Toy Fair 2018: The TFormers Report Card - What'd We Get Wrong & What'd We Get Right?

The thing about rampant speculation is that if you open your mouth, you will almost certainly not always be right. But RAC has embraced that, and today he comes back to look over his own pre-Toy Fair predictions and see what happened and what didn't, and how close he got. There's only one category where he can claim 100% accuracy... keep reading to see what it is!

It's a fair track record if not a fantastic one. We saw most if not all of Power of the Primes Wave 2 and some of Wave 3 in the form of the Prime Masters and Terrorcons/Abominus. We didn't see the Legends and Voyagers. We saw wave 1 of the Studio Series, and while we didn't really see the Bumblebee: The Movie toys, we learned that Studio Series is the Generations expression of the Bumblebee movie toyline, with the movie figures reshuffled into a later wave. We definitely didn't see Power of the Primes Blast Off. So we're going to be a little generous and award ourselves a 3/5 based on partial credits.

More partial credits here: Evergreen/Authentics and Cyberverse turn out to be different things, and we saw one of them. We saw Novastar, AKA PotP Wave 4, and we saw Predaking. We didn't see Repugnus. Thundercracker should've been shown, but the display figure was misplaced and it turned out to be a Studio Series toy, not Power of the Primes. A very mixed bag prediction-wise; it seems Hasbro is working harder to surprise us, but since we'd rather be surprised, that's fine!

One thing you can say: even when we're not right with what is possible, at least our sense of what is not possible is pretty well calibrated. There was no sign of any of the five things we named as moonshot ideas visible at Toy Fair. (Sadly, that includes more waves of Power of the Primes; what is known is what exists unless you count exclusives.)

We were entirely wrong about the future of Generations, and we suspect that's going to make more people happy than not: the future is not Evergreen, but a new War For Cybertron trilogy exploring what we currently know as the pre-history of the Transformers. It's slated for the toyline's 35th Anniversary in 2019. With Power of the Primes ending before the fall with wave 3-4, we're thinking that perhaps the Evergreen-style Deluxe and Voyager packaging we've seen leaked will be a Classics-style stopgap line in the fall that will give us Generations-style figures of the Evergreen/Authentics/Cyberverse designs.

We were also wrong that there's an attempt being made to unify the line... but to be honest, we wish we weren't. Between just Authentics and Cyberverse, you'll be able to buy almost-identical Bumblebee designs for $5, 8, 10, 15, and 20 dollars. Mix in a possible Evergreen Generations stopgap wave and that adds probably one more at a second $20 option. Even if we're wrong about such a line, we'll have three subtly-different G1-derived lines next year(Authentics, Cyberverse, War For Cybertron Part 1), possibly more Studio Series (though we wouldn't bet on it), and Rescue Bots. If the market can bear that, seeing as all three are aimed at slightly different demographics, that's great. But if it can't and triage has to happen, it's going to be a mess. We love `84 too, but that love has its limits... and Transformers has become more, much more than just 1984. We understand that with no movies in the immediate future after Bumblebee we're likely headed into a conservative time for the line, but we'd really like to see the full, rich history of Transformers reflected to a greater degree.