We’ve long known that TRANSFORMERS 4 was going to feature a “rebooted” storyline, in that we were no longer going to be following the exploits of nerdlinger Sam Witwicky, the insanely beautiful girl he’s currently dating, his parents, John Turturro, and/or those army dudes, and instead follow our warring robots in disguise on another adventure. After all, Optimus and co. are the real stars of the show.

Not so apparently. It looks like Hasbo haven’t learnt a thing from 1986’s animated feature TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (in which they slaughtered all the fan favourite characters in the first ten minutes), and are set to hang it on a whole new cast of robots instead. No Optimus, no Bumblebee, no Megatron, no Mudflap nor Skids. And why this unusual decision to throw away these beloved characters? Merch. 

While DARK OF THE MOON did gangbusters as the box office, turns out that Hasbro weren’t that thrilled with the sales of their action figures. Addressing the poor toy sales at the recent UBS Best Of Americas 2012 Conference, Hasbro president Brian Goldner had this to say…

“…it’s because of same characters in all three movies. This is why TRANSFORMERS 4 will have a new cast of characters and it will be a story revolving around these new characters”.

Wow. Guess this makes it rather difficult to defend these films – as I personally always have – against those detractors who call them out as glorified toy commercials. If they’re willing to junk such well established characters in favour of new ones simply to shift a new set of figures then it would appear the films are basically thought of that way by the makers themselves. And what hope do we really have of the property maturing? Sigh.

Anyway, here’s the newly unveiled TRANSFORMERS 4 teaser banner to cheer us up…

…Nope. Didn’t help. It’s just the words trans, formers and the number 4. It blows.

How come High Moon can get the property so right in their CYBERTRON videogame series, yet the films must continue to disappoint? Maybe it’s best we remain Optimus-tic that Bay will surprise us come its release on June 27th 2014.

Source: TFW2005

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