Cyberverse - are the toys getting too simple or are people getting dumber?

[loophole]

Maybe we should wait until the show is actaully out before we determine they shelfwarm or not, I've heard stories of the same thing happening to G1 until the cartoon came out...

[GoktimusPrime]

You mean like how G1 grossed about US$4,000,000* in toy sales before the cartoon came out?

Even if the show is fantastic it still doesn't change the quality of the toys. I quite like the G1 Battlechargers as characters but they are dreadful toys.

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*about AU$17,000,000 in today's money
Schodt, F.L., 1986

[BigTransformerTrev]

I quite like the G1 Battlechargers as characters but they are dreadful toys.

What, their incredibly brief appearances in S3 of the G1 cartoon, or their Marvel comics appearance where they flew around doing graffiti?

I'm only playing - I like them too


Needs us some proper CHUG releases of these two. I've always wondered if, considering where you have to put the guns on the G1 toys, if they should have been depicted with shoulder-mounted guns rather than handheld rifles.

[GoktimusPrime]

G1 comics. Yeah, they're total goofballs but they're lovable goofballs. And it was also a great showcase of interplanetary faux-pas that helped to remind us that these are alien robots. All too often Transformer writers (including IDW*) tend to portray the Transformers as being far too human, sometimes unbelievably so. One of Budiansky's strengths was how he liked to remind us that these are unearthly creatures.

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*IDWformers are sometimes not just too Earthly but often too Anglocentric! Although there was a recent moment when we heard someone describe how indecipherable spoken Cybertronian sounds like to humans, and another character explaining that many Cybertronian phonemes actually occur at ultrasonic frequencies. That's pretty damn cool (or as John Barber would say, "damm cool" )