FAN EXPO Canada: Hasbro Transformers Panel and Interview
While at FAN EXPO Canada on Friday, Nerds and Beyond had the opportunity to sit in on the Hasbro Transformers panel and speak with team members Ran Sun (Manager, Global Brand Development & Marketing) and John Warden (Senior Manager, Product Design) afterwards.
All the Hasbro panels were moderated by Greg Ferguson, who is the vice president of marketing for Hasbro Canada. To commemorate the 35th anniversary of Transformers, they started the panel off by showing a video with clips of Transformers from the beginning until now. Looking around the room, you could see that the video had a nostalgic effect on the audience. During the panel, they had random trivia questions for the attendees to answer, and if you got it right you won a prize — like Ecto-1 or Jetfire.
Season two of Transformers: Cyberverse Power of the Spark follows the Autobots and the Decepticons, who can now command up and harness the power of the Allspark with vehicles from Earth. Some familiar faces pop up; fans can catch Jetfire, Starscream, Skylight, Windblade, and more making appearances on the show. To learn more about the series, and see the season two preview, click here.
Coming from Generation Studio Series are some remarkable deluxe figures that transform from earth vehicle camouflage into Decepticons and Autobots. Some Decepticons that will be available are a fighter jet that turns into Megatron, Scavenger that can turn into an excavator and has two massive wheels, Mixmaster (who is also a cement truck), and Shockwave, which includes the miniature Brains, Wheelie, and a paratrooper.
Are you ready for something groundbreaking that has never been done before? Introducing Unicron; The Chaos Bringer, The Planet Eater. It will be 27-inches tall in robot mode and 30-inches in planet mode; and while in planet mode it will sit on an included custom stand to support the weight, (which is 19lb!) Those measurements will make this the largest Transformer toy to ever be created. Unicron will have moveable eyes, articulated fingers, a removable head, planet-eating jaws that can move, and more. This is a crowdsourcing campaign, so it will not happen without the fans’ help. They have to reach 8000 backers to move into production. To learn more and contribute you can go the project website here.
After the panel and the question and answer period, we had the opportunity to speak with Ran and John in the EB Games booth about the Unicron crowdsourcing, going from design to production and more.
Watch the interview below!