Was the movie the biggest thing to happen to TFs since Beast Wars?

[GoktimusPrime]

I do agree that the movie was the biggest thing since BW - but it isn't bigger than Beast Wars. The Transformers line was _dead_. Dead. Kenner took a chance with BW and brought Transformers back to life. While the film is a bigger medium, within the context of the franchise, it's not as big.

I agree.
As far as Transformers is concerned, Beast Wars was our Rennaissance.

I'm frustrated that Hasbro have thrown away a lot of the momentum from the film. From extremely tenuous "movie" themed repaints to some of the really poor merchandising which will clog shelves for a while, such as the turnarounds. I'm still amazed that Hasbro followed it up with Animated - which is so ridiculously different from the film that it can't really grasp the momentum the film generated.

I hope the lines following the future films are able to ride their momentum better, so that the films aren't a flash in the pan (:

Yeah, the direction of Animated surprises me too. Usually when a movie comes out as part of a franchise, the franchise tends to follow up by importing elements of the movie back into it. For example, when the X-Men movie first came out, all of the sudden Wolverine stopped wearing yellow spandex! There was a new X-Men cartoon (X-Men: Evolution) where designs became a hybrid between the more traditional style and movie style for the characters (and I think "Marie" as the true name for Rogue has become officially canon now - her real name was never revealed before the movie).



After the Batman movie came out we started seeing Batman media being darker are grittier (as was originally intended from the comics) and the old campiness from the 1960s-80s (e.g.: Adam West, Super Friends etc.) is now a thing of the past.



When the movie came out I was expecting Hasbro to follow up with a new toyline, cartoon and comic line which would be influenced by the movie. There are elements of Animated that are influenced from the movie, but they're more like "easter egg homages" rather than anything terribly substantial. The movie decided to make the Transformers look and behave very alien. Some people complain that they look ugly, but I like the fact that they look so otherworldly. And there are many other things which the movie writers put in to continually remind us that the Transformers are not of Earth (e.g.: social faux pas) - it's something I've rarely seen since Bob Budiansky's writing from G1. Animated has some elements of this, but it's inconsistent and kinda random... and more often than not the Transformers really do act far too human (especially Bumblebee). (-_-)

There were so many cool concepts that the movie introduced that could've been incorporated in a follow-up line but Hasbro has consciously chosen not to exploit that and go the "Disney path" instead. :/

How could you leave out Action Masters???

the Actionmasters upgraded into the Generation 2 forms, DER!!!

Yeah Pulse... you might wanna get your facts straight before jumping in there. roller is correct, the Transformers were no longer Action Masters by time Generation 2 happened - that's why you don't see any Action Masters in G2! *DER*!

I think a big part of the reality that all of us need to realise is that the movie hype is gone.

Not completely. And as they say, "strike while the iron is hot."
Look at the Animated toys that are selling better than others atm. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Starscream are seem to be selling faster than Prowl, Blackarachnia and Bulkhead (at least in my observation). It seems that figures who carry the names of characters who appeared in the movie are more popular than those who weren't. A lot of following toy lines tend to sell because they ride on the coat-tails of the success of something before. Beast Machines sold pretty well despite the amount of controversy and criticism it copped from fans, and a significant part of that was because it was riding on the coat-tails of the success of Beast Wars.