I had a strange thought as I wandered the aisles of Toyworld. I was curious as to why certain characters get revisited. For example in Animated, we've got our stock standard Megatron, Optimus, Starscream and Bumblebee. Obviously these are safe introductions to a line, and clearly there's a formula to the different transformers series. If I were to compare Beast Wars to Animated, my comparison would go as follows.

Optimus Prime = Optimus Primal, the young leader out to prove himself
Rhinox = Ratchet, the intelligent gruff character as well as trained in repair
Cheetor = Bumblebee, the young kid appeal character

These are just a few examples. I understand why Optimus is revisited time after time. However that is not my focus.

I'm curious to know why out of all the Combaticons, Swindle has seen so much attention these past few years. The same applies to Blurr. What makes their characters appealing enough to make them worthy of a revisit. Is Kup just not worth revisiting because he's too "old man" to appeal to kids? I'm not really look at Universe since as far as I can tell, we're the ones buying them, and kids will buy them purely on "wow that looks cool" factor. I suppose this applies mostly to the Animated line.

So, for what reason did Hasbro and the creators of Animated decide "Let's revisit Blurr, Swindle, Blitzwing, the Dinobots and more." Were the other combaticons not worth looking at? Why choose to place Blitzwing in animated and leave Octane for Universe? I'm curious to know everyones thoughts on these characters that Hasbro revisits while leaving others behind.