“Hey Blueshift, what are your thoughts on the whole ‘Twilight Alicorn’ thing which unless you’ve been living under a rock has caused so much consternation over the internet” is a question which nobody ever has asked me. I’m going to reserve judgement to be honest, as really, the proof is in the pudding. Sure it sounds like a nightmare pitch, but then again so does “Make a My Little Pony show that doesn’t suck” and we saw how that ended up.

Things that sound terrible have become brilliant. For example, from the moment I clapped eyes on him, I hated the casting of Matt Smith as the Doctor. Hated! “It’ll ruin the show forever!” I cried, until I actually saw him and was completely won over from his very first appearance at the end of the Tennant finale. On the other hand, things that are sure certs end up dreadful, such as “Let’s make a new GI Joe cartoon and put lots of talent with a great track record on it and give them full control, it’ll be… oh.”

Would I do things differently though? Yeah, probably. To illustrate this, I will take you through a potted history of Hasbro properties and the levels of ‘executive control’ levered on them via Transformers, a franchise I have known and loved for many years, and what has and what hasn’t worked.

Note – if you want to skip the history lesson, scroll down to the big ‘PONY TIME’ where I talk about ponies!

Obviously the big grand-daddy of them all is Generation One, back in the 80s. Now, as a kid growing up in the UK, we didn’t really get the cartoon apart from episodes chopped up into five minute segments on ‘Whack-A-Day’ or whatever video tape was at the rental shop. For me, Transformers was all about the weekly UK comic (yes, comics in the UK were weekly, suck on it America!). In the US though, it was all about the cartoon.

Here’s how it worked – it was pretty straightforward, and pretty clever. Every year, Hasbro brought in a new wave of figures. They used the cartoon in its purest form – shove in as many toys as they could. Nearly every toy from the first few years gets some sort of appearance with a few exceptions. There wasn’t really a core group of characters, each episode was Optimus Prime plus a gaggle of random picks going on an adventure. Of course, there were some characters who appeared more often than others, but everyone got some screen time. If you bought a Transformers toy, odds are that it would pop up on tv and be having adventures. That’s great for kids, it makes the character seem more ‘real’ (As a child, I would divide my toys between the ‘real’ ones and the ‘not real’ ones, the ‘real’ ones being the ones that actually appeared on their respective cartoon).



Some of these were in the cartoon. Some weren’t. Guess how that affected sales.

How does this compare to the current MLP? Well, it doesn’t really. MLP has a core cast, but doesn’t really have any interest in slipping in any of the other toy characters, which is a shame. Sure we get Cheerilee pop up, and Blossomforth once made an appearance, but for a channel like the Hub which was explicitly about linking up Hasbro’s disparate commercial aims, it’s odd. We know the show creators need to approve every character model/colour scheme. We know that Hasbro makes their own characters/colour schemes. Why not join forces? Why is Rainbow Dash’s friend ‘Lightning Dust’ rather than ‘Feathermay’, or vice versa, why didn’t Hasbro put out a toy of Lightning Dust when they saw she would feature in an episode rather than a ‘new’ character with no media support?

As a child, it’s a really powerful feeling seeing the figure in your hand on screen, even if they’re just in the background. Especially given that all the pony molds are the same and it’s just a case of putting a different colour plastic in the factory molds, it’s really puzzling why they’ve not prioritised that over ‘new’ toys.

Anyway, back on track. We then get Transformers The Movie. This film was an absolute disaster when it came out, tanking Hasbro’s initial plans for theatrical movies based on their other properties. Sorry GI Joe, you’re straight to video! It’s later been reassessed as a stone-cold classic (and rightly so!) but looking at it, it’s easy to see what went wrong.

Hasbro wanted to sell more new toys. Its 1986 line was completely new and different. Obviously there needed to be a clearing out of old characters to make the new ones more important, and they made one fatal error: they didn’t think anyone actually cared. The movie is an exercise in the systematic brutal murder of many beloved childhood heroes.

Here’s the infamous ‘shuttle scene’ from the start of the movie:

Hey kids, you know those characters you know and love so much? Brawn? Prowl? Ratchet? They die with barely a word! And look, there’s Ironhide who is in nearly every season 1 and 2 episode and who gets shot in the head!

The equivalent to this would be a My Little Pony movie in which Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash gets shot in the face in the very first scene and replaced with ‘better’ ponies. And then Twilight Sparkle dies 20 minutes in.



Hasbro gave Optimus Prime wings too! In heaven :(

There were post-movie seasons which apart from some dodgy animation were actually far superior to what had come before. However the Movie had left a bad taste in people’s mouths, and the franchise soon folded on television. All they had to do was shuffle the characters about rather than murdering them, and it’d have been fine!

