

@Sabrblade had the idea of using the theme to do a belated wave 2 of MW, and I really dig the idea.

Well, it was less my own idea and more what the initial marketing of the set made it out to be before it was confirmed to be mostly just updated remakes of the existing Wave 1 toys.

... assuming Hasbro and FunPub still had access to Euro G1.5 and G2 moulds....

From what I understand, the determining factor of what G1/G2 molds Fun Pub could use was how long ago said molds had been used by Hasbro/TakaraTomy proper. Of all the G1 molds Fun Pub released, all of them were molds that had seen reissue releases from Hasbro/Takara that had been recent enough for Fun Pub to have access to those molds.

One of the proposed TFSS toys that never came to be was to have been the unreleased blue Combat Hero Optimus Prime toy using the original G2 Hero mold, with the hopes of Hasbro letting Fun Pub use it based on the fact that Hasbro themselves had last reused that mold for Destructicon Scourge in the RID2001 line. Alas, that never ended up happening (moreso because it was by then that Fun Pub lost the Transformers convention license, but I can imagine Hasbro still turning down that particular mold request because how old it was).

That terrible Starscream was the idea that inspired them to do a MW set. They thought it was brilliant. Having better suited molds available wouldn't have mattered. They were on a mission to make a bad MW set and nothing was going to stop them.

And yet, that MW Starscream deco on that Terradive mold was gorgeous. The MW Starscream robot mode head deco in particular mapped so well onto Terradive's robot mode head. The deco was so good I got two of that figure.

Jackpot makes good points here acknowledging that the club was always up against something, in addition to the uneven spread of good and bad choices they made on their own. Sometimes the problem was that the bad ideas got greenlit, but sometimes the good ideas weren't feasible, or the support wasn't there.

The later years of Fun Pub were when Hasbro was at their most overprotective of the brand, riding the moneymaking high of the Bay movies and the delusions of grandeur they held with the Aligned media, to the point that there were a LOT of ideas Fun Pub simply weren't allowed to touch like they could before 2008, as one of the whole reasons Shattered Glass even came about was because of how Hasbro wouldn't let Fun Pub do anything with the mainstream TF media anymore. From the 3H years to the early Fun Pub years, BotCon and OTFCC had always been directly tying its toys and fiction to one of the mass retail lines, be it Generation 2, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Universe, Cybertron, or Classics. And then, suddenly, Michael Bay makes a fortune for the brand with the 2007 movie, Hasbro gets ambitious with their own grandiose lore alignment plans, and Fun Pub is then no longer allowed to touch anything happening at retail at all until after said retail lines are dead and buried (hence why it took until 2011 before Fun Pub was finally allowed to tackle Animated).

(Then again, the GI Joe convention charged convention prices for 80s tooling for years, who knows.)

As it so happened, it was JoeCon's own overpriced convention boxed sets that were the reason Fun Pub started doing the same for Transformers when they became in charge of BotCon, switching from the small handful of exclusives from the 3H years to the large boxed sets, attendee freebie, souvenir packs, and troop-builder packs for BotCon. Brian Savage wanted to apply the G.I. Joe formula of convention exclusives to Transformers (something that the current head organizer of BotCon, Hany Agaby, was very critical of, as one if his goals for this current Agabyss era is to make the new BotCon Yolopark exclusives as affordable as possible).

 

[CoffeeHorse]

And yet, that MW Starscream deco on that Terradive mold was gorgeous. The MW Starscream robot mode head deco in particular mapped so well onto Terradive's robot mode head. The deco was so good I got two of that figure.

MW decos are going to look gorgeous on almost anything. Even the ugly ones are weirdly kinda gorgeous in their own weird way. It was still a poor mold choice.

I will forever be salty at that one since Hubcap was the one Machine Wars toy I even owned growing up.

I had Hubcap too. That hurt.

