Evergreen

I'm gonna take this moment
And make it last forever

In a commercial context, evergreen product is merchandise that is not "seasonal" – it can be sent to shelves for an extended period without needing to be refreshed or updated. For Transformers, this means product that is "franchiseless", not tied to any flavor-of-the-year brand like a cartoon or movie.

After the live-action film series catapulted Transformers back into the public consciousness, deliberately evergreen products became increasingly common throughout the early 2010s, typically for licensed merchandise or for ancillary, value-oriented Hasbro toys. These products would typically borrow key art from a scattershot assortment of sources, such as various Generations toylines and the Legends mobile card game.

Eventually, Hasbro moved to align these sorts of products under a unified evergreen aesthetic, and began implementing a purpose-made set of Generation-1-inspired character designs, created by Emiliano Santalucia, for use on all-and-sundry licensed and in-house products. They debuted in late 2016, without fanfare, in IDW Publishing's contemporary comic line, before showing up on a wider variety of merchandise during 2017. At the end of the year, fans got to see Santalucia's original art on the mobile app Quidd, which used a bunch of assets ripped from the internal brand bible as "digital collectibles" (like [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Non-fungible token|{{#if:NFTs|NFTs|Non-fungible token}}]], but, uh, fungible).

Toys based directly on the evergreen designs comprise the bulk of the Transformers Authentics toyline. The designs also had an enormous influence on the characters' depictions in Transformers: Cyberverse, Transformers: Rescue Bots Academy, Transformers: EarthSpark, and Transformers: Cyberworld.

Evergreen Character Toolkit Volume One

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From 2017, licensors were given a set of assets based on "the characters who drive the Transformers story". The guide was intended to nail down "key character elements that remain constant and consistent across all expressions [of the brand]", coining the phrase "character canon". Each character was given a biography and a set of key attributes, and presented with a turnaround schematic of their first toy alongside Santalucia's reinterpretation, labelled to identify "essential brand elements" of their design for trademark/copyright purposes (for example, Prime's windows and truck grille in robot mode). A few characters were given "pretengineering" cross-sections to illustrate the mechanical functionality of their bodies. The full set of characters included, informing all merchandise produced around this time, were as follows:

{{#if:true ||(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)}}

{{#if:* Optimus Prime {{#if:* Optimus Prime
Autobots }}{{#if:* Megatron Decepticons }}{{#if:| Humans }}{{#if:| Others }}{{#if:| Misc }}{{#if:| Misc }} 
}}{{#if:|

}}{{#if:|

}}{{#if:|

}}

If a Volume Two was ever produced, we haven't seen it!

Products incorporating evergreen character designs

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Fiction

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I'm gonna give my heart away
And pray we'll stay together

IDW Publishing's original Generation 1 comic line began introducing evergreen character designs in the aftermath of the 2016 Revolution crossover event. The implementation was last-minute enough that at least one cover had to be redrawn by the artist to incorporate Optimus's evergreen design. Designs have been introduced as follows:

Space Ape's Transformers: Earth Wars mobile game introduced a design of their own that would be used in 2017:

Most main characters in Cyberverse use interpretations of evergreen designs, as do the established characters in EarthSpark.

The Rescue Bots Academy cartoon redesigned previous Aligned continuity characters, including Optimus, Bumblebee, Grimlock, and Ratchet to use their evergreen designs. Early concept art suggests this mandate was not in place at the beginning of the show's development.

Grimlock and Optimus Prime in King Grimlock both use direct translations of the evergreen designs.

Toys

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'Cause you're the one good reason
You're the only girl that I need
Power of the Primes
Authentics
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Cyberverse
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War for Cybertron: Kingdom
EarthSpark
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Merchandise

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Hasbro
Licensed
Restaurant promotions
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