Into the 90s and Transformers revives with Beast Wars, generally considered one of (if not THE) best Transformer show, but also held hostage to some terrible decisions. Part of this is the fault of the writers in setting up the show, if I’m honest. It was a ‘bottle show’ in which a group of Maximals and Predacons were trapped on a prehistoric Earth with no hope of rescue (to help with the limited budget for expensive CGI!). Any new characters could be introduced via the ‘stasis pods’ which were ejected by their ship and held in orbit.

One of the commercial problems with a show like this (and one that relates to my earlier point) is that it’s only really good for selling the characters on screen. For a show that first and foremost exists to sell toys, it only actually pushes a dozen of them. Worse than that, the setup explicitly de-canonised all the other toys that Hasbro was pushing out. There wasn’t a B’Boom or a Magnaboss or a Cybershark on the planet! The toy bios would say how characters like ‘Polar Claw’ were one of Optimus Primal’s top commanders… when obviously they weren’t. The show was so tight-knit you couldn’t really get away with sneaking in extra toys in your childhood imaginations without ignoring the show’s strong continuity.

It’s here we also get to the modern era of redesigning key characters and reselling them rather than just replacing them with new characters. For the second year of Beast Wars, Hasbro decided to make some of the characters ‘Transmetal’ which meant they got three modes and nice shiny metallic beast modes. Given that the characters were stranded on a prehistoric Earth with barely any resources, such an upgrade seemed outside the realms of possibility, so the show writers did what any sane person would.

In the first episode of season 2, the moon explodes, causing a magical wave of energy which causes anyone caught in it to turn into a ‘Transmetal’. They then shrug and get on with the rest of the season. It’s short, to the point, and doesn’t waste time with struggling to introduce new toys.

The same trick doesn’t work for season 3, when everyone gets made ‘Transmetal 2’. Rather than the ‘all in one’ approach, unfortunately they decide to introduce each new toy per episode, so most of the season is taken up with explaining why character X has been upgraded. It’s pretty painful to be honest. I prefer the ‘ripping off the plaster’ approach.

The next show was Beast Machines. This is fascinating, in that it demonstrates what happens when Hasbro give pretty much no interference in a property. Beast Machines was the sequel to Beast Wars, set on a Cybertron where Megatron is in control and Optimus Primal must fight a guerrilla war against him (he’s a gorilla, ho ho ho).

The problem is, it’s terrible.

Don’t get me wrong. It looks nice for the most part. It’s a perfectly fine show on its own merits. However, it’s an awful Beast Wars sequel and a dreadful Transformers show. It’s all about how evil technology is, for heaven’s sake! Characters from Beast Wars turn up and are completely assassinated – Rhinox stops being a loyal scientist and becomes a moustache twirling villain. Blackarachnia went from strong female villainess to weeping peril monkey. Megatron is the bad guy because he thinks Cybertron should be full of robots not plants. It’s this sort of situation when you wish someone from Hasbro had stepped in and just told them to stop.

The toys are also awful. There’s seemingly no connect between what is on screen and what is on the shelf. Half the characters don’t look remotely like their on-screen counterparts, the rest are weird sizes. Optimus Primal, the leader, is a tiny figure while the tiny character of Nightscream gets a toy as big as a child.



Believe it or not, this is one of the better efforts!

Hasbro then decided to top this all off with ‘Supreme Cheetor’, a figure that will forever live in infamy. “Cheetor is popular,” they said. “Let’s make a version of him that’s as big as a house cat so kids can’t play with it in a sane way with their other toys, costs $50, and transforms by standing up.” It was awful, shelfwarmed terribly and wouldn’t even sell when shops desperately slashed the price to $10.

The franchise probably would have died if it weren’t for Hasbro being able to import the 2000 Japanese cartoon ‘Car Robots’ and the associated toys, turning it into ‘Robots in Disguise’. Despite being a straight import, this actually did rather well.

Their next project was the ‘Unicron Trilogy’ of Armada, Energon and Cybertron, in partnership with Takara in Japan. Hasbro provided the character concepts and designs, Takara turned them into toys and a Japanese company made the cartoon.

Armada did really well. Ridiculously well, in fact. They had to keep repainting the same figures because they kept flying off the shelf. Unfortunately that’s where the good times stopped. Hasbro had no control over the content of the cartoon, and Energon turned out to be terrible. Cartoon Network where it was being broadcast noticed this, and basically did its best to hide it away. The Energon cartoon really was the pits; they even managed to spell episode title captions wrong.



