I feel like at this point the kids and collectors-aimed toylines are distinct enough that Hasbro could probably get away with leaving them out of the kids' line for a year or two.
There'll always be a new G1-with-movable-fingers animation-model-accurate Optimus Prime on shelves; let Elita-1 or Springer or Metalhawk headline the cartoon.
The problem is that the very people who are tired of Optimus and Megs are the diehards- those of us who care enough to find a Transformers message board and post on it. We consume more TF media than most other people, of course there's an outsized subgroup of us tired of the status quo.
But that's not who Hasbro targets their media at. For them it's young kids getting into things for the first time- and therefore aren't tired of OP and Megs- or casual general audience types who know the brand but aren't "in the fandom." To them OP and Megs are the face of Transformers.
And Hasbro is a publicly traded company. If they run a show with Springer leading a team of Autobots against Cyclonus' Decepticons and it doesn't hit projected targets for viewership and/or engagement stock holders will ask "why didn't you make the franchise's two most popular characters the leads?"
That scrutiny doesn't exist if you just use OP and Megs because if a project underperforms with them at least you're not left with the sense that you left money on the table character choice-wise.
honestly i'd rather hastak just come to the realization that like...they don't have to make the designs of optimus prime and megatron in the kid-aimed line styled after g1 and they can give them unique designs instead
like yeah even if they're not carbon copies of the g1 designs, it's still boring as hell lol
I think this is a good compromise, because you get the characters that have that valued Brand Equity but you get some freshness.
Thing is I think this will happen. This stuff is all cyclical. Design, aesthetics, it's all cyclical.
Back in the mid-late 2000s Megatron's design philosophy had bottomed out. His G1 gun look hadn't been viable since the early 90s and since then there had been successive attempts to redefine him. Tanks, dragons, space ships... Cybertron was that creative freedom finally over-saturating with a multi-coloured Batmobile. A colour scheme that was only vaguely Megatron-like and his most uncharacteristic alt mode yet.
After that happened... and I was very much around at the time... having Megatron have some consistency was a breath of fresh air. After all RiD and the UT constantly redesigned OP but he always had consistency. Megs lacked that, and the idea of "Megatron will just be grey with black and red accents like G1 going forward and will mostly but not always be a tank" was seen as a much needed refocusing for the character and to pretend it wasn't celebrated at the time is a bit revisionist.
But that was close to twenty years ago now. We've had Megatron after Megatron who's always shared that same general G1 design and stuff like RiD Megs, or even the final straw of the previous philosophy that was Cybertron Megs seems appealing in retrospect.
And that's natural. After so long of keeping Megatron relatively same-y, we'll start to see some creativity. And then in like twenty five years it'll swing back.
None of this is objective in any way. Art, aesthetics, preferences for both, it's all subjective to the extreme. And what's popular swings from one side to the other constantly.
I think we'll start to see more experimentation with OP and Megs' designs going forward in the next few years.
IIRC it was the "G3" trailer, where the side panels folded out into mirrored/chromed sides, which gave off the illusion that the trailer had gone into subspace.
Yep. FansProjects' G3 trailer. The name came from some people in the fandom calling Classics "G3," as the next iteration of the G1 characters after G2. It wasn't a name that stuck but it was used for that trailer.
Yeah, I've been saying this for years. More leaders!
I think the best way to tackle that would be to expand on Animated's idea of different teams having their own leadership.
You could still have OP and Megs be the "leaders" of their respective factions but establish a few 'bot and 'con teams fighting on different fronts of the war across the galaxy and check in on them every few episodes.