Transformers: Legacy
| The name or term "Legacy" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Legacy (disambiguation). |
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Transformers: Legacy (aka Transformers Generations: Legacy)[1] is a subline imprint of the Generations toyline, and the successor to the War for Cybertron Trilogy.
First revealed in late 2021 at Hasbro Pulse Con 2021, Legacy commemorates the approaching 40th anniversary of the Transformers brand by featuring new toys of characters from across the Transformers multiverse. The toys are largely in the scale and style of those from the War for Cybertron Trilogy, including numerous 3 mm posts and 5 mm ports from the C.O.M.B.A.T. System. Characters from franchises known for more unique aesthetics, such as Prime and Animated, are updated with the modern Generations aesthetic to fit with the rest of the toyline, which can range from a significant redesign to the same basic model just rendered more like a modern "Generation 1" toy. The toyline also sees the return of combiners from Hasbro for the first time since Power of the Primes, starting with the Stunticons in 2022.
The storytelling of Legacy follows characters brought together from across the multiverse as their universes collide.[2] As such, non-"Generation 1" characters are (usually) given prefixes associated with their series of origin, such as "Cybertron Universe". Replacing the package bios of old is a QR code on the back of each box, or for Core Class figures, on the instructions, which leads to the character's bio on the Transformers website. Certain characters have also been given these prefixes to denote specific iterations, such as "Comic Universe" Impactor.
Unlike its predecessors, Legacy was not replaced by a new line with its own distinct title for its second and third years. Instead, it was given a refresh in the form of subline imprints titled Legacy: Evolution and Legacy: United, with the existing assortments continued in terms of distribution. Similar to its predecessors, the Legacy toyline features package refreshes of several figures from previous lines, even all the way back to Siege, though Legacy elects to remove the battle damage paint applications from these toys where applicable.
General retail
Legacy
The first year of Legacy (theoretically) focuses on characters that can "harness the power of Energon", with as many toys including an often-translucent accessory that the figure can wield in multiple ways and combine with others branded an "Energon-infused weapon"[2], not too dissimilar to the 2003 Energon series. In keeping with this theme, the first wave of Core Class includes weapons specifically designed to combine into a large sword, but the gimmick was quietly dropped immediately after. Moreover, toys that do not utilize clear plastic in any part of their construction do not have these "energon infused" weapons, but some product descriptions do claim that the weapons are such.[3] Their random nature can be chalked up to them having been designed before the character roster was finalized.
Core Class
| Wave 1 | Wave 2
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Wave 3
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Deluxe Class
| Wave 1 | Wave 2 | Wave 3 |  |
Voyager Class
Wave 1
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Wave 2
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Wave 3 |  |
Leader Class
Wave 1
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Wave 2 | Wave 3 |  |
Big ticket items
| Commander Class | Titan Class | HasLab campaign[4]
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Evolution
Legacy: Evolution, the second year of Legacy product, was announced in fall 2022 at that year's Pulse Con. This subline imprint not only broadened the range of past Transformers franchises characters could be pulled from, it retired the Energon-infused weapons in favor of a series of integrated weapons referred to collectively as "Evo-Fusion." Admittedly, many of these are just the same "combine and mount weapons somewhere on the figure" play gimmick that has been part of the Generations line for years, but hey.
Supporting this is a continuation of the "Weaponizer" concept with a new tribe of modular Junkions that can mix and match body parts and accessories to create your own robot and vehicle modes, or armor and weaponry for other bots. Following Menasor, this subline's combiner is Volcanicus, made up of six Dinobots in the smaller Core Class. Evolution also puts some more focus on Armada characters to commemorate the series' 20th anniversary, although these new releases do not include any of the series' original Mini-Cons. The line also notably features the first mainline Animated toys since the show's cancellation in 2009; 2023 also marks the 15th anniversary of the Animated cartoon, but we doubt this was intentional.
Core Class
| Wave 1 | Wave 2
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Wave 3
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Wave 4
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Deluxe Class
| Wave 1 | Wave 2 | Wave 3
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Wave 4 |  |
Voyager Class
| Wave 1 | Wave 2 | Wave 3
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Wave 4 |  |
Leader Class
Wave 1
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Wave 2
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Wave 3 |  |
Big ticket items
| Commander Class | Titan Class | HasLab campaign[4]
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United
Legacy: United, the third year of Legacy product, was once more announced in fall 2023 at that year's Pulse Con. A celebration of the franchise turning 40 years old, United continued the previous year's focus on expanding the pool of characters to bring back into the toyline, including further Animated toys as well as toys from franchises such as Rescue Bots and Beast Wars II.
