If you’ve been around the fandom for a hot minute or two, you might remember the Heroes of Cybertron figure line from the early aughts.
You know, these guys:
Well, some stirrings in the community lately have unearthed some details from long ago — the extreme late ’90s! — that reveal the line might have been a little different from what we know.
Over in our forums, NovaSaber unearthed an old Hasbro interview from the Philadelphia International ToyExpo ’99, which talked about the then-upcoming line, as well as other things, such as the yet-to-be-revealed Beast Machines and Animorphs lines. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive version of the interview, which was originally hosted on an AOL website, was no longer displaying the images (don’t you just hate that?).
However, thanks to some folks from the TFWiki Discord and Sabrblade bringing it to us here, it would seem that the interview was archived to another website, which was then archived on the Internet Archive, with pics intact!
With the interest of preserving these for future generations of fans, check ’em out:
According to the interview, “If these were to be made they wouldn’t transform at all. They would be more along the lines of the Spawn line but with greater articulation and weapons.”
Heroes of Cybertron wouldn’t see life in the west until 2002, and even then, they were effectively domesticated imports of Takara’s Super Collection Figure: Transformers line. As a result, it’s hard to say if there was any sort of collaboration involved in bringing these to life, or if Hasbro simply slapped an old label for a concept they had lying around onto a product Takara made that was close enough to the original concept. The toy business, am I right?
In another part of the interview, the unnamed Hasbro representative seemed almost prescient when they said “I would love to make a scale model Devastator [about 2 foot high. (he made a hand gesture for the size)] I think it would make a great exclusive.”
16 years later, though he wasn’t exclusive and came in six inches shy of the mark, we nevertheless did get a Titan Class Devastator.
If you’d like to read the full interview for yourself, direct your browser over to this link.
And if you’d like to talk about this, or share any other ancient Transformers online ephemera, then head over to the “A trip down memory lane TF websites from the past” thread in our forums! We’d love to see what other relics from long ago can be turned up!
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