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Transformers needs a new Beast Wars moment!
It is the year 2025 and from everything I, as a fan, can see, the Transformers franchise is in a bit of a decline right now. Transformers One, a brilliant movie ruined by bad marketing, was a commercial failure. Paramount announced that it would not get a sequel. Hasbro is restructuring due to financial issues, looking to focus more on video games and games in general, and the toy industry as a whole is wondering how to deal with runaway tariffs and other economic woes that are currently plaguing the world.
Now this is not a “TRANSFORMERS IS RUINED FOREVER” piece here, far from it. Matter of fact, Transformers has gone through such lows before and the brand has not only survived, but flourished. Right now Transformers is still coming off an incredible, unprecedented boom period that started with the 2007 live-action movie, but which started to lose steam in the mid-2010s. Now, in terms of interest and sales, we seem to be back where we were around mid-2000s. Transformers is still a valuable, well-known brand, but far from the mainstream phenomenon it was 10 to 15 years ago.
What has that got to do with Beast Wars?
People who know me will probably also know that I’m a huge Beast Wars fan, but that actually has very little to do with the point of this article. I’m not sitting here advocating for a Beast Wars reboot or more Beast Wars homage figures (though I’d not say no to the latter). No, what I’m talking about is what Beast Wars did for the franchise in the mid-1990s.
I have some fond memories of Generation 2, it’s wild color schemes and – in the latter waves – innovative new figures, but overall the attempt to revive Transformers in the early 1990s was a commercial failure. Why? Because, for the most part, it was trying to do the exact same thing they did in the 1980s, where Transformers had its first boom period, and it no longer worked. Times had changed, a new generation of kids wasn’t interested in the old stuff, and so Generation 2 fizzled out and died.
Enter Kenner, a recent acquisition from Hasbro taking over Tonka. Hasbro wanted Kenner for the Star Wars license, but weren’t averse to making more use out of them, either. So Kenner was given the mostly-dead Transformers brand with the order to do something with it. Kenner was given almost entirely free reign. Some names were to be reused, the basic concept of robots transforming into stuff was to remain, but otherwise they were free to do something new. Something different. Something exciting.
Beast Wars, as much as old school fans decried it at first, saved the Transformers brand from extinction. It was new, it was different, it was exciting. And that, dear reader, is what I meant when I said Transformers in 2025 needs another Beast Wars moment.
Where did it all go wrong?
Starting with Beast Wars, the Transformers brand entered a period of regular reinvention. Beast Wars was different from G1 and G2. Then came Armada and the Unicron Trilogy, which was different again. The live-action movie and toy line redefined the franchise once more and cartoons like Animated and Transformers Prime introduced new aesthetics, new designs, and exciting new characters, as well.
During the boom period following the 2007 movie, we also got the collector-oriented lines that started with Classics, became Generations, and continues through this day, currently running under the name Age of the Primes.
Now, as anyone who has ever spent more than a few seconds thinking about things clearly understands, boom periods don’t last forever. In the mid-2010s the boom created by the 2007 began to taper off and Hasbro made several decisions that – to my amateur knowledge at least – didn’t necessarily hasten the decline, but certainly did little to soften it, either.
The first of which was that, starting with the 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon, Hasbro started to draw a sharp line between collector-oriented Transformers and Transformers for kids. That line has grown into a wall by 2025. Don’t believe it? How many Earthspark toys can you find on the Hasbro Pulse website? How many of the collector-oriented online stores carried Cyberverse figures? And on the other end of the spectrum, many stores (here in Germany, at least) haven’t carried any Legacy figures in ages and no Age of the Primes figures have made an appearance, either. The stores only carry the “kiddie” figures, based on movies or cartoons, which are mostly 1-Step-Changers, Titan Changers, and other extremely simplified toys that have been clogging the shelves for months, if not years.
The other decision I mentioned above was that Hasbro apparently believes that the franchise cannot survive without a movie in cinemas every two or three years. Michael Bay was clearly done with Transformers after Dark of the Moon, but was force-fed a steady stream of money until he agreed to do two more movies that, while still making money, clearly showed a diminishing revenue with every new installment. Hasbro tried to course-correct, giving us the brilliant Bumblebee Movie, but by that time the public was pretty much over these movies and audiences shrunk. Case in point, Transformers One, arguably the best Transformers movie ever made, but the least successful one in economic terms.
Don’t get me wrong, there is much that I, as a fan, love about the current toy lines Hasbro is putting out. Seeing new, improved versions of characters I saw on TV as a kid will never not be exciting to me. Obscure characters who had no chance of ever getting a toy a few years back are now featuring prominently in the latest Generations-style lines. I love that. I will keep buying that. But…
Something new, something different, something exciting!
Thinking back on the last ten years’ worth of Transformers media, how many changes have we seen, for example, in the franchise’ flagship character, Optimus Prime? Starting in the mid-1990s, Optimus changed looks roughly every two years or so (and yes, Optimus Primal is a different character than Optimus Prime, I know, but we’re talking marketing and franchise value). Beast Wars Optimus looked different than Armada Optimus, who looked different than Cybertron Optimus, who looked different than Movie Optimus, who looked different than Animated Optimus… you get where I’m going with this.
Cyberverse Optimus Prime looks nearly exactly the same as Earthrise Optimus Prime, who both look the same as War for Cybertron’s Optimus Prime, and barely differ from the many, many Optimus Prime figures we’ve seen in the Generations-style lines of the last decade. It’s always the same “Evergreen” look. Same goes for Bumblebee, Starscream, Soundwave, and Megatron. Now to avoid misunderstandings, I’m talking about the look and feel of the characters and the toys based upon them. I loved much of the Cyberverse cartoon, I enjoyed the hell out of Megatron’s portrayal in Earthspark, but the toys accompanying all these lines? They are basically interchangeable. In some cases, we’ve gotten the exact same toy in three different packages (looking at you, 1-Step Changer Megatron).
This is what I mean by Transformers needing another Beast Wars moment. The franchise needs a shake-up. A toy line, accompanied by a cartoon, which is not just the same thing all over again with slightly different dressing. A new approach, such as Beast Wars was back in the day. And – this is my personal opinion – Hasbro needs to remember that Transformers is a franchise for collectors and kids both, not two separate franchises that merely share a name. I love the collectors figures we’ve been getting lately, but I also want cool toys of the current cartoons, comics and movies. So as weird as that may sound, Hasbro, please stop catering to me solely as a 40+ year old collector and cater to my inner kid, too.
Where do we go from here?
Strangely enough, the current state of the Transformers franchise seems almost ideal for a new start. Transformers One, while a commercial failure, was almost universally beloved by fans and the ending of that movie is the ideal jumping-on point for a new cartoon series that carries the look. Make it a sequel to the movie, give the characters a make-over, introduce new characters, and have a unified toy line with figures that spark interest in kids and adults, both.
At least that’s my take on it. What do you think, fellow Transformers fans?
