POT. KETTLE. BLACKOriginally Posted by Galvatran
There's no confusion. ...Just ratbags with too much time on their hands. Yeah Im looking at you UM.
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Hello kids. I'm Mr Pot. Today, we are going to learn about...POT. KETTLE. BLACK
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Optimus would have to be first followed by Megatron.
Remember that Hasbro did lose the trademark right to "Bumblebee" for about a decade (1996-2005). Granted they did pump out a LOT of Bumblebee toys after 2007, so...
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Well... here are the answers.
This is only a rough result, but since I don't focus on or discriminate against certain characters, the stats from my own collection (which is a fairly decent sample size at 6,515 toys and figurines from Hasbro and TakaraTomy), should be pretty close to the percentages you would end up with if you counted all Transformers toys ever made. (the bigger an unbiased sample size is, the more accurate its results would be to the entire populace)
Of the most iconic character names to have existed in toy form since the first two years of Transformers, these were the six that I thought would be the most prolific - Optimus/Convoy, Megatron, Starscream, Bumblebee/Bumble, Soundwave, Grimlock.
Their percentages in my collection (and total number in brackets), in descending order...
8.92% - Optimus/Convoy (581)
5.76% - Bumblebee/Bumble (375)
3.59% - Megatron (234)
2.52% - Starscream (164)
1.83% - Grimlock (119)
1.12% - Soundwave (73)
That would mean, that if you had all of the different Transformers toys ever made, there would be about 9% being some sort of Optimus... and about 6% being some sort of Bumblebee.
That also means, just those six character names, have given us almost 25% of the entire history of Transformers toys.
I was surprised that Bumblebee wasn't yet in the lead after the last 10 years of being the face of Movies and cartoons... but going through each year, 2009 and 2010 were the only years (so far) that had more Bumblebee toys than Optimus toys. Every other year since Gen1 (which only had 3 toys of each character name), it appears that Optimus had more, giving him an unbeatable 200 toy lead (thanks to 11 years of almost no Bumblebee toys, from Gen2 in 1995 to Classics in 2006). But if future toylines have a similar ratio to this year's Studio Series, which has 30% Bumblebee's and only one Optimus to the 7 Bumblebee toys, it might only take a few years for him to catch up.
Actually... if you counted Bumblebee's "stand in" during that 11 year gap (the role of a young, bright yellow character who looks up to the rest in his team, and tries to earn their respect and admiration - ie, Cheetor and Hotshot), if both of those had been called Bumblebee for taking on his "role" during the Beast Era and the Unicron Trilogy, he would have easily been number one.
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It's really a no brainer that OP would be head and shoulders the number 1 on the list. One need only look at other toy lines such as Star Wars and MOTU respectively to see the pattern that kids will gravitate most heavily towards the leader of the good guys whether it's Optimus, Luke Skywalker or He-man. So it makes sense from a financial point of view for the manufacturer to put such emphasis on such characters/character names.
BTW I know Megatron has more variation in terms of more differing alt. modes he has compared to Optimus (who's mainly a truck) but as stated above, it all boils down to the leader of the good guys.
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I looked at my collection and have 19 Bumblebees (plus a Goldbug) vs 18 Optimus Prime/Primals/Convoys. Very much neck and neck.
Followed by 11 Megatrons and 9 Starscreams. But I have 9 Prowls and 9 Sideswipes - both several ahead of Soundwave and Grimlock.
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During the loooong process of updating most of my collection pages for the first time in 10 years, one of the things I've done is work out who else has the most Transformers toys named after them... to make up a "top 10".
And with an extra five months of toys (the previous numbers were up until the end of July, which was before the Bumblebee Movie toys came out)... I've recalculated the first six, and as expected, Bumblebee went up a bit, but still nowhere near Optimus.
Once again, this is just using the official toys and figurines from my collection, which totalled 6,698 at the end of 2018, and from that, these were the number of each toy that I had in the collection...
8.898% - Optimus/Convoy (596)
6.032% - Bumblebee/Bumble (404)
3.598% - Megatron (241)
2.568% - Starscream (172)
1.836% - Grimlock (123)
1.269% - Ironhide (85)
1.165% - Ratchet (78)
1.135% - Soundwave (76)
0.970% - Jazz/Meister (65)
0.896% - Hot Rod/Rodimus (60)
0.732% - Prowl (49)
0.582% - Shockwave/blast (39)
0.552% - Jetfire (37)
The thing that surprised me was Soundwave - I see Soundwave as the more significant, popular character in the original series, but he dropped down to 8th, with Ratchet and Ironhide having more toys, thanks to the Movie Universe.
One reason I didn't use the annual toy checklists is because I would have had to include the large number of identical toys that were released in Japan last year (and in some previous years), which wouldn't feel right if they were essentially the same toy in different packaging (like American and European packaged toys).
One thing I found interesting is that I now have over 400 different Bumblebee toys... now THAT would be a big wall of yellow if I ever got them all together.
Last edited by griffin; 28th January 2019 at 02:53 PM.
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The number of Bumblebees is even more impressive when you consider that Hasbro lost the trademark for 9 years (1996-2005).
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I suspect that has something to do with the original and still most recognised Soundwave turning into an obsolete object doesn't help. Meanwhile, The Ironhide/Ratchet repaint is always a quick and easy way to pump up figure numbers in a line of fairly popular characters. On that point of repaints, I'm surprised that someone like Skywarp or Thundercracker don't have more releases than Jetfire?
Personally, I have an aversion to popular characters (no idea where this came from however it seems to be the case in all fiction and brands), so out of this list, I like Grimlock, Soundwave and Shockwave.
If I was to think of my favourite characters, just off the top of my head, seems like the common number is 3.
Beachcomber: 6
Flywheels: 3
Dreadwind: 3
Darkwing: 3
Terrorcons: 3
Sureshot: 1
Slapdash: 1
Jeez Prime, share the love!!
I know when I run Hasbro, Beachcomber will have a huge burst of Windblade style cramming down peoples throats to catch up on Prime in most toys released.
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I was looking up this listing for a couple of things, and decided to update it with the 3 years of toys acquired since then (2019-2022). With toylines focussing on some different characters since 2018, Soundwave has jumped up three places, while Jazz dropped 2 places (from my collection of 8096 toys, which I think is a good sample size for percentages).
Also, with several Ultra Magnus toys in the last 3 years, it has overtaken Jetfire at the bottom of the list.
One interesting thing to note is that the percentages of the top character names has dropped a bit in the last 3 years, suggesting that there have been a lot more variety in toy characters... which might be due to no Movie since then, as Movie toylines are often flooded with heaps of toys of the main characters like Optimus and Bumblebee.
Optimus/Convoy - 665 (8.21%)
Bumblebee - 467 (5.77%)
Megatron - 279 (3.45%)
Starscream - 188 (2.32%)
Grimlock - 138 (1.7%)
Soundwave - 95 (1.17%)
Ironhide - 91
Ratchet - 89
Hotrod/Rodimus - 73
Jazz - 69
Prowl - 58
Shockwave - 51
Ultra Magnus - 44
Jetfire - 43
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