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, 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.