See the Power Rangers counterpart version from the Dino Charge toyline.
There is only ONE clear choice for LEADER, a GUARDIAN of peace throughout the galaxy, but ready to fight against any RENEGADE threats to life and freedom. A dependable BOT that will GO the extra mile to champion fairness and equality amid a cycle of uncertainty. FRIENDLY, even when facing off against ENEMY forces, this candidate will soar above the competition as the next Autobot commander:
Vote Leader-1 for Autobot leader! He's the Prime candidate!
honestly i'd rather hastak just come to the realization that like...they don't have to make the designs of optimus prime and megatron in the kid-aimed line styled after g1 and they can give them unique designs instead
like yeah even if they're not carbon copies of the g1 designs, it's still boring as hell lol
like yeah even if they're not carbon copies of the g1 designs, it's still boring as hell lol
Such is the bane of Brand Marketing Consistency.
The early 'aughts were really good for giving us completely different character designs for Op & Megs. People complained, but in the end it was a gift!
Not only that, but the “designers” don’t seem to design anywhere NEAR as much as they used to. Since TF07 and Animated, the various media designs are produced by media artists, who don’t have to concern themselves with issues like “engineering” or “physics”.
Since Siege, Generations has “devolved” into taking existing designs and converting them into the current cost paradigm while also building in “retools” to extend the release viability of those new molds.
If they're going to keep reusing or recommending the Earthrise trailer, I say just sell the figures by themselves, sell the trailers online (advertise it on or in the box), and occasionally release "special editions" or whatever that have both.
...okay, I'm foggy on this one. What?
Yeah, I've been saying this for years. More leaders!
At least RID15 gave us some semblance of that.
IIRC it was the "G3" trailer, where the side panels folded out into mirrored/chromed sides, which gave off the illusion that the trailer had gone into subspace.
The problem is that the very people who are tired of Optimus and Megs are the diehards- those of us who care enough to find a Transformers message board and post on it. We consume more TF media than most other people, of course there's an outsized subgroup of us tired of the status quo.
But that's not who Hasbro targets their media at. For them it's young kids getting into things for the first time- and therefore aren't tired of OP and Megs- or casual general audience types who know the brand but aren't "in the fandom." To them OP and Megs are the face of Transformers.
And Hasbro is a publicly traded company. If they run a show with Springer leading a team of Autobots against Cyclonus' Decepticons and it doesn't hit projected targets for viewership and/or engagement stock holders will ask "why didn't you make the franchise's two most popular characters the leads?"
That scrutiny doesn't exist if you just use OP and Megs because if a project underperforms with them at least you're not left with the sense that you left money on the table character choice-wise.
I think this is a good compromise, because you get the characters that have that valued Brand Equity but you get some freshness.
Thing is I think this will happen. This stuff is all cyclical. Design, aesthetics, it's all cyclical.
Back in the mid-late 2000s Megatron's design philosophy had bottomed out. His G1 gun look hadn't been viable since the early 90s and since then there had been successive attempts to redefine him. Tanks, dragons, space ships... Cybertron was that creative freedom finally over-saturating with a multi-coloured Batmobile. A colour scheme that was only vaguely Megatron-like and his most uncharacteristic alt mode yet.
After that happened... and I was very much around at the time... having Megatron have some consistency was a breath of fresh air. After all RiD and the UT constantly redesigned OP but he always had consistency. Megs lacked that, and the idea of "Megatron will just be grey with black and red accents like G1 going forward and will mostly but not always be a tank" was seen as a much needed refocusing for the character and to pretend it wasn't celebrated at the time is a bit revisionist.
But that was close to twenty years ago now. We've had Megatron after Megatron who's always shared that same general G1 design and stuff like RiD Megs, or even the final straw of the previous philosophy that was Cybertron Megs seems appealing in retrospect.
And that's natural. After so long of keeping Megatron relatively same-y, we'll start to see some creativity. And then in like twenty five years it'll swing back.
None of this is objective in any way. Art, aesthetics, preferences for both, it's all subjective to the extreme. And what's popular swings from one side to the other constantly.
