Tabula Rasa Characters: A Franchise's Anathema

MURRIETA, CA--This morning, as I was lounging in my room completing notes for my Summer course, I looked over to my nightstand. Sitting on it was a small, transforming toy that I had received from my partner’s uncle back in December. As one might be able to tell from my previous articles, I’m a big fan of the Transformers franchise, but this wasn’t one of those characters. One might then suggest that the figure was a GoBot–no to that, too. Its origins remained an enigma for months until I noticed it today, picked it up, and began to mess with it. I immediately noticed some impressive features of the toy: it had finely molded details on its vehicle mode, which was that of a Chevrolet Corvette, for example. Its headlights were molded in, as was its rear-view window and even the brakes on the wheels. Looking in through the clear-plastic windshield, one could see molded seats and a steering wheel as well, and turning the car-mode around even revealed molded in tail lights. I had never really bothered to look that closely at the figure before, but was immediately enamored with the details I saw.

I transformed it–an easy task. It shared the same transformation scheme as “Generation One” Windcharger, a similar toy, and after flipping out the legs and extending the arms the figure was in robot mode. Frankly, in this mode it looked fairly similar to a GoBot, channeling that line’s endearing proportions and robot mode silhouettes. It also did look superficially similar to Windcharger, too. With all of the successes and tenets of Transformers’s design philosophy emulated, then, why did the figure fall into such obscurity? I ceased taking notes for a time to truly look into the figure, and after scouring the internet, I found its name: Vette. Vette belonged to the “Convertors” line of transforming toys, which ran concurrently with Transformers in 1985, when Vette was first released. Vette was a part of the “Defender” faction, the good guys in Convertors canon, and was branded as one of their newest warriors. Besides that, though, Vette lacked any kind of defining characteristics or personality–thus, the reason for his obscurity, and the obscurity of the Convertors in general, became clear.

Transformers was a success due to the humanization of its characters. Despite outwardly being metallic, Transformers were marketed as beings that could think, feel, and maintain their own goals. They were not just blank-slate warriors like Vette and the other Convertors–they were individuals. Even the antagonists of Transformers, the Decepticons, had autonomous thoughts and strikingly different personalities. Astrotrain, the Decepticon’s transport, loathed dragging his team from planet to planet–he wanted to see action instead. Entire episodes were devoted to the chaos that would ensue when Astrotrain got a chance to momentarily seize power, and the audience viewed him as not just a machine, but a being with his own goals and aspirations. On the Autobot side, Red Alert was a paranoid security director who even distrusted his own teammates, and Mirage hated the war so much that Cliffjumper feared that he was a traitor. Never in watching the series did I think of them as just machines, and neither did the children watching it when it first aired, either. In fact, when Optimus Prime died in The Transformers: The Movie, so many audience members were emotionally distraught that it forced Hasbro to revive him again in the Season 3 finale.

Convertors and other franchises that attempt to mimic Transformers fail to capture the level of characterization that made the, well, characters, so special. It doesn’t matter if the figures look or operate at the same level as Transformers–Vette certainly does–if there’s no character. I buy figures, personally, because I feel some degree of attachment toward the character that it’s aiming to represent. I bought “Generation One” Dirge not because it was an outstanding figure, but because I enjoyed how he was written in the IDW 2005 comic book series. I sought out “Cybertron” Megatron because of his superb portrayal by David Kaye. Writing and humanization pays off–there’s a reason Convertors is so obscure while Transformers has Summer blockbusters. To be fair, it’s not Convertors’s fault; I don’t mean to insinuate that it is. Hasbro captured lightning in a bottle with its business model back in ‘84, but its continued success just speaks to the fact that characterization is key when selling toys, at least in the “robot” niche.

Vette now proudly sits on my shelf, along with other Hasbro figures like “Energon” Shockblast, “Energon” Omega Supreme, and “Titans Return” Trypticon–all characters with distinct personalities. It’s a piece of Transformers-adjacent history that I want to remember, and it’s undoubtedly a fun figure, too. It’s also a somewhat sobering reminder, too, of what makes Transformers so special. Hasbro now has seemingly forgotten the importance of humanizing their new characters, which stands in stark contrast with the era of the company including a bio on the packaging of every new toy released, whether in the form of “tech specs” (statistics tied to “courage”, “intelligence”, or “rank”) or short write-ups of the character. In “Legacy: United”, this principle has been dropped–all of the recently released Armorizer figures have no fiction tied to them, and no personalities at all. I own one of these figures, Magneous, but it is concededly hard to find attachment to him when I know nothing about him as a character, just as it was with Vette. It’s my hope that Hasbro returns to their past policy of creating the character to go along with the toy, so that I and others can continue to enjoy their products for years to come.