Percentage of Repaints

[UltraMarginal]

Five. Don't forget the retool/repaint of TM Megatron.

Perhaps not releasing all the Seekers during Classics may not have been malice, but it was odd that they'd release Starscream and Skywarp for Classics but not Thundercracker. And then it took Hasbro years to release the rest of the Seekers in retail... why release Acid Storm before releasing Thundercracker, Dirge and Thrust??? Acid Storm was a peg-warmer too - but surely it makes more sense to release the rest of the "core" G1 Seekers before venturing off with obscure characters like the green Rainmaker. If anything, Thundercracker should have been released in retail sooner and Acid-Storm should have been a BotCon exclusive (IMHO).

And why give us Classics Ramjet but not Dirge and Thrust?? If they didn't want to give us all 6 Seekers, they should have just released Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker in Classics -- it would have been inexpensive to do because they just repaint the same mould... then if they sell well, do the Coneheads.

And that's the thing that frustrated me... the whole idea of doing repaints is that it's such an inexpensive way of pumping out "new" toys because Hasbro doesn't need to invest in any R&D to develop a new mould. If the repaint shelf warms, then they don't lose out as much as with a new mould... so it's a relatively "safer" risk. Yet with the Seekers Hasbro were ultra ultra cautious... but took risks with other weird crap like Recon Ravage and Sea Attack Ravage - who peg-warmed something chronic.

I'd wager that they were seperated by so much time largely because they were the same mold. apart form collectors, many parents would have said to little johnny "but you got that jet only a couplemonths ago". too many of the seekers would have shelfwarmed like the ravage did. too many of the same thing in a short period of time = shelfwarmer.

releasing the seekers 6-12 months apart, gave them a gauranteed % of sales in each wave.

[GoktimusPrime]

Okay, but in the original Classics series Hasbro gave us 3 Seekers:
* Starscream
* Skywarp
* Ramjet

I would have preferred:
* Starscream
* Skywarp
* Thundercracker

...unless you think a simple retool would really persuade more parents to have purchased Ramjet over Thundercracker. Even if this were the case, why release Acid Storm before Thundercracker? I can see now appeal advantage to G1-ignorant kids (especially considering how freaking obscure a character Acid Storm was in G1 - having only appeared briefly in ONE episode of the G1 cartoon, whereas Thundercracker was a recurring character across all G1 mediums).

Surely Hasbro could have given us Thundercracker during Transformers Universe instead of Acid Storm. I still don't know why we had to wait half a decade between getting Starscream and Skywarp, then finally getting Thundercracker in retail. Gah.

too many of the seekers would have shelfwarmed like the ravage did. too many of the same thing in a short period of time = shelfwarmer.

And yet they still went ahead and pushed out those pegwarming Ravage repaints. So Hasbro denied us a Classics Thundercracked and denied a Universe Thundercracker, but they were more than happy to throw Recon Ravage and Sea Attack Ravage at us!

And I would say that Thundercracker would have more marketing appeal than Recon and Sea Attack Ravage because he's a whole different character. As I said before, if Hasbro wanted to repaint the ROTF Ravage mould, I reckon they should have tried to make it a new character - so instead of giving us Recon Ravage and Sea Attack Ravage, give us Movie-verse Howlback and Glit. Sure these are obscure characters - no more obscure than Acid Storm. And they couldn't have possibly peg-warmed any worse than Recon and Sea Attack Ravage. G1-ignorant kids wouldn't know the difference, and fans would be more attracted to them.

There just seems to be lack of consistency in Hasbro's approach to repaints...

[UltraMarginal]

Okay, but in the original Classics series Hasbro gave us 3 Seekers:
* Starscream
* Skywarp
* Ramjet

I would have preferred:
* Starscream
* Skywarp
* Thundercracker

as would we all, but who knows why they did it in the particular order they did.

And yet they still went ahead and pushed out those pegwarming Ravage repaints. So Hasbro denied us a Classics Thundercracked and denied a Universe Thundercracker, but they were more than happy to throw Recon Ravage and Sea Attack Ravage at us!

And I would say that Thundercracker would have more marketing appeal than Recon and Sea Attack Ravage because he's a whole different character. There just seems to be lack of consistency in Hasbro's approach to repaints..

I would have said a kick in the shins was a more marketable gimmick than any repaint of movie ravage, all I can suggest is they might have been trying to strike while the movie iron was hot, but personally any other mold would have been a better choice for that.

[Verno]

As somewhat of an out-sider on the movie-verse toys, I still had a wander through the toy aisle at Kmart from time to time to have a look at what the toys were like.

I must say it's very off-putting seeing repaints next to their original figures, en masse. It makes you wonder what the parents make of it.