Beast Hunters DLX Smokescreen & Bulkhead

[i_amtrunks]

Those in hand shots show the Australian Hasbro details, could it mean a soonish release here, if they are in packaging already?

[Bidoofdude]

You'd think that they'd have the factor of making toys of these characters in mind, so they would at least make a cartoon model that actually can be executed into toy form.
But NOOOO Hasbro, that's "inefficient" and "unimportant".

[griffin]

Those in hand shots show the Australian Hasbro details, could it mean a soonish release here, if they are in packaging already?

It doesn't guarantee it, it is just allows them to sell it in more countries without having to spend on generating new packaging templates.

[GoktimusPrime]

I far prefer poseable action figures to ugly bricks (excluding the Diaclone stuff, they tend to be pretty, small bricks), nostalgia aside.

I wasn't referring to poseability. Articulation is something that came in during the latter part of G2 and was refined and standardised during Beast Wars, so it's not all that new. But I find that toys that are based on an animation or movie model are often not as well done as toys that are just made as toys, because the former requires toy engineers to look at an animator's model and "translate" that as a toy. As explained in the Transformers Prime Season 1 DVD box set (special features), the two processes are essentially counter intuitive to each other. An animator will create a robot-character, then work out how it will transform into the alt mode. Toy engineers take an alt mode and then work out how it will transform into a robot (Binaltech and Alternity are good examples of this). When toy engineers have to "translate" a cartoon model into a toy, then it becomes an additionally challenging task, because animators will often overlook considerations that toy designers cannot (e.g. how parts actually move and fit IRL, play factors, cost/budget etc.

Media-based TF lines also affects the availability of characters as toys. During most other TF lines (e.g. G1, BW, BM, RiD etc.) the toys were already out long before they appeared in comic books or cartoons. So say for example, you switch on the TV and you see the episode where Seaspray makes his first appearance. You get all excited and rush to grab your Seaspray toy to play along with the cartoon, and you continue playing with that toy long after the episode's finished. Woo! Now it's like, oh look, there's Smokescreen! Man he's cool, I wanna play with my Smokescreen toy now--, ooh... I don't have one...

I'm still waiting for my Animated Omega Supreme and Constructicons... Yeah, I know that G1 had some characters that didn't exist as toys, but for the most part what you saw in the media was what was available to own as a toy.

You'd think that they'd have the factor of making toys of these characters in mind, so they would at least make a cartoon model that actually can be executed into toy form.
But NOOOO Hasbro, that's "inefficient" and "unimportant".

See... that's the problem when Hasbro lets animators dictate what a Transformer should look like instead of letting toy designers set the standard. In the old days (by this I mean pre-2007) this was usually done when HasTak would design a toy, then send samples to animators or artists to go make a cartoon or comic book based on the toy. But HasTak aren't going to make any big changes to the toy... it's already made! Oh look, Mainframe wants to create two female Transformers in Beast Wars... they take two androgynous looking moulds and ask Hasbro if they can be female. Hasbro agrees and uses female pronouns in their tech specs... but NOTHING is done to make the toys themselves any more feminine looking! Blackarachnia was still a straight up repaint of Tarantulas, and Airazor just looks androgynous (so much so that she was marketed as a male character in Japan).

I dunno... when Hasbro made Transformers as toys first, people complained about the lack of "show accuracy" (which is mostly a fallacy since the toys came first). Now we have toys that look more like the show, but compromises the design integrity of the toy. I'd rather have a well made Transformer toy that tries to be a good toy, rather than a Transformer toy that tries to be a cartoon character. JMHO.

[griffin]

More images of DLX Smokescreen and Bulkhead.

And a video review of Bulkhead.