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Hasbro Profits Skyrocket -- Thanks to Transformers


TheForgottenTaxi

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From the Wall Street Journal:

 

"Hasbro Inc.'s second-quarter earnings rose 33% as revenue in the Boys category almost doubled thanks to the success of the Transformers brand, offsetting declines in its other three product categories."

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303795304576453594217814986.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us

 

Hasbro's CEO says the gains were "led by strong gains in the Transformers brand, driven by Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

 

My personal take: I think the DOTM spin by Hasbro is a touch hard to swallow. Really, the movie that came out two weeks ago boosted your entire second quarter?

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Poor kids of today. They are forced to buy crap for toys in this day and age, and probably think that these Transformer toys are the best ever. To bad they didn't have the magic of Transformers from back in the day. There is a reason why Hasbro has been slumping the past few years not including the short surge of profits after the movies come out. Talk to me in 6 months from now if these toys are still "skyrocketing Hasbro's profits." If Ebay is any indicator, nobody wants these toys once the movie hype dies down; just like every other movie that has come out before it. You can't even give movie toys away, they're that bad. :tfsad

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Profit seems nice but their stock has been in the shit house for the past 6 months. Glad I sold it when I did.

 

Poor kids of today. They are forced to buy crap for toys in this day and age, and probably think that these Transformer toys are the best ever. To bad they didn't have the magic of Transformers from back in the day. There is a reason why Hasbro has been slumping the past few years not including the short surge of profits after the movies come out. Talk to me in 6 months from now if these toys are still "skyrocketing Hasbro's profits." If Ebay is any indicator, nobody wants these toys once the movie hype dies down; just like every other movie that has come out before it. You can't even give movie toys away, they're that bad. :tfsad

 

You must not have any of the original Transformers left. Take off the rose colored glasses. The 80s line was just a rife with repaints and cash grabs if not more so. I love my childhood as much as the next fan but I'm able to reconcile that it's gone. I love the complex and clever designs we're getting nowadays. I'd sell my grandma to be a kid again in this day and age. The toy selection, the video games, the choices abound. Hell, have you seen Nerf guns lately?! Semi auto with clips. Awesome sauce.

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:agree Especially since a bulk of the toys sat on shelves until the film came out.

 

Interesting that you pointed this out, Blitz, as I noted at Walmart today that the DOTM deluxes are like... all on sale for 5 bucks a pop, but the Generations deluxes are still full priced.

 

Not saying it means anything necessarily, but I dunno... just interesting is all.

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Poor kids of today. They are forced to buy crap for toys in this day and age, and probably think that these Transformer toys are the best ever. To bad they didn't have the magic of Transformers from back in the day. There is a reason why Hasbro has been slumping the past few years not including the short surge of profits after the movies come out. Talk to me in 6 months from now if these toys are still "skyrocketing Hasbro's profits." If Ebay is any indicator, nobody wants these toys once the movie hype dies down; just like every other movie that has come out before it. You can't even give movie toys away, they're that bad. :tfsad

Yeah but remember that the movie toys have one significant constraint that most other Transformers don't have. Most Transformers are designed as toys first, then screen characters later. For example the earliest Transformers were based on pre-existing transforming robot toys from lines like Diaclone, Microman, Astro Magnum, Mechabot-1, Macross, Dorvack, Beetras et al. - and they were modified and remarketed by Hasbro for the Transformers franchise. Marvel comics made the fiction to go with the toys as well as the comics - and a lot of the early comic and storybook art features toy-accurate art. Then later Sunbow went and made the cartoon, using simplified character designs by Floro Dery. Look at this image - on the left is Kohara Shouhei's more toy-accurate and detailed model, on the right is Floro Dery's simplified design which Sunbow chose to use and subsequently Marvel followed suit (well, some artists did, others chose to maintain a more accurate style).

 

But anyway, since most Transformer toys are conveived as toys first - without any consideration or concern for animation or comic models, they could design the toys as they like. No real need for things like faux-kibble. But with the movie franchise the characters are designed as movie models, not toys. Paramount goes and designs the characters as they want, then it's up to HasTak to take these HIGHLY complex 3D CGI models and somehow "translate" them into little toys that can transform, resemble the complex movie models, and still transform into an accurate looking vehicle mode and keep it within a strict budget limit all at the same time! For example, the first movie's Optimus Prime CGI model had over ten thousand different parts! :eek It's not an easy feat to "translate" all this into a small transformable toy within size and budget restraints. Now I'm not saying that this means that every movie toy is a gem - some are, but some are just inexcusably awful too (e.g. Combiner Class Devastator). But it's not a completely fair comparison to take a series of toys that were designed as characters for screen first, compared to your standard Transformer which was conceived as toys first.

