DON'T CANCEL ALT/BT LINE!!!!!!!!!!!

[ALPHAMAGNUS]

I dont know about anyone else, but i am furious !!!!!! not so much that has.tak is cancelling one of the greatest toy lines ever!!!!! but that they put forth zero effort to keep it alive!!!!!

 

I believe we can stop hasbro and takara if we show our support of the line, leave a post and say what you want about it, good or bad.

 

I personally believe this line was doing 100 times better than any other line without a tv show pushing it forward. I am not saying that a "cartoon " is what was needed, possibly a CGI or anime, to appeal to the older crowd that buys Alternators. it wasnt ever supposed to be for kids? was it?

 

A friend of mine bought his nephew an alt optimus, and the kid just looked at him like "how the hell do i work this?" most kids were befuddled by the complex transformations, just like the RID original molds. I am not saying make the toys dumb, just gear them toward the right audience.

 

I know that I would watch an ADULT SWIM type TF show, add some raunchy humor to a show about hi-performance cars that turn into robot A**kicking machines, and alot of older folks would buy the toys, i mean c'mon, have you seen the girls that come with the Binaltech Kiss toys. WOW

 

now i bring this fact to light, most people have never seen ALTs at all. I have a few friends that are big into model kits, mostly cars. one came over my place (mind you i usually display my TF's in bot mode) well anyway he saw grimlock in car mode and yelled., "WOW!, i didnt know you were into models too!!!" then i showed him that is was a transformer, and he almost had a heart attack. "that is beautiful , man" who says that about a toy, not to mention someone that doesn't collect tf's. I seriously think that more people would buy ALTs if they were located in a spot that wasnt next to yugioh and pokemon. (I won't even tell you what he did when i showed him my Zoids Ultrasaurus)

 

maybe if hasbro made a new line alltogether, if they teamed up with REVEL or another model kit company. who wouldnt want to make their own TF out of some plactic shrouds. it would save in assembly, we'd be doing all the work!!!! they would need to piant them either!!!! i would have to say out of 10 ALTs sold 4 are bought strictly for kitbashing. why not save us all the trouble.

 

If anyone else has ideas, comments or suggestions, please feel free to do so.

 

I mean if Family Guy fans can get a cancelled show back on the air after years of gathering dust, we have a fighting chance.

[Autobot032]

I mean if Family Guy fans can get a canceled show back on the air after years of gathering dust, we have a fighting chance.

 

No. No, you really don't.

 

Family Guy fans far outnumber TF fans, and considering how big FG is, compared to Alternators...there's well...no comparison.

 

Hasbro has made their final decision and said that Alternators are dead, dead, dead.

 

No online petition will work, I don't remember any toy based online petition doing any good, if it was even acknowledged.

 

You're welcome to hold your breath 'til you're blue in the face, but you're gonna be holdin' it a long time. Good luck, we'll see what we can do about getting you an air tank in the interim. Keep the faith man, you might just win!

 

:roll

[Buddykiller]

not to mention that the only reason family came back was because it was consistantly in adult swim's top ratings so there clearly was a demand for it even though there where all old shows. now if you wanna do the same thing then be my guest, go and continue to buy alternators even if their the ones you've already got.

 

a post on an internet message board is a fly on hasbro/taktomy's shoulders. at the time alternators came out, diecast model cars where uber hot with kids and adults alike, and alternators was an attempt to sell into that market, but unfortunatly it was very unlikely that they where perceived well by the adult diecast car collectors and was way too advance for kids, thus the only people that ended up buying them was, you guessed it, us. it only goes to show how little of an influence we as collectors have on the market. they might have made better profits by jacking the price up a bit steeper so as to allow them to cut back on the repaints, but theres really not much that could have been done to save the line as it turned out to be a niche only line, which is always death for a mainstream toy.

 

THEN AGAIN, thats what everybody said about classics when it was announced to have gone on hiatus, so i guess it did better than everybody thought, that being said theres always hope.

[ALPHAMAGNUS]

money speaks louder than words my friend. Low sales = might as well be low sales. It's not going to happen.

 

well, sadly you may be right, but i dont want to be the gutless coward that lets these companies do this, it makes no sense. I watched as the MOTU franchise buried itslef intoi the ground with endless reapints of non-existant characters, and I'll be damned if I am going to let these nimrods keep making awful mistakes, they wonder why a toy line fails, so they just make something else. "hey bill, since the transformers tv show sucked and the toys were awful, lets cancel it." "thats a great idea, lets do the same thing with someone elses characters" " hmm how about a DBZ line were goku, who can decimate an entire universe, fights with cards in a holographic arena! yeah !"

 

I am just trying to see if anyone else is as equally peaved at this , as i am.

 

Oh and btw, family guy didnt have that many fans, they do now because the guys at ADULT SWIM! saw a good thing and rolled with it!! if it wasnt for them, family guy would have stuck to fox's vault of "great show that didnt make it because the simpsons is a giant soul-sucking juggernaught" people saw family guy as a simpson rip-off, which it wasn't, if anything it's a "laugh-in" rip-off.

 

any way, i am not buying any of the movie toys in protest, I would normally drop 100's of bucks a month trying to get them all, I own about $4,000, in tf's that i have bought in the past few years. and I am sickened by the lack of quality in the recent movie toys, they aren't worth my $. I would gladly buy 5 ALTs a months instead, but no!

 

I just hope this is temporary. please don't attack ME!

 

I didnt cancel the line!

 

I am just asking for some support, even if I raise an eyebrow, i'll be happy here. too many good things aren't given a snowballs chance in hell. yet power rangers is going on 20 years

[Buddykiller]

any way, i am not buying any of the movie toys in protest, I would normally drop 100's of bucks a month trying to get them all, I own about $4,000, in tf's that i have bought in the past few years. and I am sickened by the lack of quality in the recent movie toys, they aren't worth my $. I would gladly buy 5 ALTs a months instead, but no!

