I used to sell toys on the side. It was my hobby, and my attempt to run my own business. I can't honestly say it was a success, because we are talking in the past tense, but I gave it a good go over five years. I tend to be stubborn about these things, but I think I learned something from the experience. Skills, understanding of the fandom, understanding of Hasbro, and possibly of myself. The last Transformers line I dealt with was Earthrise, by which point the fun was going out of it. What follows is a discussion of that toy line, the impression it made, what worked, and what didn’t, from my point of view.
Context
Following on from Siege, War for Cybertron: Earthrise was the middle of the trilogy. Continuing the same trends as it's forebear, Earthrise promised G1 characters, this time in their Earth modes, with an almost "mini-Masterpiece" design. The initial response to it could be summed up as "yeah, those look really cool... wait...wait, you guys are doing the seekers AGAIN? Why did I buy that Prime then!?”. As I outlined in my Siege article, Hasbro had already done those characters the year before, so people got annoyed. It felt to some like they'd been duped into buying something when Hasbro had a better version on standby, which often was a limited release. Often, it was not the merely the same character, so much as the same engineering, but to be fair to Hasbro though, it might not be entirely their fault. Siege was seemingly hurried to market following the short-lived Power of the Primes, and then the other thing happened. Let us acknowledge the elephant in the room, Earthrise suffered a nine month delay due to the pandemic, a completely reasonable and understandable thing under the circumstances, which may explain a few decisions that Hasbro made. The line only did a year in general retail too, meaning that it just didn't last as long as Siege either. That said, there is a lot of inertia in toy manufacturing, so it's hard to say the extent to which Hasbro course corrected. The thing is though, if we take off our tinfoil hats, and put aside terms like "distribution woes" and "obsolescence", Earthrise does have an issue with consistency. When it's good, it's really good. Earthrise has a solid claim to having the best Optimus Prime, and the best Titan class, and does build on Siege's good points. When it's not, well, you get things like Arcee and what happened to the smaller price-points. If you can even find the toys...
The 2020 Earthrise Smokescreen Toy
Didn’t I buy this last year?
Something which is very notable in Earthrise is the ratio of 32 regular releases to 29 exclusives, including Generations Selects, significantly more than either Siege and Kingdom, and nearly as much as both together. As a majority of these multipacks covering characters like the Seekers, Earthrise technically has more contemporary exclusives than mass market versions of its toys, although Generations does tend to overlap, so it depends on how you count to an extent. There’s just less of it to go around, and its being reused on the same scale as Siege, which makes me wonder about last minute changes. Did a wave or two get reworked as Amazon fodder? Maybe not, this is possibly just a matter of stop-gapping, but it really wouldn't be a shock. The Modulator retools look like a wave 4 thing to me. Earthrise also does the same Generations Grab-bag thing Siege did, and as a result we get a lot of late G1 and 86-movie toys filling out the ranks. Its doing a better job than its predecessor did, if only because Earth modes are the norm, but the characters selected for the exclusives have to be some of the more desirable characters around, and notably, a lot of the ones with strongly defined Earth modes. It feels wrong that its easier to find a Quintesson than say, Prowl, Bluestreak, Ironhide, Ratchet, Ramjet, Dirge, Thrust and Runabout. Earth mode Bumblebee and Soundwave were also off being Netflix/Siege exclusives around this time, Siege having not actually gone away, thus ensuring comparisons would be ever present. Perhaps Hasbro thought that these toys may not sell as well immediately after their Siege iterations, as reused engineering was prevalent here, and so they scaled back, or just decided to maximise sales by making a big name a limited release? Whatever happened, the main line suffered as a result. The theme was undermined, the type of people who’d want the 1984 big names were now being frustrated by limited releases, and/or really annoyed at their Siege purchases, and assuming you were in a position to see Earthrise toys in person, the odds were it would be a less-desirable mass-market release. Obviously, I wasn’t Amazon, so this situation wasn’t great for my business at the time, but its not about me. Even if we hadn’t been dealing with a global plague at the time, all the while desperately looking for some escapism, this was a massive PR misstep, and I can’t stress that enough.
