Just realised last night, that if you keep pushing Studio Series Wreck Gars wheels onto the talons on his arms/legs the centre of the wheel pushes out and locks it in place so they don't keep falling off...
Duh! LOL! :D:rolleyes:
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Just realised last night, that if you keep pushing Studio Series Wreck Gars wheels onto the talons on his arms/legs the centre of the wheel pushes out and locks it in place so they don't keep falling off...
Duh! LOL! :D:rolleyes:
Oh, that's a nice tip. I was wondering about that as many pictures I've seen of him seem to have the tyres just loosely hanging there.
Thanks chum!
Until last night, I've never noticed in TFTM that Ramjet is pointing his weapon at the crowd after Starscream silences the Constructicon's trumpets.
https://i.imgur.com/il5UMeWl.jpg
Like an enforcer perhaps? To keep the cons quiet, or stopping any more challenges.
If so, he probably would have been the only one loyal to Starscream.
I love that after all that happened on Titan during The God Gambit episode, Astrotrain is the one crowning him.
I just found out that the "King Grimlock" comics are based on G1 Season 3 Ep 13 'Madman's Paradise.'
Yep, I am really really late to the season 3 party.
I didn't realise that former Hasbro designer Eric Siebenaler (from Armada-Animated era) has been dabbling in the Transformers universe again on a professional level, doing some concept art for the Cyberverse cartoon, including some of the main characters (based on the toys) from the beginning of the series a few years ago, to the Dinobots on last year's episodes.
His instagram is here, which he has posted up some of the Cyberverse artwork... and some other random Transformers art along the way.
For those new, Eric was from America, but spent a couple years in Australia back around 2008 (during Animated)... because someone special was working at the Australian Hasbro office at that time, but it was a big secret at the time as there was a cover story as to why he was in Australia (they both eventually moved back to America a couple years later).
There was an Animated promo event for kids that he was at in Sydney and Melbourne in November 2008, which a number of fans visited both.
http://www.toycollectors.com.au/cnsyd01.jpg
I remember at the time it was talked about as like an international exchange. Who was the other employee? Did we ever have that confirmed?Quote:
Originally Posted by griffin
They did a lot of spin on that one at the time to avoid bad press... but it was purely a case of boy meets girl, and Eric was too important to Hasbro at the time to risk losing him over a girl, so he was allowed to be in Australia for a couple years while working on Transformers until the both of them could move to America.
At random today I was reading the tfwiki about Shattered Glass Jetfire (the toy section, based off his Siege Commander body, which is a straight repaint) and read the line about the twin cannons being able to be separated. I did a double take and looking at my Siege Jetfire and popping one off his arm I realised there was a little peghole holding the cannon barrels. A bit of a wiggle and off it came. Doing so actually creates a great weapon/shield combo for smaller figures.
Honestly had no idea and would've stayed that way had I not been randomly browsing!
I only just noticed that the mastodon Fossiliser's name is Masterdominus. DOMINVS means "master" in Latin, so "Masterdominus" means Master Master. :D
e.g. DOMINVSSERVVMSALVTAT = "The master greets the slave."
What's "baiter" in Latin?Quote:
Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime
Maybe "INESCATOR."Quote:
Originally Posted by Tha_Phantom
I was told by someone who was told by a Hasbro insider that Hasbro was initially reluctant to allow Lego to make the Optimus Prime set due to Lego being their competitor. I guess this is why Hasbro made attempts at competing with Lego (Mega Bloks, Construct-Bots, Kre-O etc.), but ultimately just could never match Lego's success. I suppose they've come to a point of, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." I don't actually know how well Mega Bloks, Construct-Bots or Kre-O sold, but seeing as neither line exist anymore while Lego does, I'm gonna guess that they did not fare as well.
Does Mega Bloks not exist anymore? I still see them on Shelves...Quote:
Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime
Mega Construx seems to be doing pretty well for Mattel. However they leverage the "Minifig" aspect of it very well and that's where Hasbro potentially dropped the ball?
I think Gok means the Built to Rule toys, since Mega Bloks does still exist, even if they are called Mega Construx nowadays. It seems nowadays they mostly do licensed toys (whether it be Mattel brands like Hot Wheels and Barbie, or licenses that aren't owned by Lego like Halo, Pokemon, Call of Duty, etc.)Quote:
Originally Posted by KELPIE
Should be noted that what is called Mega Bloks now are building blocks designed for pre-schoolers.
