Hasbro Pulse Fan Fest 2021/Questions and Answers

About a week after the Hasbro Pulse Fan Fest 2021, fan-sites were invited to a live Q&A session with Lenny Panzica, Ran Sun, and Ben MacCrae on April 15th, 2021. Matt Karpowich attended for MediaWiki.

Q&A

1. With both the Kingdom and Studio Series 86 lines, some of the 1986 movie characters are split between them. What's the thinking there?

We positioned Studio Series as the most film-accurate line, tapping into our live-action films. We realized there was a lot of hunger for the '86 characters - they're just so iconic, so we wanted to keep them separate from the core Generations line. With that said, the main lines rely heavily on G1, which is why you see some duplicate characters. It seems like a lot of people are invested in Studio Series versions of '86 characters, so in the future we'll be looking at how we can differentiate them between Generations and Studio Series, even if they're the same character.

Some of them correlate to each other narratively, like '86 movie characters showing up in our Netflix content. It's a bit of a parallel universe going on. Like it's a parallel universe Galvatron and Cyclonus.

Since Galvatron shows up in Earthrise, we didn't want to spoil that part of the trilogy, so by putting him in Kingdom you're able to get that character you saw earlier in Earthrise.

1.1. Is there the possibility that Kingdom characters will show up in Studio Series?

Anything's possible.

1.2. Thank you to whoever designed Commander-class Rodimus Prime!

Mark Maher worked on that, I'll let him know.

2. Windblade! Fans helped create her in 2013. Lenny, YOU designed her. But she hasn't had a new toy since 2018! Where did she go?

Where DID she go? Well, narratively, she just hasn't shown up yet - there's a lot of other characters we need to fit into the roster, get into people's hands. An opportunity will come up, it's just a matter of when. I'd design her 100 times over, I love Windblade! She's my baby.

3. The Ark looks awesome! Was that ever going to be a HasLab project, or was it always part of this line?

Always part of this line. When you think of the Ark in scale with other things, it's huge, but it's not god-sized. It fits really well with the Titan price-point, what we were able to offer with Teletraan-1 being a Triple Changer and all that - what were able to put together is actually pretty rad. So no, he was never a HasLab project. We think of HasLab as doing the unachievable.

3.1. Can we get Teletraan-1 as Mainframe for Selects? Action Master colors?

It's a great idea! It's cool.

4. How much coordination is there between the toy team and the creative teams on the cartoons and IDW comics? Does the toy team take into account the popularity of characters used in the comics when deciding on releases?

Yes, we do consider it. However, it's difficult to partner with IDW because their timelines are completely different to ours - our timeline is like a year to a year and a half ahead, while theirs are much shorter. It's hard to sync up with them. But we do consider what's becoming popular in their storytelling.

5. Recently, there's been a focus on taking parts and using them on other figures, like Wingfinger. How much do you think about play patterns and interactivity between figures?

It depends on the feature set and play pattern we're pitching for the year to sell to people. Before we came up with the Fossilizers, we had the idea of a system to customize your robots in cool and fun ways. "What can that be?" Then we'll go to our brainstorm process and be like, "what if they're BONES, dude, 'cause it's taking place in the animal kingdom?". That's how we handle that: form meets function. Function - customize your figures. Then the form of that - let's do bones.

6. At the Fan Fest, there was a Fossilizer combiner revealed. Was that intentional from the start? And does it have a name?

No, it wasn't intended from the start that they would be combiners. Just that the 5mm port system allows for it. Are you talking about that crazy thing that Mark built?

6.1. Yeah.

So literally, Mark messages me every night with rad bone Weaponizers that he found online or made himself. And it's the coolest thing ever because it's like 11 o'clock at night, he's saying "CHECK IT OUT!". But yeah, that was a Mark build, because he loves them - and he's right to love them because they're awesome. It shows just how cool the mechanism is.

6.2. With the piece he took off Wingfinger to demonstrate it, that felt like it was intentional? So we were just wondering if that planned or just something he did.

I think it's the beauty of the mechanism. If you have the right pieces, you can make something that looks intentional. It's just something he did. Mark is a very talented dude.

6.3. It would make a nice box set...

Ahaha. I mean. Hmm-hmm.

7. With Kingdom homaging the 25th anniversary of Beast Wars, are we going to see more homages from it? You've covered season 1 pretty well, but will we get into Transmetals, or even Beast Machines?