The 2020 Earthrise Arcee Toy
More Speculation
So, why might it have played out like that? I mean, yeah, the pandemic must have had some effect, and we must cut everybody some slack on that, but its not a blank cheque. Why did Hasbro arrange things like they did? Well, speaking as someone whom has sold toys as a business and dealt with wholesalers and such, I feel there is a point that I should stress for the unfamiliar. There is no internal difference between the assorted collector-aimed Transformers lines. Generations has been running since 2010 and its banner includes Studio Series and most exclusives; this is what things like product codes and shipping boxes tell us. It all bleeds together after a certain point, regardless of branding, so saying Earthrise followed Siege, or is better/worse than Siege is a little misleading. Siege and Earthrise are two peas from the same pod. Earthrise is functionally waves 6 to 8 of Siege, and if you view it like that, things start to make more sense. The two share so much in play patterns, engineering and price-points that they might as well be one thing, the only difference being packaging. For the record, Kingdom is a similar-if-nuanced situation, as while that continues the same thing, its hard to argue that beastformers aren’t a meaningful change. Furthermore, Hasbro is also a famously difficult company to source from, as their distribution tends run off a random number generator, and their thought processes can be a little inscrutable. So, the matters discussed in the preceding paragraph aren’t really out of character for them. They are, from a dispassionate point of view, trying to fill price-points. This viewpoint also explains the issues with theme I keep bringing up, as unrelated ideas get brought in to round out the numbers, and the habit of reusing stuff to save money. If anything can be said about Earthrise, its that it makes Hasbro’s business practices more noticeable, by giving the G1 fans exactly what they wanted, and then making it hard to buy. The difficulties I had in the basic area of having toys to sell, along with general pandemic uncertainty, were a large part of my decision to close my business. Not the only thing, and I’m certainly not blaming them, but it is what it is.
The 2020 Earthrise Exclusive Ironhide Toy
Engineering Heaven, and Engineering Hell
A few paragraphs ago, I used the words "mini-Masterpiece" in reference to Earthrise, and many of them were. We’re talking a high level of cartoon fidelity here, and often involved transformations. The poster boy for this is undoubtedly Earthrise Prime, but Cliffjumper was also an early leader in this trend. There’s definitely a lot of good in Earthrise, but there’s also more mediocre and outright bad. And with so many things, its often easier to write about the bad, than to highlight the good. As I’ve written previously, this “cartoon model” design approach would have a few unfortunate downsides, notably resulting in an Arcee so overtly flawed I almost can’t believe its from the same line. I really didn’t like the idea of ordering that one, especially in solid cases. New mould Earthrise toys often have a bit of a problem with partsforming, faux kibble bits, Q.C issues, troubling uses of translucent plastic, and prematurely ageing plastic from what I’ve heard. Moulds re-using engineering from Siege were largely OK if over-familiar at this point, but that didn’t stop some of them coming out worse in the process. You know how Earth mode Ironhide was an exclusive? Well, his earth mode was mainly a removable roof segment that went over his siege alt form, which still left his feet exposed, ruining the effect. Oh, and unpainted windows, and varying shades of red. Maybe some of these were exclusives because Hasbro knew it would be a harder sell otherwise…
The 2020 Airwave toy
Play Pattern Woes
Of course, while the partsforming and such were often merely minor annoyances, the real design failing was probably the A.I.R Lock system, which was a big part of smaller price-points, and is largely forgotten now. When I asked my twitter followers what Earthrise was like, this went totally unremarked upon, maybe I should have mentioned it? The basic idea here was to create base modes for Micromasters, with larger toys having connection points, the Weaponizer concept being reworked into Modulators which could form playsets, and Battlemasters playing a supporting role. Unfortunately, Micromasters in Earthrise were not a significant improvement over the Siege version, they didn’t quite commit, and this ended up spoiling two otherwise excellent play patterns. We only really got two Modulator moulds, and they were OK, but there wasn’t enough of them to really explore the concept, nor did they have the sheer mass required for a good base mode. We needed more and bigger. The Battlemasters were similarly limited in scope, and had the misfortune to be largely made of translucent plastic while turning into bits of road/shields. No matter how you spin it, that’s a worse idea than the weapon types they followed. As a result, the few new toys Earthrise had that weren’t heavily 1980’s, end up feeling like compromised curios. Definitely interesting, but it didn’t quite work. And I’d say this, as much as anything, took the shine off Earthrise for me as a collector, rather than a business man. I can take or leave G1 accuracy, what matters more to me is fun, and the edge cases. Siege had plenty of fun and edge cases. Earthrise had a bunch of G1 characters with very vanilla interpretations, and fumbled the bits I’m usually interested in.
Having dealt with the big picture stuff, let’s now look at the toys by price-point.
The 2020 Earthrise Slitherfang Toy
Battlemasters
Now, you can make the case here that the best toy here is one repackaged from Siege, Smackdown, although as retailer I wasn’t too fond of repacks. He’s a little robot minotaur hammer, whom serves as the Wreckers’ mascot, and he’s pretty great. Meanwhile, Rung is fine, and the three original moulds feature a lot of translucent plastic, while transforming into bits of road/shields. As noted, its a little hard to recommend those, but Slitherfang is interesting. Give him to Siege Barricade, he makes for a good colour match.
