Quote Originally Posted by doublespy View Post
Ownd only 2 or 3 Armada figures. Played with fellow collectors' other toys quit a bit but never liked this gimmick-focused idea. Probably also because the line before it was so good (even it was only supposed to be a filler), Armada was quite disappointing for me. And by the time Superlink came out there was already the 20th anniversary awesomeness happening with BT and Masterpiece. So the Unicron trilogy never interested me that much.
Very interesting point. I suspect that Hasbro had gotten rather complacent after Beast Wars. The reason for this was because I remember in Dec 2000/Jan 2001 as Beast Machines/Car Robot was winding down, we still hadn't heard any news about what Hasbro was planning next for Transformers. I called a US contact of mine who has close links w/ Hasbro to see if I could sniff out any news and specifically asked if Hasbro had any plans on bringing over Car Robot for their market. The response at the time was a definitive "no" and assured us that there would be a wholly new line up for 2001. Then a few weeks later Toy Fair happened, and lo and behold Hasbro's booth had "Robots In Disguise" -- which was Car Robot! But there were NO physical products on display, only cardboard mock ups of Car Robot toys and RiD packaging; and the packaging looked rushed. No artwork, just photos of toys, and the tech specs looked really rushed too (their functions were just descriptions of their alt modes! ). So considering what I knew prior to Toy Fair, I've always suspected that RiD was a last minute decision when Toy Fair was looming and Hasbro realised, "Oh crap, we haven't actually got a new line of Transformers planned for this year... let's bring over Car Robot!"

Then 2002 rolled along and still NO new line up announced at that year's Toy Fair. We just had another year of RiD a trickle of repaints - and most of us will remember how dry 2002 was for new toys. Though it was a good time for G1 reissues - but even fans in Japan were massively complaining about the lack of new product. It was only toward the end of that year that Armada was announced; the USA got the first wave of toys in late 2002, but most markets (such as Australia) didn't get them until early 2003 (so I see Armada as a 2003 line). So as much as Armada has its flaws, I think a lot of fans (myself included) got really excited because it was the first new Transformers product series that we'd seen in nearly three years! It's like that joke Eddie Murphy once made, if you were stranded on a desert island starving to death and someone saved you and gave you a stale cracker, you'd think that was the best damn cracker you ever had in your life.

And I agree that Energon continued Armada's legacy of being an overtly gimmicky line. But IMO they actually started getting the formula right with Cybertron in terms of making the gimmicks far less intrusive and compromising of engineering/design. Cybertron gimmicks on the whole tended to compliment the toys and work with them rather than against them as we saw with so many Armada and Energon figures. Sure, there were a few duds in Cybertron too (Leo Breaker springs to mind... guh), but overall I felt that Cybertron was by far the strongest of the Unicron Trilogy toy lines.

Quote Originally Posted by doublespy View Post
Also quite liked Overload. I think it was the first toy to have the G1 transforming noise built in?
I believe you're right