The fansite BWTF asked a few questions of a couple of Hasbro people at the American Toyfair who were representing the Transformers Brand - Jerry Jivoin and Joshua Lamb.

The first part talks about early ideas that were thrown around for the TF4 movie, and how that will feature as this year's theme.

But the end bit talks about the missing Generations and Beast Hunters figures, and that they should still be coming, somewhere...

Spinning off that question, because I don't think my readers will forgive me if I don't ask this, Swerve, Cosmos, Tailgate, Skrapnel - we're getting that right? My understanding is that they were underordered originally but more are being made...
JJ: They were underordered, we're going to make sure there are more releases. We've already informed our U.S. Sales team about that. As we do more orders, we'll make sure the waves that come out...that the mix within the case pack will include those characters along with the new characters in the waves three and four so that all those characters get out there in a healthy supply.



And to address the other half of the rumor, upscaled "Beast Hunters" and those guys?
JJ: They were ordered in small amounts, I know that from a U.S. perspective. The challenge we have with the "Beast Hunters" line, separate from "Generations" because "Generations" is continuing is that "Beast Hunters" has a finite shelf life because the Movie line is coming. So this is always a challenge we run into when we switch entertainment themes is that the last product that is set to hit the shelves sometimes are underordered or we get into a situation where retail is simply not ordering anymore and they've shifted their orders now to Movie. So those are newly tooled products, so we as a company have a high desire to ge them out there to the public. We're pushing to get them out this Spring or maybe we can get them out as an exclusive.


JL: Unfortunately it's a product of what you saw downstairs for the Movie line. When we showed that pitch to our retail partners, everyone got so excited that they just..."Ok we're gonna make sure that when the Movie starts we're going to have clean shelf space, set the Movie property and just go for it!".
....as well as talking about how they segmented the Brand's toys to make it easier to engineer the line to target certain demographics, from 5 year olds to have fun and play with their toys, to fans to be challenged and display their toys...

Can you talk about the challenge in managing different levels of transformation complexity across the line?
JL: It's actually not a challenge. Especially now that we've separated the buckets, it makes it a lot easier. We set parameters up front. We said "Ok, we're going to hit this kid with this particular product and we wanted to be able to have a one step or under five steps, we came up with mini-rules. Once you have those rules in place it becomes very easy. I think what took us a while was to get to those rules. For a while there, especially in the past movies before, as Jerry said before (note: during the Hasbro presentation) we were making the same product for a lot of different people and it just wasn't working. We were trying to do all these little "fixes" everywhere trying to make everybody happy and no one was happy. By having the buckets separated for this year in what we saw downstairs at Toy Fair...once we figured it out...then it became easy. It was "Ok, got it."


JJ: And Josh used that word. He would say "We were designing something that was for a five year old, really meant for a five year old to play with and Josh would challenge his designers and engineering...we would say "Can a five year old play with it? Will they have fun playing with it?" When you can simplify it to that message then it makes it easier to design and engineer the products. It makes it easier on Takara Tomy to develop because we can give them clear direction on how to go. And then vice versa we can say "This if for a fan. This is for a collector." then the appropriate product is made there from the number of steps to the articulation to the decoration needed so it does help design and engineer develop according to the age being developed for.
...plus talks about the growing significance of the fans in recent years, driving the success and expansion of Generations from one to 5 size classes, with no media support like the mainlines have, that fail to sell once the cartoon or movie ends....

"Generations" is being expanded into the Leader Class. For many years it stayed in the safe "Deluxe" price point. What was the inspiration behind breaking out of that?"
JJ: What happened was...when we relaunched "Generations" in the Fall of 2012 we launched it with the Deluxe Scale with the Combiners that came out with Bruticus from the "Fall of Cybertron" Activision game. The product line sold so well that when we looked at that we were like "We have an opportunity here where we can expand Generations" because people were asking us to. They wanted Voyager, more Deluxe, eventually they wanted Leader. We wanted a price point that was $10 and below so we did the Legends two packs. As we put the product out it sold really well. So it's given us this opportunity where we can expand into these other scales and continue to expand "Generations" as a whole from a business. Also when you look at Titan, for the first one we did Metroplex - the video game inspired that one. Let's do the biggest ever, let's bring Metroplex back to the fans! The things we've done have all been very successful and it's continuing to feed it. Now we're like "Okay we can do this." and now we're building and expanding with the new Leader coming out, with Jetfire to expand into those other price points and filling out what fanswant.


JL: It's working because the fans are buying it. We came out with Bruticus in that line and the fans bought it. We're making it because the fans are buying it not because we're just pushing it out there so as you can see from what we saw downstairs with the expansion - it's very easy to go into a management situation and say "Hey, we want to do this because we have the proof...the previous year look what happened. I've said many times, Brian Goldner told Wall Street, told the analysts this! It's very rare that your CEO is going to get up there and talk about the fan community of the brand when a majority of the brand is a kid-focused brand as "Transformers" is so he recognizes that, which is huge. He's recognizing it because the fans are there for us.
...and wraps it up by letting us know that in America, fans will be able to buy the Movie toys online from the 12th May (being called Cybertron Monday), and then the physical stores can start selling them on the 17th.
Since Hasbro Australia doesn't have an online store, that won't be applicable here.

JJ: The new Movie line hits the week of May 17th. There's going to be an online sell date of May 12th. We're code naming it "Cybertron Monday", so that's when people will be able to go online and then brick and mortar will have it the week of May 17th.