The 2020 Earthrise Daddy-O Toy
Micromasters
These followed on the same pattern as Siege Micromasters, I.e. half a team, an unconvincing weapon mode, and no real improvement over the original toys. If you’re not already onboard with Micromasters this is a hard sell for me. These were relatively easy for me to source wholesale, perhaps for that reason. Possibly the Hot Rod Patrol is your best choice here overall, given their relative competency, vehicle forms, and Daddy-O’s name.
The 2020 Earthrise Cliffjumper Toy
Deluxes
Things begin to pick up a bit in the deluxe slot, but its not great, especially around wave 2. Arcee is there, as is the rather simplistic Allicon, and Smokescreen is standing around like some lesser-known member of the Jackson 5. That’s a dated reference, I know, but this is an 80’s tribute line. Overall, wave 1 probably offers the best selection of toys, and probably the best Cliffjumper ever made, faults included, although if you have a certain big boy, your mandatory purchase is Fasttrack. Meanwhile, Airwave is a personal fave of mine, and Runabout’s fake heelie-wheels are dumb. Seriously, they stick out in car mode.
The 2020 Earthrise Starscream Toy
Voyager
Another weak showing, the main attraction here is Starscream, whom is a pretty good, but clearly Classics inspired, iteration of the character. He’s very much in the Goldilocks Zone of mass-market toys, yeah, there’s improvements that could be made, but there’s only so many before you go over budget or make things less fun. The rest of the slot is decidedly less brilliant. Grapple had a problem where his pegs would break during transformation. Snapdragon had a similar issue with cockpit doors. The Megatron retool has more partforming than the Siege version and suffers from photodegradation. Meanwhile, the Quintesson Judge is modulator-adjacent, partsforming into a prison playset. Its…. Okay?
The 2020 Earthrise Optimus Prime Toy
Leader
Let’s not mince words, if this Optimus Prime toy hadn’t been a thing, the discourse around Earthrise would have been completely different. On the upside, it has many upsides. Its a mass-market, mini-masterpiece; it does an awful lot well, too many to mention. On the downside, it shares parts with the Siege version, and basically is a voyager with a box trailer that does very little. Its both a shining example of the positives in Earthrise, while appealing deeply to collectors, and of Hasbro’s business practices, while frustrating collectors. Otherwise, this slot ends up a bit thin. Astrotrain is back, and making actual sense this time if that’s your thing? Sadly, I just didn’t like Doubledealer in hand. He’s big, but feels off, like it needed another design pass.
The 2020 Earthrise Sky Lynx Toy
Big Boys
Possibly the area that Earthrise unashamedly wins, we have two toys whom definitely fall under the heading of Generations Grab-bag, but are just as definitely welcome. Sky Lynx is a quality update of the frankly bonkers original, which throws an actually good base mode into the mix. Scorponok is something I regret passing on, another quality update that makes him a double-headmaster. Both have reasonable claim to be the best toys in their respective, and immense, size classes. Part of that is probably the source material, and the lack of other versions, but generally I’d say these were more fun-oriented than some of the smaller toys. I mean, Sky Lynx is a cat-bird-dinosaur-robot sponsored by NASA. And Scorponok takes design elements from Japanese media, not just the G1 cartoon, while stealing Fort Max’s gimmick. That's genius.
The 2020 Earthrise Exclusive Deluxe Centurion Drone Toy
Exclusives
Sorry, we still have to talk a bit more about exclusives. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about the seekers etc. again, because aside from plonking big names into this category, there are a few more interesting choices. The Centurion Drone set serves as a vessel for all the accessories which didn’t make the budget on other toys, which is good, but to the point were the actual toy is secondary, which is a shame. A few moulds from earlier lines come back, such as Punch/Counter-Punch, whom didn’t get a wide release before, so that’s nice. There’s also some G2 stuff, such as Sandstorm, a Gobot in the form of Bug Bite, an “Alternate Universe Optimus Prime”. Or, more accurately, Dead Prime from the 1986 movie. Because we needed a toy of a corpse, apparently. Of course, you’re gonna have a hard time finding them for a sane price.
Conclusion
Earthrise is endlessly frustrating to me as a toy line, due to what might have been. We can chalk some of this up to highly unusual circumstances, but generally it feels mismanaged. The ratio of exclusives to mass releases is borked, there’s varying issues with quality control, everything near the Micromasters suffered, and there was a general lack of wow factor. But then again, it might just me associating it with some past disappointments. It got some things very right, much more right than the series average. Overall, Earthrise is the awkward middle child of its series, and while that’s not the same as saying its bad, it doesn’t look that great with its siblings on either side.
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