This year also introduced another iteration of the mix-and-match "Weaponizer" gimmick in the form of "Armorizer" toys, rock-like beings who can turn into vehicles, weapons and armor for other toys. These characters take inspirations from both the Rock Lords of the sister GoBots franchise, as well as a race of rock aliens from planet Daira who appeared in a single episode of Headmasters.. The name of their home universe even shouts out the molten realm within the core of the Earth in the Inhumanoids cartoon. Talk about a literal deep cut.
Core Class
| Wave 1 |
Deluxe Class
| Wave 1 |
Voyager Class
| Wave 1 | Upcoming wave |
Leader Class
| Wave 1 |
Big ticket items
| Commander Class | Titan Class |
Exclusives
Please note that the exclusivity listed for toys below applies to the United States. Also, most of Legacy's exclusives were available through Hasbro Pulse as well, but in much smaller numbers than their "main" outlets.
Legacy
Walmart
- Walmart had a large number of exclusives; first came a trio of normal Legacy-packaged Deluxe beast-bots (which were sold as Farmers exclusives in New Zealand).
- Next came the Velocitron Speedia 500 Collection, which focused on characters on the namesake planet participating in the namesake race. The first assortment was revealed on the June 23 2022 Fanstream. A second assortment of Deluxe Class toys was revealed in early October, without prior announcement.[7] Distribution of this second wave of product has been... let's politely call it varied. These toys were Kmart exclusives in New Zealand.
| Deluxe Beast Assortment | Velocitron Deluxes | Velocitron Voyagers
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Velocitron Leaders |  |
Target
- The majority of Target's exclusives were part of the long-running Buzzworthy Bumblebee series, a multi-franchise set of toys with increasingly-smaller amounts of Bumblebee in it. Still, Target got one of the bigger actual-Bumblebee releases this year.
| Legacy | Buzzworthy Bumblebee |
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Amazon
- Amazon's Wreck N' Rule Collection is centered on the fan-favorite Autobot subgroup, the Wreckers. Each box also forms part of a collage when stacked together, plus each set comes with a part of a carboard "iconic" Wrecker hammer display.
- The toys were gradually revealed one at a time over the course of several days. They then ended up shipping months earlier than originally stated, and well out of their reveal order .
| Wreck N' Rule Collection |
Walgreens
- Drug store chain Walgreens was supposed to have an exclusive this year. However, few people ever found it in US stores; arguably, more people have found it at closeout chain Ross well after Legacy was over, and many US fans turned to importing it from the UK if they missed the very brief window of availability on Hasbro Pulse.
Hasbro Pulse
- Technically, the HasLab items above could all be considered "Hasbro Pulse exclusives" as well. And many of the other chain exclusives ended up sold through Pulse, albeit in very limited numbers. Still, Hasbro saved one box set for themselves.
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Evolution
Walmart
- Walmart's Toxitron Collection "capsule" featured gloriously garishly-decoed toys based on unreleased concept redecos from Generation 2 (and one from 2003's Universe). The series was revealed on March 13 in 2023 as part of Walmart's "Collector Con", showing off the first three toys as well as putting them up for preorder. The toys eventually started shipping in mid-July, with the remaining toys being officially revealed at San Diego Comic-Con (though naturally they had both leaked and been found at Walmarts before the show). However, distribution has reportedly been spotty at best, with many stores missing out on some or even all of the capsule.
| Toxitron Deluxes | Toxitron Voyagers | Toxitron Leaders |  |
Target
- Target's exclusive offerings were a little slimmer this year, but did give fans a much-anticipated entry in their seemingly-annual 4-pack series.
| Buzzworthy Bumblebee |
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Amazon
- Amazon's series focuses on characters in "pre-war" forms, with a fair amount of inspiration from the 2019 IDW comics series.
Pre-Cybertronian War
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(Data Clerk Orion Pax and Senator Shockwave) |
(Miner Megatron and Senator Ratbat) |
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Walgreens
- Yeah, good luck with this one.
Hasbro Pulse
Generations Selects
Continuing on from the War for Cybertron Trilogy, the special edition Generations Selects line offers redecoes catering to fans, sold through Hasbro Pulse and numerous other online retailers in the US and Canada. This assortment is considerably smaller than for previous lines, mainly due to a larger output of concurrent retailer-specific exclusives.