I stand corrected, sir. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Handsprime
I was just watching some mini-clips from TakaraTomy for a cross-promotional thing in Japan, and I think that I have been pronouncing "Takara" wrong all this time.
All this time, I have pronounced it (and heard it from others) as Tar-car-ah (as if you had the word "car" in the middle)... but these three mini-clips from TakaraTomy had at the very beginning, the name pronounced like Macca (Macdonalds), with the "M" replaced with a "T", and "ra" at the end.
So if you say - "Macca-ra" a few times and then change it to "Tacca-ra", that was how they were pronouncing it in the mini-clips.
A small change, but it now sounds significantly different in my head.
Even though I know the various sounds of Japanese characters, I've never heard anyone pronounce "Takara" in this way before.
(unless the Japanese person on these mini-clips is pronouncing it wrong?)
That's a linguistic transference thing, applying English word-stress patterns to foreign words. :) If it was pronounced the long-middle sound English way it'd be タカーラ ta-kaa-ra as opposed to タカラ ta-ka-ra. The closest way to the Japanese-style pronunciation would probably be the first syllable sound of 'cutter' repeated for all three 'a' syllables. Goki can probably explain it better than I can.Quote:
Originally Posted by griffin
Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it too much, but yeah, the ad had it right. Takara means 'treasure' in Japanese btw, though I'm not sure if they chose the name based on that (again, Goki would probably know) - it's written in katakana (usually used for foreign/loan-words or for emphasis) which is reasonably common for company names.
The difficulty here is that Japanese is not a stress-accented language like English, but rather a pitch-accented language; and as Odie pointed out, Anglophones have a habit of transferring stress onto Japanese words (and phonemic transference is a main source of foreign accents).
There are four main pitch accents in standard Japanese, which this video explains quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6AoilGEers
The pitch accent that applies in the standard pronunciation of "Takara" is the Odaka (low-high-low) pitch:
ta KA ra
low high low
The other thing that Anglophones tend to do is muck up vowel lengths. In the word "Takara," every "a" is a short /a/ sound; as Odie said, like the "ah" sound in "cutter" (or "up"). I think Anglophones are okay with the short "a' sound when it's in the first syllable of a word, like WAgyu or WAsabi etc., but then they tend to lengthen the vowel in the second syllable, so "wasabi" becomes "waSAAbi." Note that saying wagyu as waGYUU is actually correct (it is supposed to be a long "u" sound). So sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not; it's easier to see when you read it in Hiragana text or more transliteral forms of Romanisation (e.g. "wagyuu").
So every syllable in "Takara" is a short vowel. Ta. Ka. Ra. Not "taKAAra." Think of it as the "ka" as in "KArate", even Anglocised it's kaRAAte, not KAArate.
Yes, "Takara" does mean "treasure" in Japanese. :) As you have correctly stated, Japanese names/words are often written in Katakana for em-far-sis. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
TL;DR: Go to Google Translate, set it to translate from English to Japanese. In the English panel, type "Takara" in English. You will see the Japanese text appear on the other side. Under the Japanese text is a speaker icon. Click on it to hear a recording of a native Japanese speaker saying the word. You can also type in "Takara Tomy" and click on the icon to hear it being said.
Is anyone here acquainted with the Japanese legal system? Because now I'm wondering how Takara and Treasure were both allowed to be in the same market segment of video games simultaneously.
In the west that would be considered brand confusion and get one of the companies to get a big legal win.