The whole intent of Kingdom was to shatter the ceiling of saying that Generations was just vehicles and robotic-type things. We know the fandom for Beast Wars is gigantic - me in particular, I'm a Beast Wars: Transformers collector, I used to wake up every morning at 6 o'clock to watch that and Conan the Barbarian - and the idea is that now, we have that ability to dive into those things. That was the strategy there: how do we do Beast Wars in Generations and do it right, give it the Generations veneer, textures. We're not going to do a smooth Optimus Primal. We're going to make him look like a silverback gorilla. So that was kind of the goal: we needed to do Beast Wars, how do we get it in there? And I think, narratively, John Warden and Ran did a great job.

7.1. I mean, you put a Beast Wars character into Dark of the Moon of all things.

Who'd we put in Dark of the Moon?

7.2. Quickstrike, as Darksteel.

THAT'S RIGHT! That's right, sorry, yeah - I was like "we're doing Quickstrike". I didn't get my snake tail, though.

8. BotBots! It's getting a cartoon but the toys are nowhere. Series 4 and 5 were hard to find due to the pandemic. We love BotBots, but what's happening with them?

BotBots is one of those great projects that was borne from the Transformers team at Hasbro and we're really proud of it. I think that announcement from Netflix on the new show is really exciting for the team, and we're going to bring those cute little characters alive on our Netflix screens. Having said that, when there's content, we always want to make sure our fans are able to get products. So nothing I can say at this moment, but more to come on the BotBots product.

9. To piggyback off the distribution of stuff, not just BotBots, but Cyberverse, and even Generations have been hard for people to find. Some people will find 50 Grimlocks at their Walmarts and at others it's impossible to find anything. Fans are trying to get this product. Is it possible for some of these items to get re-releases? Like the Amazon coneheads, or Ironhide/Prowl pack?

That's the second time we've had that question today - I guess we really need to think about the distribution for coneheads! We're so sorry that you can't find product at your local stores. We try our best to make sure that we create enough units for consumers, markets to be able to have a particular character. At this point, we don't have scheduled a rerun of the characters you just mentioned, but we'll put it into consideration. There is a "rerun test" where we review some of the characters and say, did we shorten this one, or undercut this one? We're definitely reviewing some of them right now. Once we have more clarity on what's needed, we may bring back some of the characters you've mentioned, as well as characters the other Q&A group mentioned. I said this to the other group as well - you guys have no idea how much we rely on your comments, dialogues, social media about the figures and where you can find them. You always have these great posts about "we found this character in this store in Texas" or "this is already out". Make sure to keep those dialogues alive, because we do definitely look into that. And once we feel like it's a character or something that we can bring back, we can bring back either in that form of, what we're doing with a story, or we just completely renew it as a reissue, like some of the Beast characters at Walmart. More to come on that, thank you for the feedback.

9.1. Well like, the Titan Omega Supreme figure was rerun recently through online retail.

Yeah. Yeah, so there are a lot of factors deciding what's rerun. Demand is obviously the number one factor, but there are other factors as well.

10. I think the huge news that came out of the Fan Fest was the auto-converting Optimus Prime. I thought the reaction was really interesting - people who don't pay attention to Transformers toys were talking about it. What lessons are you as a team taking from that? What was your reaction to everyone else's reaction?

I mean, the first reaction is that it was awesome and everybody loved it. I worked on the franchise side for a while before coming over to product, and I worked on that project. I spent over 40 hours listening to Peter Cullen's voice lines, to help make sure it was very G1-authenic, and it was a lot of love and extra hours that went into that from everybody that worked on it. To be able to get someone like Kevin Smith as an influencer to reveal that I think gave it a lot of credit as well - for people to be like, "okay, this guy is an 80s fan, he grew up in the 80s, he obviously loved Transformers, if he's backing it then I should love it too". I think that had a lot to do with it.

10.1. Any chance of future characters getting the auto-transforming treatment..?

<silence>

10.1.1. The seven-hundred dollar treatment..?

10.1.2. I wouldn't say no to a Megatron or a Soundwave! Or a Blaster!

Anything is possible. I know they're looking at the success of this first product to see if there are other things to bring to market in the future.

10.2. I know there's probably some legal reasons behind it, but I'd really like to call it an "auto-transforming" figure rather than an "auto-converting" figure. Is that okay?

... we should stick to the converting.

10.2.1 We don't want to genericize our trademarks.

Ah! There we go. Mr. Karpowich to the rescue.

11. Question from one of our Canadian listeners. Are the Shattered Glass toys going to be available in Canada through EBGames or Toys "R" Us like other exclusives?

Currently, I believe they're only going to be available through Pulse. We can look at a potential other distribution, but currently it's just through Pulse, especially as it's shipping with that exclusive comic book.

11.1 Following up on that, any update on shipping to Canada? It's like 30 bucks for a $20 figure.

That's something I can't talk to. PR potentially may be able to follow up, and also that's something Pulse would have to address.