I think we'll start to see more experimentation with OP and Megs' designs going forward in the next few years.
Yep. FansProjects' G3 trailer. The name came from some people in the fandom calling Classics "G3," as the next iteration of the G1 characters after G2. It wasn't a name that stuck but it was used for that trailer.
I think the best way to tackle that would be to expand on Animated's idea of different teams having their own leadership.
You could still have OP and Megs be the "leaders" of their respective factions but establish a few 'bot and 'con teams fighting on different fronts of the war across the galaxy and check in on them every few episodes.
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Too grand, and overplaying the hand of optimus. The 13 were functionally gods: inbided with powers cybertronians haven't seen since. Optimus is just a file clerk with a nightlight of wisdom in his chest.
How about a post great war cybertron where prime is choosing planetary governors in a new age of colonization: with the series focusing on those planetary governors, how they deal with decepticons trying to either settle and integrate into a society that doesn't trust them, or outright running intelligence operations and attempting to steal the resources being generated to fund either a political or a new military coup of cybertron.
How about a post great war cybertron where prime is choosing planetary governors in a new age of colonization: with the series focusing on those planetary governors, how they deal with decepticons trying to either settle and integrate into a society that doesn't trust them, or outright running intelligence operations and attempting to steal the resources being generated to fund either a political or a new military coup of cybertron.
There's different interpretations of the 13. They're clearly just normal dudes who legends sprang up about in IDW (for reasons I won't get into due to spoilers), and Transformers One
I like the idea that, at the end of the time when the universe is dying, the last 13 cybertronians are forged, each based around an archetype and taking the form of the more popular and well known characters (So Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee, Starscream, Elita-1, etc.) mixed with a few wildcards for flavor (Windblade, Crasher).
Surviving the end of the universe and the birth of a new one, they proceed to create a new cybertron, just as the 13 before them had, repeating an endless cycle, rebirth after rebirth.
Literally has them as just the first generation of bots who get taken out by a non-thirteen member. Even the most powerful of them was no match for getting shot in the back. They're legends and leaders, but not gods.
I like the idea that, at the end of the time when the universe is dying, the last 13 cybertronians are forged, each based around an archetype and taking the form of the more popular and well known characters (So Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee, Starscream, Elita-1, etc.) mixed with a few wildcards for flavor (Windblade, Crasher).
Surviving the end of the universe and the birth of a new one, they proceed to create a new cybertron, just as the 13 before them had, repeating an endless cycle, rebirth after rebirth.
Here's another premise I think could be fun:
Each of the 13 was actually a Vector Sigma-like master computer for a Quintesson colony or world, like Quintus Prime was the primary computer for Quintessa. A Quintesson rebel named Primus then breaks into and rewrites the shell code for each computer to free them from Quintesson control, and they then free all the creations they had domain over. If you want them to have bodies, perhaps they then download themselves into the most recently produced bodies available to escape before they get caught and reprogrammed. Vector Sigma could have been made from a backup of Vector Prime, or was a secondary unit that didn't reach full sentience. And you could link their themes to quirks of their original primary purpose, like ALpha Trion may ahve been the computer for a library world, or Solus was a weapons factory world.
It'd never happen though, but wiht creativity I think we could get some other interesting takes on the 13 like that.
Each of the 13 was actually a Vector Sigma-like master computer for a Quintesson colony or world, like Quintus Prime was the primary computer for Quintessa. A Quintesson rebel named Primus then breaks into and rewrites the shell code for each computer to free them from Quintesson control, and they then free all the creations they had domain over. If you want them to have bodies, perhaps they then download themselves into the most recently produced bodies available to escape before they get caught and reprogrammed. Vector Sigma could have been made from a backup of Vector Prime, or was a secondary unit that didn't reach full sentience. And you could link their themes to quirks of their original primary purpose, like ALpha Trion may ahve been the computer for a library world, or Solus was a weapons factory world.
It'd never happen though, but wiht creativity I think we could get some other interesting takes on the 13 like that.
in Cyberverse, the personalities of the 13 are in the matrix, which implies each of them wielded it, which made me think what if the 13 weren't contemporary to each other?
