Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
Allow me to clarify. I'm not saying that the advent of Manny features necessarily came from BW. After all toys like Wreck Gar have us the first ball and socket joint and the original Soundwave had weapon incorporation in his alt mode. And G2 gave us the earliest 9 point articulated figures with toys like Laser Rods and Cyber Jets etc. But these things existed in isolated pockets. BW took these concepts, aggregators standardised and improved on them. BW set a new standard which successive lines have followed. The bar existed but BW raised it and that level has become the new basic metric for TF designs.
Remember...
What being a TF collector was like during G2. It was isolating and toys were either really hard to find because retail buyers weren't ordering stock or overflowing with shelf warmers. I still found early G2 toys on shelves as late as 1999! That's like finding TFP Beast Hunter toys in stores today (6 year gap). When you did a web search on "Transformers" all you'd find was results about electronics.
Remember.....
What it was like when BW first came out but the cartoon hadn't yet. The toys were *the* appeal of the line. Back then the official canon was that the BW TFs were reformatted G1s and that's how we played it with our toys. Remember how blown away many of us were when we first handled these toys. It was also the first time that we had beast modes that were proper robots in disguise.
Remember.....
Interacting with the fandom including "AusTrans." About half of our conversations were about BW because they were the new game in town. Toy reviews, toy news etc. - dominated by BW. Remember attending fan meets in the latter half of the 90s. Watching BW marathons (cos I had eps on NTSC VHS from the states allowing us to watch a season ahead of what was airing here), playing with BW toys etc. It was at one such fan meet that we discussed things like how Scavenger was obviously TM Inferno etc.
Maybe you guys experienced the brand and fandom differently in the 90s but that's how I remember it. Before BW I couldn't even find other fans to interact with no matter how much I tried. After BW it was like the floodgates opened and suddenly finding other fans became much easier.
And yes, Car Robot was undeniably hugely successful. I remember RID toys selling like hotcakes and flying off shelves long before the cartoon ever aired.
I'm not saying that BW was the only thing to boost TFs (Bayformers was a big boost) but BW boosted it when TFs was at its lowest point. It breathed new life into what was an effectively dead franchise. Think back to 1995. TFs was screwed. This wasn't the case after BW; we've never sank as low as the mid 90s