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).

Masterpiece Bluestreak (2015)

One of the most persistent myths of the Transformers franchise was the existence of a "blue Bluestreak" among the original Transformers toys in 1984. Between a combination of Bluestreak's color-suggestive name, his box art, and the promotional images of the toy in Bluestreak's original instruction book and the catalog that came with that first run of toys (both of which used a Diaclone toy instead of the version eventually used for Transformers production), many fans were convinced that the original Bluestreak toy was indeed blue rather than the silver and red color scheme that was actually used (which, it should be noted, had no precise Diaclone equivalent, the closest Diaclone example having a black hood and top that the original Transformers version lacks). I myself remember seeing the silver-and-red toy in the '80s and thinking that the blue version used with all those packaging materials must have reflected some earlier variation that I had simply missed in the earliest days of the franchise. But, to this day, no legitimate sample of the toy in blue has ever surfaced in Transformers packaging.

BotCon 2016 Megatron

Once upon a time, the then-standard bearer for official Transformers conventions lost the convention license. In the aftermath of that final convention in 2004, the former convention-runners revealed plans for what they would have released at the 2005 convention. Chief among these revelations was a new form for Beast Wars Megatron, using the then-recent Robots in Disguise Megatron mold. Although this concept was extremely popular, it soon became clear that the new convention-runners had their own ideas for BotCon exclusives. Thus, Transformers fans had eventually come to accept that this idea would never become a reality....

BotCon 2016 Airazor

2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the Beast Wars franchise. While that era has certainly been popular (partly because it is often credited with saving the Transformers franchise from oblivion after a less-than-stellar revival attempt with Generation Two), attempts to tell new stories in and around the Beast Wars setting have tended to meet with controversy. Fun Publications' two attempts at pre-Beast Wars stories have proven no exception. In both cases, at least part of the controversy centers around the character of Airazor.

Transformers Collectors' Club Krok (2015)

It has been observed that the Transformers Collectors' Club has made something of a mini-franchise out of taking old Action Master characters and giving them new life as transforming toys. Krok is certainly an example of this trend. As one of the "new" characters created for the Action Masters line back in 1990, this toy from the club is Krok's first transforming toy ever.