Prima had the matrix, making him Prime and he ruled for awhile before dying and passing it on to Vector Prime, who did likewise, and so on and so forth until it fell into Megatronus' hands, and his betrayal was to not pass the matrix on, believing noone else was worthy, leading to the Matrix being lost for at time, Legends about it being found by the legendary thirteenth prime abound, until it is finally found by the future Nova Prime, starting a new dynasty of Primes eventually leading to Optimus and even Rodimus.
Prima had the matrix, making him Prime and he ruled for awhile before dying and passing it on to Vector Prime, who did likewise, and so on and so forth until it fell into Megatronus' hands, and his betrayal was to not pass the matrix on, believing noone else was worthy, leading to the Matrix being lost for at time, Legends about it being found by the legendary thirteenth prime abound, until it is finally found by the future Nova Prime, starting a new dynasty of Primes eventually leading to Optimus and even Rodimus.
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Or, you know... puff puff pass.
What about a quest-style story? A Cybertronian (Optimus/Megatron/Bumblebee/Swerve) has to assemble a cross-factional team, each with unique abilities, to find/defeat a MacGuffin/EndBoss and Save The Prince(ss?)/Village/World/Universe/Christmas. Maybe a few more members join along the way, and by the end there are/were 13(ish) members, and either someone notices a parallel with the first 13 (though maybe not a direct 1:1 correlation), or the story flashes forward a few generations and tales are told of the Legendary 13 who Saved The ____.
No biggie, just convince Hasbro to bring back Ask Vector Prime and then they can hide a secret message inside a a book of character models that decrees Dinosaucers are just Cybertronians who have 100% organic compositions and that Reptulon is just Cybertron from a universe where the sparks bonded with carbon based lifeforms instead of metal and dear lord I want to cut off my fingers for typing up any of this.
That's also kinda how IDW started, which I've always been on board with, and disappointed that they didn't do more with.
New TF listings...
Age of the Primes:
- Tra Gen Prime Commander G1 Silverbolt
Product Number: G0752
- Tra Gen Prime Titan Star Optimus Prime (Star Convoy)
Product Number: G0470
Fan Channel:
- Tra Gen Selects G2 Dinobots
Product Number: G1375
Walmart:
- Tra Gen retro Inspired Dlx Seaspray
Product Number: G1382
- Tra Gen retro Inspired Dlx Brawn
Product Number: G1384
Target:
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Voy WFC Optimus Variant
Product Number: G1789
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Voy WFC Megatron Variant
Product Number: G1790
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Dev Dlx Sideswipe
Product Number: G1791
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Dev Dlx Wheeljack
Product Number: G1792
I'm not sure how I feel about Star Convoy. It's great to get him (and hopefully a Grandus later on to connect to him) BUT it won't really be able to stand alongside my regular TFs lije my G1 and POTP (sic) versions can.
Age of the Primes:
- Tra Gen Prime Commander G1 Silverbolt
Product Number: G0752
- Tra Gen Prime Titan Star Optimus Prime (Star Convoy)
Product Number: G0470
Fan Channel:
- Tra Gen Selects G2 Dinobots
Product Number: G1375
Walmart:
- Tra Gen retro Inspired Dlx Seaspray
Product Number: G1382
- Tra Gen retro Inspired Dlx Brawn
Product Number: G1384
Target:
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Voy WFC Optimus Variant
Product Number: G1789
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Voy WFC Megatron Variant
Product Number: G1790
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Dev Dlx Sideswipe
Product Number: G1791
- Tra Gen Bullseye SS Dev Dlx Wheeljack
Product Number: G1792
I'm not sure how I feel about Star Convoy. It's great to get him (and hopefully a Grandus later on to connect to him) BUT it won't really be able to stand alongside my regular TFs lije my G1 and POTP (sic) versions can.
Star Convoy could be commander class Star Convoy (base to robot to super mode) voyager Optimus Prime (robot to cab to body) and core/deluze rodimus Minor (robot to car)