Transformation 185: The Sound(waves) of War.

27/11/2015

If there's one thing we learn this week, it's that you can always depend on Soundwave to make any scene in any comic good.

Elsewhere though, Quintessons Junkions and Girls continue to let the side down. Also featuring Rodimus Prime's greatest foe: A Sharkticon.

All in my look at: Space Pirates! Part 4

7 Comments

Nathan webb

27/11/2015 09:16:00 pm

Like most readers of the original comic I was first a fan of the cartoon and had quite a fondness for sound wave and his more robotic personality. I was often left feeling short changed whenever sound wave turned up in the comics in his more human personality. But for once I quite enjoyed reading sound wave as a jovial leader falling into a trap and fighting his way out.

If rodimus reverts to hotrod without the matrix does Optimus turn into Orion?

I entered the competition virtually immediately the morning my comic arrived with the morning newspaper and was very hopeful until I got to school and was informed by a more... Informed friend who told me it was dive bomb not swoop!

Tim Roll-Pickering link

28/11/2015 12:03:05 am

At last the story comes to life. I suspect my dislike of this one is down to the first half being inordinately slow in building things up - and then the ten month wait for it to be completed in the Collected Comics only for it to be forgotten can't have helped. It wasn't until I saw scans on the web in the late 1990s that I found how this one ended.

Although I didn't know too many details from the cartoon - at the time season three episodes were especially hard to find on second hand tapes - it was clear that this one was taking far too many of the weaker ones for no real reason. Oddly that didn't include Wheelie - but as my only exposure to the character back then was here plus a few lines in the Ladybird novelisation of the film he came across as a resourceful one-off character whose rhyming just made for fun scenes with Wreck-Garr and not an obvious target for hate.

Arcee and Rodimus is the silliest moment of all, and feels worse because prior to this story we haven't actually seen Arcee or their feelings for each other so it just turns into idiotic hero running into a trap. And removing the Matrix simply turning him back into Hot Rod also rather undermines him - he's not someone who has grown up but just a boy enhanced by magic.

Tetsuro

28/11/2015 02:33:48 am

The Trypticon contest actually brings up two interesting points; one being what I can only assume is a rather British view of UK not being part of Europe, but more importantly, that Trypticon was sold in the mainland Europe, just not the UK. That's complete news to me.

Benway

28/11/2015 05:18:03 am

He was really cool and everyone wanted the toy, so obviously he wasn't available. Hasbro hated us.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

24/12/2015 07:38:53 pm

At some point somebody needs to work out the exact continental TF releases back in the 1980s as there's so much confusion around this. It looks as if Hasbro had different divisions covering the UK (and Ireland too?) and the continent - wasn't the latter still using the Milton Bradley name? - and this would explain many of the disparities.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

2/6/2022 05:54:18 pm

(Years later but having found this on a search...)

It seems clear that multiple toy companies' international arrangements could be complicated, sometimes having local branches of the company in certain countries and at other times partnering with a local established company. In addition not all countries were treated as individual units either in terms of organisation or packaging. It would appear that whereas there was a branch under the Hasbro name covering the UK releasing Transformers (though ISTR curious references to "Milton Bradley" in the Action Force bit of the intellectual property notices), much of the continental Europe was covered by one or more branches using the "Milton Bradley" name. Milton Bradley had merged with Hasbro in 1984 but often it takes a while for such mergers to be fully completed. And in Italy there was the GiG company licensing the line. As a result there would have been some quite different decisions taken about how much of the line to run with.

(Also the multilingual packaging can confuse about the combinations. There was a year in the 1980s when English appeared with French/Dutch/Spanish despite the UK ((and, I assume, Ireland)) having monolingual packaging ((did Malta get TFs at all then?)). Over on the Mask toyline a mixture of monolingual English and multilingual packaging could be found in the UK with the former usually having the local catalogues/addresses ((so was not a case of US packaging winding up over here)).)

Something that stood out in a recent video on the Spector Creative channel is just how important chains like Toys R Us were to the US toy industry at the time. But on reflection it and equivalents weren't so big here. The UK traditionally did not have a lot of what Americans call "big-box stores" and even today retail parks are generally much smaller than the US equivalents whilst the "everything under one roof" model has been limited (and department stores are steadily dying out). But I don't think the same was true in continental Europe where the term "hypermarket" is more than just something encountered in language classes. In the toy industry this would have meant there were not many big toy shop chains dominating things and nor were there either multiple toy aisles in huge hypermarkets or many enormous departments in department stores. Hamleys has a huge store in London but (if I get the history right) from the early 1930s until the late 1980s it was very much a one outlet affair and an attempted expansion in 1987 generally failed (and most of the other branches I'm aware of today seem to be tiny little units riding the name & tourist toys). Toys R Us only entered the UK market in 1985. And beyond toy shops, Argos doesn't seem to have begun its superstore branches until the late 1980s.

As a result I'm guessing that quite apart from the different size of either the UK alone or the UK + Ireland compared to some of the continental combined countries, the nature of the UK toy retail sector meant that many toylines had to be structured around an average shelf/peg space much smaller than in other countries and so it wasn't always considered viable to release the full set of items for a year in a particular line. It probably also limited the number of big ticket items that could be sold here. So there was an inherent constraint built into the market here regardless of popularity.

Ralph Burns

29/11/2015 02:46:03 pm

I love the air of desperation around pimping next issue's Action Force freebie. "See, kids, Action Force may be gone from the back-up story slot but we can't leave it alone for long! You will love it! LOVE IT!!!"

UNGH!!! HOPPER!!!
SPECIAL TEAMS!

Transformation 185: The Sound(waves) of War.

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