At this point I should probably mention a few things about Goki and myself so people know why we're chiming in on this. Goki (hope you're OK with me mentioning this @Goki, it's reasonably common knowledge and you've mentioned it yourself on the boards a few times) is a Japanese language teacher here in Oz, i.e. he teaches kids Japanese in schools. His Japanese is way better than mine, which is very rudimentary, mostly strong Osaka dialect, and also very rusty. I'm an English as a Foreign Language teacher - technically we're supposed to call it TESOL now, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, which includes English as a Foreign and English as a Second/Additional Language, but I'm very much specialised in being 'the token English/foreign guy' in contexts where there's not much English used in everyday life. I have a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics and a few other postgraduate 'teaching English as a language' qualifications, and I lived in Japan as a school-based English teacher for a couple of years where I learned Japanese from scratch, hence why I speak a local dialect. My Japanese should be way better than it is but I basically worked too much and didn't practice enough so it never developed as much as it should have. Baka Odie.:o Either way, both of us have a reasonably solid English-Japanese issues knowledge base, but as a general rule I figure it's better to let Goki do the board explanations on Japanese language stuff because he teaches it to English speakers whereas I taught English to Japanese speakers, so he's the Expert so to speak.Quote:
Originally Posted by DELTAprime
Goki actually came to Japan when I was over there and we spent a day along with his family and some friends of his hitting up the Transformers shops in Osaka, it was a fun day. :)
Anyway, as for Treasure VS Takara, I can't speak as to the legal side of things, but from a straight-up language side of things Takara (the company, which is now Takara-Tomy after a merger with Tomy) uses the Japanese word for 'treasure', albeit written in a script that wouldn't normally be used for the word - Japanese uses a few different 'kinds' of written scripts, the main ones are katakana, hiragana, and kanji, with (a few different styles of) Romaji which is basically using the English alphabet to transcribe Japanese words/sounds. I won't go into it a lot because it's kind of complicated. The key bit is that Takara is a Japanese word that 'means' 'treasure', whereas the Treasure トレジャー company uses the English word written in Japanese (katakana) script, so they're two different words. It's kind of like if you had a company called 'Red Company inc.' here in Australia and someone else started up a 'Rouge Company inc.' (rouge being French for 'red'), the different language used for the name would probably address the legal-confusion angle. It's a little bit different from that because English is basically the world 'lingua franca'/common language these days, i.e. it's pretty much the default most common language people use to talk with other people if they don't speak the same native/national/regional languages, and Japan also has a pretty strong historical relationship with 'the West'/America ever since America forced them to open up to the world back in the mid-1800s (again, long and complicated bit we don't have to get into), so English has a kind of national-psychological 'bigger place' in Japan than French does here in Australia.
But yeah - different names, different companies, also different main focus for said companies - shouldn't cause legal problems or misunderstandings, not least because 'treasure' isn't a widely-known English word in Japan.
I'm not a history expert, but I think English words started flooding into the Japanese language and overall society during the U.S. post-war occupation of Japan. Post-pre-WWII saw a lot of German, Dutch, French (etc.) words enter Modern Japanese, e.g. arubaito (arbeit), enerugii (energie), desshin (dessin) etc. Pre-Meiji European loanwords mostly came from Jesuit missionaries; so words entering from Portuguese and Spanish e.g. pan (pan), tempura (tempora) etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
Yes, the "Japanese" word 'tempura' is actually of Portuguese origin and is related to the word temporal. Tempura anomaly detected, captain. :p
But yeah, I think a lot of 20th Century loan words have come from American English. Hence why 'soccer' is pronounced with an American twang as "sakkaa" instead of a more English sounding "sokkaa" etc. When I was a kid, I used to think that Shockwave's name in the G1 cartoon was "Sharkwave," because the way that Americans say "shock" sounds like how we Aussies say "shark." :p Yes, I know his name was Shockwave from the comics, catalogues etc., but I thought that "Sharkwave" was just his Sunbow variant name, like how Jetfire became "Skyfire." :p
I'm not an IP expert, but my understanding is that you can trademark common words so long as you don't use those words in a generic sense. This is why Hasbro never uses the word "transform," but only ever "converts." Words like transform, transformers, transformation etc. are generic words, but because Hasbro has trademarked "Transformers" as a brand name, they cannot generically use any of these words in reference to the Transformers brand/products, otherwise they could lose their trademark.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
I would imagine that this applies in other countries and languages. So while "takara" (treasure) is a generic word, I suspect that TakaraTOMY cannot use that word in reference to their own company.
e.g. "Kabushiki kaisha Takara-Tomy wa takaramono desu." = "Takara Tomy Co., Ltd. is a treasure."
I have no idea why they would want to say that, but yeah. Or similarly, "Hasbro, founded by the Hasbros (Hassenfeld Brothers)..."
