Nezha: Transformers (franchise)

Cyberverse « Nezha: Transformers Cartoon Toyline

Nezha: Transformers (哪吒与变形金刚 Nézhā yǔ Biànxíng Jīngāng) is a franchise for the Chinese market, a joint effort between Hasbro and China Central Television (CCTV). The series combines the Transformers with the story and characters of the 2003 cartoon The Legend of Nezha, a previous CCTV production. The title character Nezha is a Chinese deity who, among other things, is a protector of commercial vehicle drivers.

Announced in 2017, with a staggered release in 2020 (sort of, see below), the franchise consists of:

• A televised cartoon
• A toyline

Nezha: Transformers follows the design and package styling of the Cyberverse series, including the character models for major Transformers characters, though it is yet unclear what this means for the fiction.

While intended for release in China, according to former Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, broadcast stations around the globe have expressed interest in taking on the show. However, due to the show's production issues, this seems increasingly unlikely.

A Line in Limbo

Information about this line is incredibly sparse, as the franchise itself is incredibly sparse. While the franchise did see release, it exists in a very clearly incomplete state, apparently in that horrible space where it's not been actually canceled, but the odds of it actually continuing as originally intended are increasingly bleak.

While a trailer for the cartoon was released in December 2019, the actual series has been seemingly delayed with no release window yet announced as of 2023. There have been only three toys announced/revealed that aren't building-block-based toys or pre-existing Cyberverse toys... and even among the block-based toys, the overwhelming majority of those are based on Cyberverse characters. Nezha himself has less than a half-dozen products in total, and he's the only Nezha-original character to have any toy released at all.

Just what the hell happened to this series is an open question, and the "best" answer is "probably a ton of different things". The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic doubtlessly played a role, but the franchise started production three years prior, so that can't be all of it. Strained relations between the United States government and Chinese government during production is another possible stumbling block, especially given CCTV is a government-run entity. And of course, there's likely a lot of backroom deal production shenanigans that we will never be privy to.

Toy-wise, that so little product exists while so much of the rest of Transformers continued to chug along does bring into question the original scope of the line to begin with... though it is possible that the show's production delays mean we've only seen the stuff that was ready to go or cheap enough to produce at the time, with more planned product intended to follow along with the show when it aired.

But again, it's likely we'll never actually know the whole story, or even most of the story.