Animated Arcee Cancelled or postponed?

[GoktimusPrime]

I'm surprised... especially considering that Hasbro allowed ToyFare magazine to publish an image of Animated Arcee in their July issue. Extremely disappointed too... that toy would've been the closest thing we'd have to a G1-accurate Arcee toy. (T_T)

Shame on you Hasbro.

[i_amtrunks]

I'm hoping that it is only cancelled at the store because the Animated line is going on a movie line induced holiday from the shelves, and when the movie hype is over, but the movie stock is still flooding shelves, that Arcee will be made available again.

[Gouki]

The emails have been saying "for the time being". Seems like a pretty big distinction between that and cancelled forever and ever.

[Doubledealer]

No point getting our knickies in a knot until they're officially cancelled. As we all know the movie line is going to be around for quite a while before we see much of anything else, so let's just see how it all pans out. Having said that, If the new Animated toys are cancelled it will certainly be time for tears.

[TheDirtyDigger]

I have faith that Arcee will be released.

[FFN]

If they got to the tooling stage, then they'll be released somewhere, somehow, most likely in a post ROTF Universe sideline.

Gok asked at the Eric meet last year why Hasbro went in such a wildly different direction from the movie line for the post-movie TF line, considering other franchises such as Batman based post-movie series on the visual style on their very successful movies. Animated was developed sometime before the 2007 movie was released. Essentially, Hasbro created a series with a totally different visual style to the movie on the off-chance that the movie would not do very well - there was no cast-iron guarantee the movie would have been the success it is now. Hasbro was just covering all possibilities.

Since the movie was such a huge success and Animated apparently did not perform to expectations, it makes the most logical and business sense now to do a new television series and Transformers main line based upon the movie, since that's what most people will associate "Transformers" with.

It hurts, but Hasbro has masters to answer to: its shareholders and the retailers.

[Robzy]

This news really sucks!

If it doesn't go to retail, I wonder if they could release it as an online exclusive or something (like Mattel does on their website)