Margaret Loesch

Margaret Loesch is an American television executive. She is the former president and CEO of Marvel Productions, and during her time with the company was one of the producers of the original Transformers cartoon and an executive producer on The Transformers: The Movie. She has most recently been tapped to head "The Hub," the joint venture between Hasbro and Discovery Communications, who are in preparations to roll out a cable network dedicated to children's programming. As such, she will also be overseeing the production of the next Transformers cartoon.

Notes

• The book Toy Wars by G. Wayne Miller contains the following passage about Loesch and her time at Marvel Productions (amended here for clarity):

Marvel [Productions] co-produced the G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, and Transformers series with Sunbow Entertainment, a subsidiary of Joe Bacal and Tom Griffin's ad agency, which did Stephen Hassenfeld's bidding. Scripts were written to include the latest toys. [As CEO of Marvel Productions, Margaret] Loesch sought a balance between creative independence and financial reality, but it took confrontation to finally achieve it.

One day her Transformers team came to her with Hasbro's latest demands. "They told us to write the scripts but leave blank the characters until they figured out what toy they wanted us to promote," a story editor said.

"That's it," Loesch said. "We can't do this."

Loesch prevailed. Hasbro would not relinquish control, but it begrudgingly accepted Hollywood as a storytelling partner in a medium it had known, until the 1980s, only in fifteen- and thirty-second increments.

External links

• Margaret Loesch on the Internet Movie Database