It’s not unusual for Hasbro to use the annual BotCon convention as its primary springboard for debuting upcoming Transformers products and figures, but for the past couple years they’ve gotten into the habit of holding back a reveal or two for SDCC, which gives Transformers fans a reason to stay glued to their monitors the entire weekend waiting for a nugget or two of news.
This year, Hasbro saved two of its biggest reveals — and I mean biggest, literally — for SDCC in the form of Superion and Menasor, two large gestalts built from the Aerialbot and Stunticon combiner teams, respectively. Now, there had been rumors swirling around since BotCon that 2015 was to be “the year of the combiner,” but now we have proof by way of visual confirmation, and the results look to be pretty cool.
Combiner teams have been the darling of the 3rd party world for a few years now with a variety of companies releasing Defensor, Computron, Menasor, and Superion, not to mention multiple versions of Devastator, Bruticus, and Predaking — all vying for our collector dollars. Hasbro themselves, however… well, their attempts at combiners in recent years haven’t been as successful. Their Fall of Cybertron Bruticus was a noble attempt at a retail-level combiner, but it still left an awful lot to be desired, and it proved to be yet another fertile starting point for some 3rd party teams who took Hasbro’s Bruticus as an opportunity to “fix” the figure by way of offering their own figures in place of what Hasbro produced.
TL;DR — the 3rd party world has been leaving Hasbro in the proverbial DUST when it comes to combiners.
With the debut of Hasbro’s Superion and Menasor, however, it looks as though Hasbro may be gaining back some of the ground they’ve lost. Both gestalts look promising. Not perfect, mind you, but promising and miles better than what we saw with Bruticus. They weren’t posed very well in the displays, so that may be what’s making them look “off,” but time will tell.
I’m think I’m definitely in for both teams and I can’t wait to see what other combiners Hasbro has cooking for 2015. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Piranahcon and Computron, but we’ll probably have to wait until Toy Fair ’15 for more news.
What we’re seeing is encouraging, though, and it’s great to see Hasbro investing this kind of time and effort in Transformers lines that aren’t related to the movies.
Aside from the combiner reveals, there really wasn’t much product on display that was new to us. That doesn’t mean it’s not awesome to see new pics of the upcoming Jetfire, Arcee, Windblade, and Chromia Generations figures, and we got to see some pics of the new Age of Extinction voyager Drift and Slog figures, so that was cool too.
The later half of 2014 and 2015 are looking good for Transformers Generations figures, and I’m excited to see what else Hasbro has in store for us.
