Animated Character Focus (A soapbox style thread)

[GoktimusPrime]

I'm curious to know why out of all the Combaticons, Swindle has seen so much attention these past few years.

He's arguably the most unique of the Combaticons as far as characters go. Brawl's a belligerent ball of rage - we get that in a lot of Decepticons. But Swindle's like totally self-serving... as Animated Megatron said, he'd sell his own motherboard.

The same applies to Blurr. What makes their characters appealing enough to make them worthy of a revisit.

Cos super speed is kewl.

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.

As far as Animated is concerned they already have a grumpy old coot in the form of Ratchet.

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.

The Dinobots were chosen because they're popular characters. The Animated Dinobots are awfully written characters, but they're already fan favourites due to the fact that they're just Dinobots. So it's a winning formula for Hasbro. I guess they chose Blitzwing because of all the G1 Decepticon Triple Changers he's the most "aggressive" because all his alt modes are military vehicles - a jet fighter and tank. There's not all that much threatening about a oil tanker, steam engine or space shuttle (which would also be why Blast Off isn't that popular as a Combaticon - the choice of a space shuttle in a team of combat vehicles is odd!)

I know what you mean in terms of wanting to see Hasbro spread out more and include more lesser used characters from previous TF series - and I totally agree with that. And it seems that Hasbro will be doing that with some upcoming Animated characters such as Waspinator, Strika and Dai Atlas*! So kudos to Hasbro for reaching out more and including more characters that haven't been revisited as much as others. I was impressed that even the live action movie went and used some pretty obscure G1 characters such as Blackout and Barricade!! Sadly All Hail Megatron seems obsessed with predominantly sticking to characters from the first 3 years of G1. :/

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*historically a rather unpopular/controversial character within the fandom