 

I just hope this is temporary. please don't attack ME!

 

I didnt cancel the line!

 

I am just asking for some support, even if I raise an eyebrow, i'll be happy here. too many good things aren't given a snowballs chance in hell. yet power rangers is going on 20 years

 

boy your gonna miss out, these are some awesome toys, seriously. i'd wait another year and boycott another line >_>

 

i know it sounds smartass, but i'm dead serious.

 

anyway, back to topic, power rangers are a simple formula that WORKS. kids love ninja/kung fu/karate kick ass stuff and they don't care about the godzilla-esque sfx. alts on the other hand are way too complicated for kids to play with. i'd have probably not played with them as a kid. i liked my tfs to transform really fast so i could pretend it was like the show. most alts take a good 5 min to tf, and then theres fragility issues etc... power rangers are toys, and sadly to say alternators where more like models.

[ALPHAMAGNUS]

any way, i am not buying any of the movie toys in protest, I would normally drop 100's of bucks a month trying to get them all, I own about $4,000, in tf's that i have bought in the past few years. and I am sickened by the lack of quality in the recent movie toys, they aren't worth my $. I would gladly buy 5 ALTs a months instead, but no!

 

I just hope this is temporary. please don't attack ME!

 

I didnt cancel the line!

 

I am just asking for some support, even if I raise an eyebrow, i'll be happy here. too many good things aren't given a snowballs chance in hell. yet power rangers is going on 20 years

 

boy your gonna miss out, these are some awesome toys, seriously. i'd wait another year and boycott another line >_>

 

i know it sounds smartass, but i'm dead serious.

 

anyway, back to topic, power rangers are a simple formula that WORKS. kids love ninja/kung fu/karate kick ass stuff and they don't care about the godzilla-esque sfx. alts on the other hand are way too complicated for kids to play with. i'd have probably not played with them as a kid. i liked my tfs to transform really fast so i could pretend it was like the show. most alts take a good 5 min to tf, and then theres fragility issues etc... power rangers are toys, and sadly to say alternators where more like models.

 

dude exactly, why are these geared towards kids, that like selling guns that only fit into a child's hand. definately not a good idea. i understand that children rule the market. but lets be honest how many of the 6 foot optimus primes are being sold because some kid wants it? none, adults have their place as consumers too. if they only tried, maybe an onling pre-order, i know that most of you guys would have killed to get an ALT hotrod in the mail, just by ordering it.

 

ALl i can see when i head out shopping is a crap load of clearance toys that obviously didnt sell, yet they are getting another set of toys. even the classics line, I see tons of those just collecting dust.

yet they are being continued( kinda)

 

maybe to these companies , good sales = lots of clearance. i dunno , it just seems backwards

 

i think they were trying to gather hype about the ALts, by making them hard to find, when in this place we know as REALITY, they could have released a thousand different versions of the same mold, and people would have bought them

 

the truth is EMPTY SHELF = BAD SALES

 

and , FULL SHELF = GOOD SALES

 

Stupid , just plain stupid

[trench]

I'd say the ultimate deathblow to the Alts was when Takara killed BT. As I'd say that they were too detailed and complicated (i.e. too expensive) for Hasbro to continue development on their own.

 

I also have the feeling that Hasbro discovered securing the licences for the car's likeness was way more of a pain-in-the-ass than they originally thought it would be.

[Buddykiller]

trench raises good points.

 

as for the 6 foot optimus, yea, didja see the price tag on that?

 

honestly though, to market to adults exclusively and not take a big price hike, they'd have had to have gone BT style, and well i think it's obvious that hasbro doesn't like diecast much (even the Titaniums is being handled by Galoob), not to mention people would probably not pay as much for them as one would suspect. another thing that killed the alts where distribution. bad bad bad distro. when we got cases full of nothing but repaints stores started selling less and less so there where more and more repaints on the shelves which lead to them not ordering anymore from hasbro, and so forth and so on and here we are. even with a case of nothing but rumble and ravage, half of the nation didn't get them while the other half that did where oversaturated.

 

as for the other lines, apparantly the reason there was so much product is because the stores ordered a bunch which can only mean that they sold quite well actually. i don't think classics 2.0 (Powerglide universe thats a stupid title) will last very long. i mean everybody clamoured on and on about it because it was a new line that brought back g1 (we've always had homages, but an entire line of homages was something else), and we knew it was only going to last a short time. hasbro was very upfront about the fact that classics was only a filler until the movie line. all that imo drove up sales figures.

[hrsanchez15]

I like Alts so that sux that there giveing them the heave ho, but the last few that came out I didnt like for example Rumble his Alt mode (Honda Civic) sucked the last great Alt that came out Was Optimus and Nemisis Prime there Alt modes were awsome ( Dodge SRT10), sad to see you go. :wave

[trench]

another thing that killed the alts where distribution. bad bad bad distro. when we got cases full of nothing but repaints stores started selling less and less so there where more and more repaints on the shelves which lead to them not ordering anymore from hasbro, and so forth and so on and here we are.

I think the expense at developing the molds was a major contributor to the necessity of repaints - unfortuantely for Hasbro, repaints never sold quite as well as the first run molds did. Plus, I think in the case of Rico and Rolly, Hasbro used second-tier characters because they were hoping to use the better characters for new molds later down the line (e.g. they could have easily made Bumblebee using the Mazda mold [Meister's head without the visor would have been reasonably close if they didn't want to mold a new head] and Trailbreaker with the Jeep mold [shoot, Trailbreaker didn't even need a new head with the Swindle mold since it was his in the first place]).