Have you had that happen? Not had any problems with just-boiled water on other figures, but not had much cause to do similar with TFs.Clay wrote:You could try heating the head in hot water first to help weaken the glue, but not water so hot as to deform the plastic.
Equal might be pushing it. Hasbro just doesn't care / understands that it pays not to be too proscriptive. I think broad church is the natural end point of most franchises that are old and which been recycled many times with attempts at "new" takes. Trek is an odd one out, for instance, and I'm not sure that fans really give much of a shit about what Paramount consider canon. In part because it's not the norm in other franchises where comics tend to explicitly position themselves as having multiverses -- or simply different versions for TV, film, young audiences, etc -- and Transformers has joined them. Doctor Who throws in time travel as a main plot device as well, and 40K generally assumes all accounts are in-universe and unreliable and can therefore coexist.Clay wrote:It's not about parity of output though, but just that different major iterations are all equally canon even though many/most contradict each other.
A lot of the designs are heavily stylised as referential to a particular continuity, though, and whilst people will accept stand-ins they tend to want the ones that fit their preferred fiction or time period. Also goes for things like Marvel Legends.Clay wrote:The toys/merchandise are the same, but fans in various niches have dramatically different concepts on who/what the characters are.
TBH I think it's just that they're different characters. In some cases sharing little more than a name and a few design cues (and design cues can be thrown out completely as long as a bio states it's a character in the same or a related continuity).Clay wrote:And those different characterizations can be understood as different "modes" depending on who's looking at them. It's... more of a conceptual transformation than a literal one.
People buy figures to be completely different characters too, with or without customising them. Sometimes a play feature like Headtitanmasters encourages it. (Also something else that Marvel Legends explicitly does with some of the pack-in heads).
Considering their now-regular mining of obscure characters for mainline product as well as variants, many of whom had little or no characterisation, I'm not too bothered if they also want to keep the recognisable names on the shelf. And they are still throwing in some new characters.Warcry wrote:Hasbro's last CEO was pretty vocal about wanting to be an IP company, not a toy company. From that angle it makes a lot of sense that they shifted from "make awesome toys that people will love" to "sell memorabilia of characters people already love". And that fiction that doesn't really fit into the new paradigm (like the 2015 RiD cartoon and the old IDW) are being retired and replaced with twenty different flavours of "evergreen" legacy characters and concepts.
Personally it's more a case of I don't care about eg Picard because after decades of another extended continuity something that essentially resets to Insurrection seems extremely dull and limited. Doesn't invalidate anything, but it does make me care less about another continuity -- in terms of pecking order, audiences prioritise what they like. Similarly didn't have much interest in Regeneration One since it pitched itself as a Marvel US extension but ignored G2. And Discovery seems to have consistently wandered off into mirror universe and time travel (Enterprise couldn't stay away from time travel either; they didn't seem to realise that the time period could be interesting without future-future shinies). Lower Decks is very fun, though.Warcry wrote:After 20-odd years in the fandom I sometimes forget that this must seem really weird to people who follow other franchises. The utter rage I see from a subset of Star Trek or Star Wars fans when newer works come out and "invalidate" some novel or another from twenty years ago that they liked...as if they just won't be able to enjoy it anymore because it's not "canon" to the newest stuff.