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.

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, never a HasLab project. We think of HasLab as doing the unachievable.

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

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. How much do you think about play patterns between figures?

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