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A more "Marvel" repaint of the Legacy Bludgeon seems most likely, though not especially exciting. I wouldn't be super surprised to see Siege or Earthrise Megatron done up as the inner robot or "Destructicon Bludgeon" from RiD. Not sure what other options there'd be...SS 'Gamer' Megatron seems really ill-fitting, Kingdom Warpath too. Maybe SS Bee Movie Soundwave?
I've been expecting to get Windsweeper as a retool of Needlenose since I first handled the latter. If memory serves, the new figure's molded details included a mix of things taken from both characters' original box art. This line seems like as good a place as any to release it.
I like the original set of Fossilizers a lot, but it's tough to get too exited by the later retools when they are, after all, just skeletons.
Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
It'd be a harder sell to do Bludgeon again than Springer, Twin Twist, etc without more mould changes.
The 'Destructicon' version as a voyager I could see some appeal in if the chest was remoulded (which would also let them double dip on another Western release of G2 Megatron, maybe the purple version) and in terms of deluxes Slammer doesn't quite fit but they've already got form in reusing the Skullgrin design and that could get by with a head change as well as having guns that double as swords.
Skeleton retools like MD I can see some point to, lurid deco less so. But three or four feel like enough. Also I've just realised that Spindle was a retool -- never saw past the bloody awful colours to notice it's a spinosaurus. Minus the purple I'd have bought it.
The 'Destructicon' version as a voyager I could see some appeal in if the chest was remoulded (which would also let them double dip on another Western release of G2 Megatron, maybe the purple version) and in terms of deluxes Slammer doesn't quite fit but they've already got form in reusing the Skullgrin design and that could get by with a head change as well as having guns that double as swords.
Skeleton retools like MD I can see some point to, lurid deco less so. But three or four feel like enough. Also I've just realised that Spindle was a retool -- never saw past the bloody awful colours to notice it's a spinosaurus. Minus the purple I'd have bought it.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Reveals/listings:
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/07/tra ... cap-505394
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/06/sta ... ore-505244
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/06/tra ... ges-505263
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/02/22/202 ... ore-503473
Fairly obscure selection there with Star Raiders. The Cybertron Starscream and almost confirmation of Armada Wheeljack are fairly welcome (not sure SS will beat the original, and will doubtless feel very light). Sureshot would get us another Autobot Targetmaster.
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/07/tra ... cap-505394
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/06/sta ... ore-505244
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/06/tra ... ges-505263
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/02/22/202 ... ore-503473
Fairly obscure selection there with Star Raiders. The Cybertron Starscream and almost confirmation of Armada Wheeljack are fairly welcome (not sure SS will beat the original, and will doubtless feel very light). Sureshot would get us another Autobot Targetmaster.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Filch is probably the one that stands out most for me from that bunch. Always liked her, though I couldn't rightly tell you why. Cannonball and Lockdown both look good too, but neither are figures that I'm all that interested in getting for a second time. Cybertron Starscream looks cool, but I'll probably be more interested when it's repainted into someone I don't already own so many figures of.
The Mayhems honestly took the wind out of my sails a bit. It's too bad that the Deluxe Insecticons have the same ugly, mismatched legs, hips and crotch as Bombshell did, instead of the paint-corrected ones Shrapnel had. I'm not particularly interested in doing that custom again two times over with colours that are a lot tougher to match than black and silver.
Windsweeper actually disappoints me more than Crankcase did, because Needlenose was a very good toy and a very good place to start from. This could have been great if they'd put in any effort at all. Swept-back wings (you know, the thing he's named after?), double-thruster shoulders and new guns would have been a home run. Instead, the only retooled part is a head that looks like the box art.
Prime Breakdown is far and away the best toy of this bunch, but I stopped caring about new toys of TF:Prime characters 14 years ago when Hasbro refused to sell me a Breakdown to go with the rest of hte show cast. I'm certainly not going to start caring about them again now.
And every figure in the bunch comes with someone else's very distinctive signature weapon. Needlenose's Targemasters. Bulkhead's wrecking ball. Shrapnel and Bombshell's guns. No memorable bladed weapons for Chop Shop or Barrage. No arm-mounted flip-out guns for Windsweeper. Breakdown at least has his hammer...but only because Bulkhead already did.
