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Transformer Box Art Is Amazing!
- Thread starter Falselogic
- Start date
Also the above is an awesome gallery, but man, what even was going on with Transformers post 1987 or so. Probably not a coincidence that's about when I got out of them as an obsession and got into Lego and video games instead.
Just try not to think of the implications that picture holds.
You weren't alone. Post '86 the line was struggling. Kinda like Mattel did with Masters of the Universe in '87, Hasbro pulled out all the stops and made the biggest toys of the whole line (Fort Max and Scorponok), and tried to button it all together with a mostly line-wide play pattern. But it didn't stop the cartoon from getting cancelled, which hurt interest more.
So the next three years of the line ('88-'90) were characterized by increasingly strange gimmicks to try to drum up interest. This was the time when TMNT was starting to get super popular, and the concept of big chunky transforming robots didn't have the same sheen as it did a few years back. Most folks who were following along as kids at the time dropped off like you did. Actually there's a pretty sizable chunk of people who remember the '87-'90 years as "Generation 2," because it was all so different (G2 is a whole other line from the 90s).
Anyway, I always have to come in and stan for late G1. I love the outlandish colors and designs. The Decepticon Pretenders are some of my all-time favorite Transformers. I only got to experience G1 in its last year, so the stuff I had as a kid was mostly Micromasters and Action Masters. (TBH even at the time I wanted the "real" characters, but I've grown to love the stuff I had too).
Plus, even though the cartoon was over, the Marvel comic continued through the end of the toyline and had many of its best stories around that time, some of them featuring the whackadoo 1988-1990 characters.
Let us never forget that Octopunch is canonically the most important Transformer ever
Egarwaen
(He/Him)
Title also possibly shared by Brainstorm (IDW 2005) and Perceptor (IDW 2005) who may canonically be responsible for the existence of multiple Transformers franchises.
Here is some more artwork by David Schleinkofer, the guy what did "One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall," the first image in Falselogic's poll:
(I know some of y'all recognize this one)
(Lots more here)
(I know some of y'all recognize this one)
(Lots more here)
Egarwaen
(He/Him)
Here is some more artwork by David Schleinkofer, the guy what did "One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall," the first image in Falselogic's poll:
(I know some of y'all recognize this one)
The Marvel/DC/Star Wars/Star Trek/Battlestar mega-crossover one is incredible, but this... This blows my mind!
Oh, now I'm trying to remember what happened there. IDW was fantastic, but a lot of start-stop with regards to trying to maintain a proper reading order and making sure you've got everything.
Egarwaen
(He/Him)
During the second MtMtE arc after Dark Cybertron, #34-38,
Brainstorm reveals that his briefcases are actually a complicated networked time machine, and goes back in time to try to kill Megatron. A convoluted series of events occurs, but it turns out his plan was futile; the mechanism he used for time travel was immune to paradoxes but instead operated by Terminator-style predestination rules... Except Perceptor had been meddling with the "paradox locks" on the time machine while bouncing Team Rodimus around the timeline, resulting in the creation of multiple parallel timelines, something that Cybertronian science had previously shown to be impossible.
Ah, right. I remembered the bigger part of that, and
that's how we got the functionist universe, isn't it?
...that's as far as I'm willing to go, because I know where this road leads. I'm not sure this newborn forum can handle the Multi-Verse of Eternity.
That contradicts Tom Sciolis Go-Bots, which implies that they created the entire Transformers multiverse