 

And there were plenty of G1 toys that shelf warmed too. One classic example is 1986 Kup. He was a massive shelfwarmer - so much so that retailers like Grace Bros (now Myer) were flogging them off at just $5 each, which even by the standards of the day was a steal! I know this because that's how much my Kup cost! In fact, my mum bought a whole freakin' box load of Kups! I got one, my brother got one, my cousins got some -- and the rest were used as birthday and Christmas presents for ages... for the next year all of my friends got a Kup for their bday or Xmas from us! :eek And this was a toy whose character prominently appeared in comics, animation, story books etc.

 

You must not have any of the original Transformers left. Take off the rose colored glasses. The 80s line was just a rife with repaints and cash grabs if not more so. I love my childhood as much as the next fan but I'm able to reconcile that it's gone. I love the complex and clever designs we're getting nowadays. I'd sell my grandma to be a kid again in this day and age. The toy selection, the video games, the choices abound. Hell, have you seen Nerf guns lately?! Semi auto with clips. Awesome sauce.

First of all, G1 was NOT rife with all kinds of pointless repaints like we have in movie toys and other recent TF lines. There were variants, but not repaints done for the pure sake of trying to milk more money from fans. Variants aside, there was just one main version of each toy-character. There was no Night Attack Optimus Prime, Shadow Command Megatron, Stealth Bumblebee, Cyberfire Bumblebee, Sea Attack Ravage, Recon Ravage, Going Shopping For Milk Ravage etc. In fact, there are very few Transformer toys in G1, especially early to mid G1 that were straight up repaints. The exceptions were Starscream, Skywarp, Thundercracker / Rumble, Frenzy / Buzzsaw, Laserbeak... and that's it. Toys like Bluestreak & Prowl or Red Alert & Sideswipe are actually retools and not straight up repaints. And the first year Seekers and some of those cassettes existed as repaints because they already existed like that in Diaclone and Microman, so Hasbro took advantage of these different versions and made them into different characters. It wasn't really until 1988 that we had the same mould purpose-repainted to be different characters, and even then they were for two different markets (e.g.: Nightbeat, Minerva / Doubledealer, Doubleclouder etc.). It wouldn't be until 1989 with the advent of Micromasters that we had the same moulds purpose-repainted as different characters for the same market - and even then, the repaint would come with a playset that the original didn't come with (e.g. Mudflap, Greasepit / Stormcloud, Skyhopper etc.) It wasn't _really_ until mid to late G2 (1994-95) that we had a slew of purpose-repainted moulds as a new characters, e.g. Go-Bots, Cyberjets etc.

 

The whole craze of repainting almost _everything_ gratuitously didn't really take off until 2003 with Armada. Since then it's become a fairly standard and shameless practice, but for the first 19 years of Transformers it was relatively uncommon. Also, remember that G1 toys were - on the whole - very well designed for its time. It's not exactly fair to be comparing a toy that was designed in the 1980s and was awesome for its time, with a toy designed today. Sure, there were dodgy G1 figures like the 1988 Pretenders, Firecons, Battlechargers... but on the whole, most G1 toys were pure win for their time. Don't tell me you picked up a Jazz figure in 1984 and thought to yourself, "What a piece of crap!" -- well, maybe you did, but at the time I thought the toy was just awesomesauce! :)

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If there is this skyrocketing phenomenon occurring due to DOTM, it appears short lived, and it's certainly not translating into investments. There was the smallest bump in HAS stocks after the movie release, then down, down, down...its value is back to where it was a year ago.

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If there is this skyrocketing phenomenon occurring due to DOTM, it appears short lived, and it's certainly not translating into investments. There was the smallest bump in HAS stocks after the movie release, then down, down, down...its value is back to where it was a year ago.

 

It went up about 2 bucks if memory serves. Around 37 per share to like 39 and back. Maybe they'll do better this Christmas.

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