I think that they can refer to their products as "treasures," but not the company. So I think that Hasbro can say things like, "We've transformed the market...," but they cannot label say any of the R.E.D. Series with "product does not transform." Just, "Product does not convert." When I was translating for Hasbro AU, I was always careful to translate "transform," "transformation" etc. as "convert," "conversion" etc. I even had to explain this to my Hasbro AU contact as he didn't know this. :)
I totally forgot that there was a Generations toy made of Optimal Optimus until the comparison images to Legacy TM2 Megatron came out the other day. I guess I'm going to have to hit up ebay for a POTP Optimal Optimus in addition to the other figures I need to chase down before they get too expensive.
Recently occurred to me that the live-action Jetfire is not bent over with age, rather, he is in gerwalk mode. Maybe he's forgotten how to fully convert. :)
griffin pointed out something to me today that I hadn't noticed... the MPG Trainbots are being released in the same order as their G1 numbers.
i.e.
C-125 Shouki
C-126 Getsuei
C-127 Yukikaze
C-128 Suiken
C-129 Seizan
C-130 Kaen
C-131 was Raiden, so I do wonder if they will release a massive (and expensive) MPG Raiden gift set later; similar to what happened with SS Devastator.
https://i.ibb.co/7tCkNQK/trainbots-G1-boxed.jpg
Two weeks ago while looking up something for Kingdom, I found out (after the entire 3 year WFC series is over :p ) that the logo for each series has a number imbedded into the word "War"... so Siege has "1", Earthrise has "2" and Kingdom has "3".
This was on EVERY toy box too, and I never noticed it.
Talk about hidden in plain sight...
http://www.toycollectors.com.au/blog/f946.jpg
That's cool! Like you, never noticed it lol
How about that!
Also the next thing in that sequence would be "4/for"!
The "A" in "War" in Earthrise's logo is so wierd once you see it
That's so cool.
Similarly I never noticed that.
In addition the 1, 2 and 3 and on the first, second and third letters respectively.
That is cool. And here I was whinging about how similar they all look making me click the wrong links on the small logos on the TT website.
G1 Cosmos' Greek name is Kυρίαρχος (Kyriarchos), which means "sovereign," and is where English gets the word kyriarchy ("a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission") from.
https://i.ibb.co/j8D6rQ8/temp.jpg
(photo credit: F. Work)
Japanese: Adams (named after George Adamski)
Italian: Disco (meaning "saucer" or "disk")
Mandarin: Yǔzhòu Fēidié ("Space UFO"; which is silly, because the fact that we can identify Cosmos as a flying saucer means that he's an identified flying object)
Other languages' names for Cosmos are basically just their equivalent word for it...
Hungarian: Kozmosz
Portuguese: Cosmo
Russian: Kosmos
Somewhat funny that the Greek name for Cosmos isn't "Cosmos" considering that the word 'cosmos' itself comes from Greek! :D A direct English translation of "Cosmos" would be "Allworld."
In 2000 Takara repainted Fortress Maximus as Brave Maximus in Robots in Disguise (who was called "Fortress Maximus" in the RiD dub but the toy was never released by Hasbro). It's only just dawned on me that the word "Fortress" comes from the Latin word "fortis," which means "brave." :eek:
Also, Grand Maximus' name just means "big biggest." :p :D
Has anyone ever realised that based on the scale chart, Full Tilt (Trypticon's included car on his chest) is as big or even bigger than a full sized combiner?
Wow, it's only just dawned on me that "Brave Maximus" is the only non-dub name I use when discussing RID 2001. I guess to be fair it's not a Hasbro toy though.Quote:
Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime
I always knew Rodimus was supposed to be a futuristic truck, not a Winnebago. But I never knew until today exactly what Rodimus was based on. Enter the General Motors Bison from 1964.
https://designyoutrust.com/2019/06/1...ed-so-awesome/
We have the new/old style Landcruisers and the PT Cruisers. Why not the Bison?
Very nice. This is the closest thing to a real-life Rodimus Prime altmode i've seen. All it needs are flames decal.Quote:
Originally Posted by DELTAprime
I only just realised that with the release of Inferno, Hasbro has actually made a toy of every mainline cast member from season 1 of Beast Wars in the Generations line. Too bad there doesn't currently seem to be the same level of dedication to getting season 2 and 3 cast members produced.
Well the have done Transmetal Dragon Megatron and POTP Optimus Primal... but I doubt that you will see any others soon given how close it is to the release of RoTB.Quote:
Originally Posted by DELTAprime