I don’t like to call professional television show staff ‘lazy’, but come on, there’s no excuse for this. Insultingly lazy.

The animation company kept ignoring any of the notes Hasbro sent them, and decided to make Cybertron its own continuity (which Hasbro did not want, they wanted an Energon sequel) so a great deal of reediting and interesting dubbing had to be done to bring it back in line with the original plans.

Then we get the Michael Bay films, which… well… hmm. The first one was actually pretty decent, the second two were dire. Really, really dire. They did fantastically well though. The toy sales for the first film were so good that they had to pull figures from international stock to shore up the US releases (grumble grumble). There were loads of emergency repaints brought in to shore up the line.

By the time we reach Dark of the Moon, the third film, it all goes horribly wrong. The film makes over a billion dollars, but the toy line tanks. There are still shelves full of unsold movie figures today, and the reason is simple:

Parents don’t want to keep buying toys of the same characters for their kids.



”What do you mean parents won’t buy the same character again? Should we… should we give him wings?”

The movies kept pretty much the same cast. They looked the same in each film. This was a massive problem for Hasbro, given that they wanted people to buy a big expensive Optimus Prime figure each year. Parents who bought their kids Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Ratchet et al in the first year were less keen on buying something that looked exactly the same again and again. Sure, the actual toys were new – they were new molds, new engineering etc, but if you looked at the toy, they were the same.

It’s not rocket science. People won’t buy the same things again and again, they want to buy things that look new. They want to feel value for money. They don’t want to buy a pretty much identical Optimus Prime again and again, even if he is ‘different’.

Yeah, Dark of the Moon was a disaster. Waves were cancelled. Toys of characters who were in the movie weren’t even released in the US (though the planned US releases eventually made their way to Asia). All this from one of the most successful movies of recent years.

It’s also worth mentioning Animated. This was the cartoon in between the movies and showed on Cartoon Network. Brilliant show and fantastic toyline (which didn’t do great given the very ‘new’ designs but seemed to be slowly picking up steam). Unfortunately it was part-owned by Cartoon Network and so cancelled in favour of a show Hasbro owned completely that could be broadcast on their new channel, the Hub.

Let’s be frank, I’m not a huge fan of Transformers Prime. It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s what you’d get if you asked a computer to output a generic Transformers show. I’ve tried to watch a lot, but it never seems to spark with any sort of passion. Really, I’m still bitter that a great show like Animated was cancelled in favour of a generic show like Prime because of licensing issues.

Because they’ve used super-expensive CGI, they’ve gone for a ‘bottle show’ again, of a handful of Autobots and Decepticons, with a few cameos when the budget can afford it. Also they are apparently defending a city that is empty, because there’s no budget for animating lots of people. The whole show feels quite empty, really. For season 3, Hasbro are rebooting it as ‘Beast Hunters’ which includes new characters, and all the current characters redesigned (sound familiar?). As robots though, it’s easier to get away with redesigning them. It makes more narrative sense.

PONY TIME!



So what about MLP then? Where’s all this going?

No matter the outcome, I think Hasbro have made a fundamental mistake. Sure from a marketing point of view, the short-term benefits have been huge. It’s generated a lot of buzz, a lot of talk, a lot of publicity. Everyone’s going to be watching the episode to see what happens. People who maybe haven’t thought about MLP in ages are talking about it. Short term, it’s great. Long term, we’ll see what happens.

Problem is, the buzz is all from a position of weakness. The buzz isn’t that it is exciting, but that it’s an awful idea. The discussion seems to be mostly between “I don’t like it” and “I don’t like it but maybe it could be good”. I’ve not seen anything punching the air saying it’s a brilliant idea (I’m sure there are people like that, but it’s the minority). Yes, you get a lot of buzz, but the buzz is that it is a terrible idea that can hopefully be salvaged, not that it’s an exciting, welcome new development.

Secondly, well, yes, you want to sell more toys. Hasbro are concentrating a lot on a core set of characters, which can be a diminishing return, and it’s harder to keep selling the same figures again and again. I think they saw the sales of the Celestia princess figure at the start of the line, saw the sales of the Cadance figure at the end of season 2, and decided that each year their big event needs to be to push a princess figure. That’s all that makes sense to me. The thing is, what works once isn’t guaranteed to work again and again.



How many expensive toys that look like this will people actually buy?

MLP is very repaint-heavy. Most of the characters look the same anyway. If you’re trying to push a big expensive Princess toy, even if it is a new mold (I’m not sure that it is, but it might be), it still looks exactly the same as the previous figures to most people. Parents may be happy buying a pink Celestia, they may be happy to buy a pinker Cadance, but will they really triple dip for the same figure but in purple? They might pull it off, but it’s not proof of a winning formula by any means.

