Quote Originally Posted by DELTAprime View Post
So many Action Masters, so few traditional Transformers products. What happened in those years?
It was Hasbro's attempt at trying to make Transformers into articulated action figures, but of course, sacrificing their ability to transform just made them incredibly stupid. And to make matters worse, their articulation isn't even that great, even by 1990-91 standards! My first Action Master was Jazz, and while I was impressed by his leg articulation, the articulation on the rest of the figure disappointed me, as it felt like a Star Wars figure from waist-up. We already had G.I. Joe ARAH by then, and I was seriously expecting/hoping that Action Masters would be more like them, given that they'd taken out their ability to transform. But no.

And Action Masters might've been alright if they were just a really small sub-group; like maybe 6 of them. But as you've noticed, they dominated the line, with about half of the franchise being these Action Masters! And of course, they were explicitly marketed as being part of the main Transformers action figure line, and not some piece of merchandising or "sub line" like a lot of the non-transforming (and shelfwarming) Transformers Age of Extinction and Robots In Disguise toys of late. Many fans consider Action Masters to have played a significant contributing factor in dealing the death blow of Generation 1. Hasbro did go back to making traditional Transformers in 1992-93 (as you'll see in Part 5), and there were some really cool gimmicks like Axelerators and Predators... but it was too late.

By this stage, Hasbro really should've looked at trying something really new, but they didn't. By mid-93 they gave us Generation 2, which of course were initially all just redecoed and repackaged G1 toys. They did start giving us new moulds later, and some with some pretty awesome features (e.g. Gobots), including the first Transformers that were both transformable and poseable in robot mode (e.g. Laser Rods, Cyber Jets, Combat Heroes). Although G2 did have its fair share of utter crap too (e.g. Power Masters). But I guess it just failed to conceptually bring anything new to the Transformers franchise, and thus even some of the best G2 toys continued to languish on shelves for years to come. You could still find G2 toys shelf warming in some stores during the late 90s. I remember finding a mountain of shelf-warming Laser Optimus Primes at Toys R Us in 1999! And G2 would've definitely seen the end of the Transformers franchise in the mid 90s if not for the fact that their recently acquired Kenner branch decided to try something completely new -- Beast Wars (1996). By 1997 BW had become the 3rd best selling action figure line in the US (after Toy Story and Star Wars). That's an incredible turn around considering that it had hit rock bottom just the year before. That's why I often say that, regardless of what anyone thinks about Beast Wars, never disrespect it, because the Transformers franchise would've died off 20 years ago without it. I know I'll be pre-ordering Masterpiece Optimus Primal!