Funnily enough, Black Zarak and Lift-Ticket were shipped before the general retail Legacy lineup arrived on store shelves, as was Magnificus for Legacy: Evolution.
| Legacy | Evolution |
Legacy (TakaraTomy)
TakaraTomy's normal-retail Transformers Legacy (トランスフォーマーレガシー Toransufōmā Regashī) toyline is largely the same as Hasbro's, with no notable changes to the toys proper; the one "big" change is that the packaging adds ID numbers for each item (sadly, Hasbro's Legacy toyline ditches the number system seen in the previous War for Cybertron Trilogy toyline). But the TakaraTomy line is markedly smaller than Hasbro's, having omitted all of the package-refresh figures and the first-year Core Class figures (the Cores were eventually picked up again with the Evolution Dinobots, et al.). On top of that, the list of exclusives for the line released by TakaraTomy is a more limited selection.
Beginning with Wave 9 (corresponding to Hasbro's Evolution imprint), TakaraTomy's bios began making reference to the characters' arrival in "Legacy World", presumably the same enigmatic location featured extensively throughout Hasbro promotional images and stock photography.
Comic
TakaraTomy's iteration of the Legacy franchise is accompanied by a series of (very) short comics on their website by brand veteran Hayato Sakamoto, thus far uncharacteristically continuity-light for a TakaraTomy outing as befitting Legacy's grab-bag approach:
| Transformers Legacy | |||
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General retail
Exclusives
TakaraTomy Mall
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Notes
"Universe" designations
The universes currently featured in the Legacy toyline include (as the line names them):
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Though "G1 Universe" and "Beast Wars Universe" do not appear on the toys' boxes prior to United, they do appear on the QR-accessed bios on Hasbro's website. What toys get "____ Universe" prefixes is sometimes arbitrary. The Diaclone-adjacent items in the Generations Selects and Buzzworthy Bumblebee lineups are not given the "Diaclone Universe" label. Velocitron Blurr is based extensively on a comic-original redesign but doesn't get the "Comic Universe" tag. Galaxy Shuttle gets "Victory Universe" on his packaging, but Metalhawk and Minerva don't get "Masterforce Universe" on theirs. United Tasmania Kid likewise gets a new "Beast Wars II Universe" tag, while the previously released Evolution Leo Prime and Nemesis Leo Prime were only given "Beast Wars Universe" tags in their online bios, despite them all originating from the Beast Wars II sub-franchise. Just roll with it.
Readers might notice that the original Robots in Disguise franchise was released in 2001, not 2000. However, Legacy basically treats both Robots in Disguise and the original Japanese version Car Robots as the same thing, and Car Robots was released in 2000. A bit more oddly, 2003 is considered the anniversary year for Armada, despite the toyline and cartoon launching in Hasbro markets in Summer 2002.
In TakaraTomy's take on the line, everyone is established as visiting the "Legacy World" (レガシーワールド), alternatively "Legacy Spacetime" (レガシー時空) or "Transformers Legacy World" (トランスフォーマーレガシーワールド) in full. Their origin universe descriptions are largely similar, to the point of using Hasbro's names for the lines rather than their own (in line with their use of Hasbro's names for the characters), but there are still some notable differences:
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The change from "Diaclone" to "Ancient Time Universe" is because TakaraTomy has a concurrently-running Diaclone revival line entirely separate from Transformers (focusing on the original pre-Car Robot aesthetic).
Other notes
- Emiliano Santalucia was responsible for the concept art of the various "energon weapons".[8]
- Prior to the toyline's reveal in October 2021, much of its roster was found through internal online listings from retailers such as Target.
- Some toy listings featured "Evolution" as part of the toyline's name in its first year,[9] far before the Evolution branding was officially introduced.
- Much like 2022's Studio Series lineup, Leader Class toys feature window-less packaging, which allows for expanded artwork. The others largely utilize the same minimized window and plastic tray-less boxes from the previous line, War for Cybertron: Kingdom, though with many hard-to-stack (but cool!) angles for the sides and no plastic window.
- The lack of a plastic window in the packaging has led to several drawbacks, most prominently the lack of support offered by the plastic window makes the packaging more susceptible to stress-based wear-and-tear, as well as tampering with the figures inside such as pushing Voyager Bulkhead's head into his chest cavity, making it appear as though the figure is missing his head.