They're clearance fodder at best. What a waste.
I don't suppose any third parties have been batty enough to do Triggercons?
The Mayhems honestly took the wind out of my sails a bit. It's too bad that the Deluxe Insecticons have the same ugly, mismatched legs, hips and crotch as Bombshell did, instead of the paint-corrected ones Shrapnel had. I'm not particularly interested in doing that custom again two times over with colours that are a lot tougher to match than black and silver.
Windsweeper actually disappoints me more than Crankcase did, because Needlenose was a very good toy and a very good place to start from. This could have been great if they'd put in any effort at all. Swept-back wings (you know, the thing he's named after?), double-thruster shoulders and new guns would have been a home run. Instead, the only retooled part is a head that looks like the box art.
Prime Breakdown is far and away the best toy of this bunch, but I stopped caring about new toys of TF:Prime characters 14 years ago when Hasbro refused to sell me a Breakdown to go with the rest of hte show cast. I'm certainly not going to start caring about them again now.
And every figure in the bunch comes with someone else's very distinctive signature weapon. Needlenose's Targemasters. Bulkhead's wrecking ball. Shrapnel and Bombshell's guns. No memorable bladed weapons for Chop Shop or Barrage. No arm-mounted flip-out guns for Windsweeper. Breakdown at least has his hammer...but only because Bulkhead already did.
They're clearance fodder at best. What a waste.
I don't suppose any third parties have been batty enough to do Triggercons?
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Assuming I get a set, if you're at all interested in working something out for the Breakdown it'll probably end up with a nephew otherwise. No connection to Prime, personally, and cross-generation bundling is particularly annoying.
There was a 3P Crankcase variant of an Ironfist (reportedly quite a breakable design or dodgy QC) and I picked up both of those back when they came out. Can't think of others. Small and a bit stylised but looks pretty good -- https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/ ... st.907243/
Windsweeper I'm annoyed at the asymmetrical guns most of all and would be looking for a pair of alternatives I can paint. It looks a bit better than the convention one, although the head sculpt isn't the best it could be.
And yeah, it's going to suffer from the same let down as other spring-loaded or mechanism-based toys that have been reimagined without the gimmicks, like Mattel's updates of Rattlor and Mekaneck in Origins where the long necks are just push on extra parts.
There was a 3P Crankcase variant of an Ironfist (reportedly quite a breakable design or dodgy QC) and I picked up both of those back when they came out. Can't think of others. Small and a bit stylised but looks pretty good -- https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/ ... st.907243/
Windsweeper I'm annoyed at the asymmetrical guns most of all and would be looking for a pair of alternatives I can paint. It looks a bit better than the convention one, although the head sculpt isn't the best it could be.
And yeah, it's going to suffer from the same let down as other spring-loaded or mechanism-based toys that have been reimagined without the gimmicks, like Mattel's updates of Rattlor and Mekaneck in Origins where the long necks are just push on extra parts.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Appreciate the offer, but I don't have much use for a Breakdown anymore. I got rid of most of my figures from the Prime show after it became obvious that something like 1/4 of the 20-character cast were never going to get released outside of Japan. I think I only have Starscream and Bulkhead left of the show cast, and maybe an Arcee buried in a box somewhere.
I hadn't seen the new version of those He-Man toys, though. I think that might be a new "winner". I had second-hand copies of both of the originals when I was really young, and the neck gimmicks were so clearly the entire point of the characters!
I wouldn't have minded a set of Triggercons with manual flip-out weapons, if it came down to that. Obviously spring-loaded would be better, but the big, silly, integrated guns are what stand out in my memory of the characters more than the actual mechanics of the gimmick. Having Crankcase and Windsweeper running around with hand-held weapons feels like the absolute peak of missing the point of the original. Especially when every toy these days has 200 5mm ports all over their body for mounting weapons.
I hadn't seen the new version of those He-Man toys, though. I think that might be a new "winner". I had second-hand copies of both of the originals when I was really young, and the neck gimmicks were so clearly the entire point of the characters!
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
I'd have been happy if Crankcase had actually had the cannons. Or with Windsweeper any effort, since the chances are it was a pre-tool and the option for matching guns (or even non-targetmaster cannons) could have been included.
