I may not have explained my idea well. I wasn't suggesting an intent to confuse purchasers about which toy is which, but to confuse young children who would ask for toys above their skill level. This way, when little kids in the store ask their parents to buy them a big kid toy, the parent could find the appropriate age level without the little kid knowing he's getting a little kid toy. The kid wouldn't whine in the store about getting a little kid toy, or whine later at home when he can't figure his new toy out.Warcry wrote:If that's the plan it's come nowhere close to working, since the Generations toys sold out anyway and nobody is buying the alternatives. And honestly, relying on your consumers to not be able to tell what they're buying is a horrible business strategy.
I wouldn't put it past them, though.
I have both the First Edition and mainline Prime toys of Cliffjumper and Arcee. The FE toys are noticably bigger. In fact, I think the mainline Prime toys were the first ones I noticed being smaller than previous Deluxes. Maybe the cost of making new molds was justified because the alternatives were: make all the Prime toys FE size (which would cost too much), or have a line of toys out of scale with each other.
One thing that bugs me about all the Bumblebee toys is that in the movies and Prime cartoon, Bee has a unique take on the standard door-wing silhouette. His meet in the back instead of being attached to the shoulders. But, most of the toys I've seen have them on the shoulders. I only found one that has them get about half-way to each other. I might pick up another Bee if they did a better job of matching one of the more distinctive elements of his character model.
I find the way Hasbro's doing things now especially frustrating, because it wasn't that long ago they were giving me exactly what I wanted. When I'd got back into collecting TFs, I wondered if there was any reason they couldn't just put out the 80's toys again. I pick up a Free Comic Book Day Armada book, and there's an ad for the Commemorative series.
Those were pricey, small, and poorly articulated. So, then I thought it'd be nice if they made more advanced toys of the original cast with current technology; skip the die cast if it'd keep costs down. They made Alternators. I got a bunch of those and liked them, but thought they were a bit too complicated to be fun toys. Then they made Classics/Generations/etc.