- Due to the polarizing reception to the Generation-1-fied redesigns of Prime characters, Hasbro announced they were trying to find a better balance between preserving the original designs for non-G1 characters whilst updating them for the current aesthetic for later toys, particularly the Animated character updates,[10] and has not ruled out on Studio Series for more accurate redos of Prime characters.[11] Come Legacy: Evolution, the new Animated Prowl showed off this new approach, being basically the original design, just made more boxy. Meanwhile, Prime Skyquake ended up as a pretty even blend between the Prime and original Skyquake visually, while the Armada characters added to the line all had sculpts that were incredibly faithful to their original iterations (minus loads of gimmicks, of course, but the visuals were there).
- The original listings included a lot of entries titled "Energon Monster". As per Hasbro designer Mark Maher's Instagram post, these Fossilizer / Weaponizer style Core and Deluxe toys were dropped eventually, and last minute the Pretenders were approved to fill in these empty slots. Hence the different size classes between Skullgrin, Bomb-Burst and Iguanus.[12]
- A Legacy animated series, conceptualized as a sequel to the War for Cybertron Trilogy cartoon, was in the discussion stage at one point, but Netflix passed on the pitch,[13] as it didn't fit with Netflix's mandates at the time. Hasbro chose not to shop it to other platforms or services, as they wanted to maintain their good relationship with the streaming giant.[14] The show was intended to be much lighter in tone than War For Cybertron, and would have been set centuries after the events of Kingdom.[15]
References
- ↑ The official in-house title of the toyline is "Transformers Generations: Legacy", which is often used in online product descriptions given to retailers. The name used for the line's logo, however; is just "Transformers: Legacy".
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Pre-reveal of Legacy on the Transformers Facebook: "Celebrating an almost 40-year legacy of Transformers, universes collide as fan-favorite characters are brought together from across the multiverse, updated with Generations styling. You can harness the power of Energon, with all-new Energon-infused weapon accessories that come with figures across the line."
- ↑ Tarantula's product description says that he comes with a crossbow and an sic accessory, but Armada Starscream's product description claims that he comes with an energon sword despite both swords being casted in solid plastic.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Due to their sheer scale, all HasLab campaigns are kept in-house and are thus sorta kinda joint exclusives between Hasbro Pulse, TakaraTomy Mall, and a very select list of secondary retailers with Hasbro and TakaraTomy's blessing to cover additional regions around the globe.
- ↑ Design notes on Legacy Scarr and Swoop from Hasbro designer Evan Brooks on Instagram
- ↑ "You will see a regular Legacy box sitting on the shelf with all of our new Legacy: Evolution stuff for Wave 1 so that if you are a MIB collector you can actually collect these all in the right same packaging." -Ben MacCrae on the Legacy: Evolution panel at Pulse Con 2022
- ↑ Transformers Velocitron Speedia 500 Deluxe G2 Shadowstrip & Crasher Out In New Zealand – First In-Hand Images at TFW2005
- ↑ Then you will actually see the concept art Emiliano Santalucia drew up even before we had the rollout of characters planned for the year. I think this will provide great insight for all yall as alot of the planning for weapon combinations was to obviously utilize our 5mm peg across all scales but this was all sold in before character selects were figured out. -Mark Maher on Legacy Energon weapons, 2022/6/21
- ↑ BigBadToyStore listing : "Transformers Generations Legacy Evolution Voyager Wave 1 Set of 2 Figures" (outdated, "Evolution" has since been removed)
- ↑ "Q: For Legacy Animated stuff, would they be in the original style or more G1-ified like the TFP toys? A: The latter, however they have heard the stylization feedback about the TFP figures, so they are working on trying to find a better balance regarding G1-ification."—TFW2005 asking Hasbro about Animated updates in Legacy
- ↑ "Q: Could we also see more accurate versions of them and the TFP characters in Studio Series though? A: Entirely possible, they’re talking about expanding Studio Series beyond movies."—TFW2005 asking Hasbro about more accurate redos of Prime characters
- ↑ Mark Maher - Instagram
- ↑ "Per FJ DeSanto: they had a series for Transformers Legacy planned out, but Netflix passed on it. #TFconLA"—Mike Seibert, Twitter, 2022/3/13
- ↑ "To be clear Mike even though i may have said it, Netflix didn’t “hate” the pitch, in fact they liked it. But their mandates had changed and what we were proposing didn’t fit that. Hasbro didn’t want to shop it elsewhere cause they want to keep their relationship w Netflix."—F.J. DeSanto, Twitter, 2022/3/13
- ↑ "Also the show was a dramatic change from WFC as it was lighter and more colorful as it was set centuries after WFC and would emphasize the fun of everything. See how colorful the legacy packaging is and you’ll get the idea."—F.J. DeSanto, Twitter, 2022/3/13
External links
- Transformers: Legacy at the TakaraTomy website