Origins has been a weird run... some figures that didn't rely on moulding got their mechanical or water based gimmicks (Snout Spout, Webstor, Clawful, Roboto, Mantenna, etc) and some that were iconic purely for their gimmicks (e.g. Kobra Khan) lost out. Mattel really doesn't seem to like doing spring loaded things, for example. Thunder Punch He-Man was the only figure with a spring loaded waist despite that being the main action feature of most non-gimmick-based characters... and either there were production problems or stock was lost at sea (genuinely mooted as a possibility) but that figure's basically unobtainable and most retailers didn't get stock. The same for the Fisto/Jitsu spring loaded arms. The much more common Battle Armor figures did get a spring loaded feature, I suppose, and Clawful and Mantenna got things that were weird reversals of original actions. It seems to have been decided on a wave by wave or figure by figure basis.
The Snake Men were generally not great (King Hiss and Squeeze are okay, the disassemble gimmick working for Hiss better than the original to some extent) but my vote for worst would be Tung Lashor. In Classics there was a second head but in Origins there's a small thin separate tongue to immediately get lost or swallowed -- honestly, just supergluing it in would have been less rubbish.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Univer ... B0C4YP44MF
I could've forgiven Mekaneck somewhat if they'd gone beyond the original and included one or two extra neck pieces. Rattlor does rattle, surprisingly. So you can shake him, then stop doing that mid-attack while you slowly rip his head off and add a yellow column between two parts. Fun.
Origins has been a weird run... some figures that didn't rely on moulding got their mechanical or water based gimmicks (Snout Spout, Webstor, Clawful, Roboto, Mantenna, etc) and some that were iconic purely for their gimmicks (e.g. Kobra Khan) lost out. Mattel really doesn't seem to like doing spring loaded things, for example. Thunder Punch He-Man was the only figure with a spring loaded waist despite that being the main action feature of most non-gimmick-based characters... and either there were production problems or stock was lost at sea (genuinely mooted as a possibility) but that figure's basically unobtainable and most retailers didn't get stock. The same for the Fisto/Jitsu spring loaded arms. The much more common Battle Armor figures did get a spring loaded feature, I suppose, and Clawful and Mantenna got things that were weird reversals of original actions. It seems to have been decided on a wave by wave or figure by figure basis.
The Snake Men were generally not great (King Hiss and Squeeze are okay, the disassemble gimmick working for Hiss better than the original to some extent) but my vote for worst would be Tung Lashor. In Classics there was a second head but in Origins there's a small thin separate tongue to immediately get lost or swallowed -- honestly, just supergluing it in would have been less rubbish.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Univer ... B0C4YP44MF
I could've forgiven Mekaneck somewhat if they'd gone beyond the original and included one or two extra neck pieces. Rattlor does rattle, surprisingly. So you can shake him, then stop doing that mid-attack while you slowly rip his head off and add a yellow column between two parts. Fun.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Like clockwork: https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/dunge ... ice-summit
Transformers and Peppa Pig are mentioned. Apparently for D&D the strategy isn't just for artwork but for dungeon modules as well.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
It should definitely be possible to build learning models on top of just a company's IP, although by this point the onus is on them to prove it's just their content in there.
The fact that modelling is likely to be based on part on experience gained from illegalities is somewhat specious, or at least no more meaningful than large corporations investing resources in FOSS development or a lot of benefits having come from wartime technology or Nazi science. If we were going to discard every advancement we didn't like the creators of there wouldn't be much left.
The fact that modelling is likely to be based on part on experience gained from illegalities is somewhat specious, or at least no more meaningful than large corporations investing resources in FOSS development or a lot of benefits having come from wartime technology or Nazi science. If we were going to discard every advancement we didn't like the creators of there wouldn't be much left.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
I work with generative AI a lot in my current role. I also work with it a fair bit just for fun, on my own time. And I have to say that it's scary to see a huge company like Hasbro jumping into the AI pool with both feet. Not because I think AI will do the job so well that people's jobs will be automated out of existence, though. It's because AI -- when left to it's own devices -- currently does such a shitty job that I think a lot of companies are going to over-commit to it and wind up running themselves into the ground.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that AI is good for! If I need to know how to do X in JQuery or build a Python script to do Y, it can usually help with that. I know people who've used it to sharpen their resumes, to assemble bullet points into a polished sales pitch, or to summarize the findings in a large data set for laymen. But the common thread in all of that is that the human is doing the creative part of the job, and the computer is doing the grunt work at the end, taking that creative thought or concept and making it presentable. When a company proposes to do the opposite -- to get a computer to do the "creative" work and pay an intern to do the cleanup -- I feel like they've fundamentally misunderstood what the technology is and what it can do. ChatGPT isn't Mr. Data, it's the Enterprise computer. That doesn't mean that there's no place for AI in a creative endeavour, but the models we're using today aren't capable of being the "creative" part of the process.