We’re in an economic slump. Toys are expensive and people have less money. Parents don’t want to keep buying variations on characters they already own, they want to buy new characters. If their kids have a Twilight, sure, some will cave in and buy ‘new Twilight’ but plenty more will say “No, you’ve got one already.” That’s what killed the Transformers Dark of the Moon line. They may be new figures, but to all intents and purposes the kids already owned them so the parents weren’t buying.

How would Mr Blueshift approach this problem?

1) Bigger rotatable cast

The game plan is to be able to keep things fresh and new. Sure you can have your core characters, but try to develop a bigger set of background ones too. You can insert one into each episode, basically auditioning them to see how the audience responds, giving them more screentime and toys the next year if your core audience likes them. Characters like Scootaloo and Trixie are a good example of that, she pops up in one or two episodes in season one, and then a lot more because she’s popular. At some point, your core cast will change as it is gradually rotated out.

You could have spotlight episodes about any character! Why not? From a sales point of view you want to push all your product, not just a few figures, and it only helps to make the world feel bigger.

This is my biggest point really. The problem with a bottle show is that once the audience has become bored with the core cast, there’s little place to go apart from start changing them in weird and wacky ways. It can’t hurt to have some trainees in the sidelines who have already rehearsed themselves in prior episodes.

This would be more episodes like ‘Wonderbolt Academy’ where Rainbow Dash is hanging around with previously unseen character ‘Lightning Dust’. In Blueshift world, we may have already seen Lightning Dust in the background, and she’d certainly have a toy by the time her episode was on air! Maybe she’d pop up again. Maybe not. Depends.

2) Background characters are toy characters

Or vice versa. I don’t care which. Hasbro started to do that with Lyra and Trixie releases, but there’s no excuse for not giving all their other ‘new character’ releases the colour schemes of characters already in the show. It’s free, low-effort advertising. Or vice versa – decide all the colour schemes with the animation company ahead of time and make sure they are all in the show and available on toy shelves. A few seconds exposure is still better than no exposure after all.



Why doesn’t this happen more? There’s literally no downside, nothing to lose!

3) Mix up the settings.

This is part of the ‘keeping things fresh’ idea. Change the setting for each season. From the pre-season publicity, I did assume season 2 would be in Canterlot, and season 3 in the Crystal Empire, but they kept it all in Ponyville. Why not have your core cast move to a new place, perhaps leaving behind the less popular characters and swapping them out for new ones (bye, Applejack!). We can always visit them again. This gives a chance story-wise for more new situations, characters and ideas, and toy-wise to push the sale of play sets. Everyone wins!



The toys said ‘Canterlot’! Why do they even say that if it’s a lie?

4) More interesting gimmicks

The princess thing is a gimmick. But it’s harder to sell the same gimmicks again and again. I was actually surprised that they didn’t push the ‘Crystal Pony’ thing more as I assumed that was the season 3 gimmick. Was it all really just to sell a wave of transparent blind bag figures?

When I was little, my sister had a pony whose rump had to be rubbed before it would reveal its cutie mark, that was exciting! Maybe that would be the year’s gimmick (Apple Bloom discovers a town of blank flanks and helps them get their cutie marks / they have hidden theirs out of shame / something). Perhaps seaponies? Flutterponies? It gives a good excuse to introduce new characters too.



Okay, maybe not quite like that, but you get the idea.

5) Prioritise soft toys more

It does confuse me how Hasbro have put a low priority on plushies. They are a huge business on sites like ebay, with toys going for vast amounts. Meanwhile, the official ones look horrendous. A bit more care, and you’ve basically got a license to print money. Add to that the idea that parents might not want to buy their kids another plastic Twilight Sparkle, but they’ll probably have no qualms about buying them a decent plush Twilight Sparkle if they have a plastic one already, because they are seen as very different items. With a good quality plushie range you can double your sales on characters! They’re making them anyway, why not make them well?



”We don’t like money”

In a Blueshift world then, we’d still see Twilight as the main character, but we’d get a lot more character rotation. Maybe Applejack would be phased out to the background and replaced with a more popular character. Can’t hurt, as long as there are toys of them! You’d see every character on screen represented by some form of product, at the very least a blind bag figure (because again, why not, they’ve got to be some colour, use the ones you’re already advertising!). Give people more chances to own all the characters they see on TV rather than ones they have zero attachment to and keep throwing in new things to the mix.

Anyway, thanks for listening! That’s my take on it, what would you do differently if you had to make sure a great show continued to be both good and sell toys?