They were really banking on FOMO, but they failed to realize that the opposite effect also exists. Some of us are afraid to buy into something if we don't know how far it's going to go. Some of us backed Tassimo instead of Keurig and were left with worthless machines. Punting so much MW out of their MW set in the hopes of selling it to us later on turned us off because we didn't know if those later releases would ever come. And we weren't wrong. Those later releases didn't come. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe. That wasn't my fault. Their stuff was priced way outside the range where it's reasonable to ask me to play guessing games.

 

[lastmaximal]

The later years of Fun Pub were when Hasbro was at their most overprotective of the brand, riding the moneymaking high of the Bay movies and the delusions of grandeur they held with the Aligned media, to the point that there were a LOT of ideas Fun Pub simply weren't allowed to touch like they could before 2008, as one of the whole reasons Shattered Glass even came about was because of how Hasbro wouldn't let Fun Pub do anything with the mainstream TF media anymore. From the 3H years to the early Fun Pub years, BotCon and OTFCC had always been directly tying its toys and fiction to one of the mass retail lines, be it Generation 2, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Universe, Cybertron, or Classics. And then, suddenly, Michael Bay makes a fortune for the brand with the 2007 movie, Hasbro gets ambitious with their own grandiose lore alignment plans, and Fun Pub is then no longer allowed to touch anything happening at retail at all until after said retail lines are dead and buried (hence why it took until 2011 before Fun Pub was finally allowed to tackle Animated).

I'm aware. But I recall that the realities of working with Hasbro and the factories were always a pain for them to navigate, even during the first few years of holding the license. That said, they still managed to meet in the middle enough that they could still turn out winners. Animated, G2 Redux, Pirates vs Knights, and Most Wanted were all from those "most overprotective" years. And I guess we could have used some more protectiveness from Hasbro, if that level of overprotectiveness still let something like "Dawn of the Predacus" through.

I frankly don't mind at all that Hasbro wanted more and more control over their stuff, even if that did end up cannibalizing what they'd commissioned the club to do. As I mentioned, if bringing what once upon a time would have been collector's club output (with all the paywalling that is an unfortunate factor in that) under the main company umbrella results in Bug Bite and Flamewar and and Toxitron and whatnot being available without those hoops to jump through, I welcome that. Hasbro should probably not quit their day job and start running conventions (as we've seen), but I have no real opinion on that as attending one is moot for me anyway (but I am glad that groups exist to hold them for the fans that can). I'll pass on passive-aggressively sniping at the IP holder for deciding to do things themselves with their own IP.

MW decos are going to look gorgeous on almost anything. Even the ugly ones are weirdly kinda gorgeous in their own weird way. It was still a poor mold choice.

Yeah, the deco was never the issue and it was going to look great on whatever jet it was applied to. "It looks good" is something I can agree with, but it is not a defense of that mold choice.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Hasbro should probably not quit their day job and start running conventions (as we've seen),

I dunno. People laugh at HasCon but I don't remember a single complaint about how it was run. It was overly broad and not at all what we were looking for in a BotCon replacement, but as far as the ground level logistics go it seems like they totally nailed it. That's not trivial.

 

[unluckiness]

I would hope the billion dollar corporation could do the job of what appears to be a gaggle of nerds and some office staff did

 

[lastmaximal]

I dunno. People laugh at HasCon but I don't remember a single complaint about how it was run. It was overly broad and not at all what we were looking for in a BotCon replacement, but as far as the ground level logistics go it seems like they totally nailed it. That's not trivial.

I mean it was competent and safe and solid, which is great (especially given other convention type things of the period). I'm just figuring, that's probably better outsourced to people whose primary expertise is that.

 

[Andrusi]

Why was Electro made instead of Hubcap?

I am still of the opinion that this is the wrong question. They should have made Hubcap and Electro.

 

[lastmaximal]

I wouldn't have minded that, but if the theme is Machine Wars and they already did the other pickup...

 

[The Predaking]

So would Wave 2 of Machine Wars have used the Overlord mold? That would have been a nice figure to have as the centerpiece. Who would he be? An Autobot or Decepticon? A new character or a rehash of a G1 character like Flywheels for example given the alt modes?