But I didn't actually come to this thread to talk about AI. I came here to talk about Hasbro's latest Transformers four-pack, which has to be the most scattershot assortment of figures they've ever bunched together.
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/28/tra ... ers-507424
So, we have...
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that AI is good for! If I need to know how to do X in JQuery or build a Python script to do Y, it can usually help with that. I know people who've used it to sharpen their resumes, to assemble bullet points into a polished sales pitch, or to summarize the findings in a large data set for laymen. But the common thread in all of that is that the human is doing the creative part of the job, and the computer is doing the grunt work at the end, taking that creative thought or concept and making it presentable. When a company proposes to do the opposite -- to get a computer to do the "creative" work and pay an intern to do the cleanup -- I feel like they've fundamentally misunderstood what the technology is and what it can do. ChatGPT isn't Mr. Data, it's the Enterprise computer. That doesn't mean that there's no place for AI in a creative endeavour, but the models we're using today aren't capable of being the "creative" part of the process.
But I didn't actually come to this thread to talk about AI. I came here to talk about Hasbro's latest Transformers four-pack, which has to be the most scattershot assortment of figures they've ever bunched together.
https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/03/28/tra ... ers-507424
So, we have...
- Box art Tarantulas, of all the ridiculous things that probably eight people aside from me care about.
- Titans Return Squeezeplay, eight years after the fact.
- Prime Cliffjumper, who you'd have expected would merit a main-line release?
- Tarn, allegedly in his Cyberverse deco but they didn't retool the face, so it's actually just some guy from the background of the episode.
Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
Yeah. Having skipped Fangry due to the bundling and being another so-so- reuse of Twinferno, Squeezeplay unfortunately looks like more of the same just with Mindwipe. If they'd been available, I might have bothered, but TBH sticking the TR heads on headless originals is fine, personally.
I don't really get why the stores accept slight redecos of toys that have recently been released, unless they're being given glowing assurances that Tarn is a character people particularly want (which is the sort of scam that shouldn't work multiple times).
I don't really get why the stores accept slight redecos of toys that have recently been released, unless they're being given glowing assurances that Tarn is a character people particularly want (which is the sort of scam that shouldn't work multiple times).
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Re: Grumpy old men: armchair brand management
This is the first Target 4-pack where I don't look forward to every figure.
I like Legacy Tarantulas, but not enough to need another deco.
I'd be into a decent Squeezeplay, but this isn't it. The bot mode is good, but the beast head looks awkward floating above the neck, and the claws don't look like they can hold anything.
Prime Cliffjumper makes me consider the set. The Chase mold looks good, and this is a good use of it.
I never got Legacy Tarn, but he's being repacked. I don't know which deco I'd prefer, having seen neither of them in person. I know Tarn more from Cyberverse than the comics, but it was the comic deco I referenced for my Kre-O build.
I like Legacy Tarantulas, but not enough to need another deco.
I'd be into a decent Squeezeplay, but this isn't it. The bot mode is good, but the beast head looks awkward floating above the neck, and the claws don't look like they can hold anything.
Prime Cliffjumper makes me consider the set. The Chase mold looks good, and this is a good use of it.
I never got Legacy Tarn, but he's being repacked. I don't know which deco I'd prefer, having seen neither of them in person. I know Tarn more from Cyberverse than the comics, but it was the comic deco I referenced for my Kre-O build.
They accepted Thunderhonky in the last 4-pack, and that apparently did well enough for them to want another 4-pack. If Target's paying enough attention to know Tarn was recently released, they're paying enough attention to know that he wasn't distributed well enough to meet demand. Maybe they're hoping Cyberverse fans will army build him.