Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Television Game Show - The Early Years

As I've pointed out in the past, I'm a huge fan of game shows. Easily my favorite genre of television. I was extremely pleased to learn last year, while I was between jobs, that BUZZR, a new free over-the-air broadcast station (i.e., not cable or satellite, which I would have to pay for) dedicated to classic game shows, was beginning to air in my area. BUZZR just celebrated its first anniversary earlier this month, but I'm more interested in another anniversary, which I also learned about through BUZZR: Friday, July 1st, marks the 75th anniversary of the television game show!

Masterpiece Exhaust (2015)

Repaints have been an economic fact of life for most Transformers lines, and the Masterpiece line is no exception. For some molds, such as the one shared by Prowl and Bluestreak, the repaint options are immediately obvious.^* But, for molds created to depict a character that had no mold reuse within the original Transformers line, the Masterpiece creators have had to look elsewhere for inspiration if they want to recoup the costs of creating the mold. Arguably the most frequent source of such inspiration has been the Diaclone line which created the molds for the original Transformers toys in the first place. Thus, it was fairly intuitive that the Masterpiece Wheeljack mold (released in 2014) could be used to represent the "Marlboor" variant, widely known in collector circles as an obscure pre-Transformers use of the Lancia Stratos mold.

If only things could be so easy....

BotCon 2007 Springer

BotCon 2007 was a turning point in the early history of Fun Publications' tenure with the convention. It not only featured the first box set to completely sell out even before the convention started, but BotCon 2007 was arguably the first time that the convention-exclusive toys were an intentional extension of the line of toys then-currently (or, at least, very recently) sold at retail. Especially because of the controversial inclusion of the Seeker jets, BotCon 2007 exclusives were touted as a way to "complete" one's Classics collection (as the revisited Generation One characters that came out in 2006 were more-or-less officially called, if not on the actual packaging of the time).