On Saturday, February 11, SuperHeroHype attended Hasbro’s 5th Annual Toy Fair Collector-Fan Event at the Times Center in New York City. 2012 is a big year for Hasbro as they have two summer blockbuster movies based on two of their long-running toy lines, a couple of animated television shows and a video game based on a third and are handling toylines for what are expected to be two of the biggest movies of the summer. It was a little hard to be overly-excited going into the event this year because so much had already been released and leaked beforehand, but it’s always great to get up close to these toys and see them first-hand since they’re so much more impressive when on display in the Hasbro showroom then they are in the product pictures. Below, you can read an overview of this year’s presentation and descriptions of some of Hasbro’s 2012 toy line that we took hundreds of pictures of while visiting the showroom.
You can see a demo of what this looks like in the video below and then check out all the new Battleship-related toys and games in the gallery below it.
The smaller-scale Cyberverse line will be introducing a new Maximus scale in the fall starting with a giant Optimus Maximus playstation that will all you to combine all of the Cyberverse toys and vehicles. They’ll also be releasing some new Cyberverse vehicles – they’re putting out a Star Hamer with Wheeljack and an Energon driller with a spinning drill that includes Knockout from “Transformers Prime.”
The next big thing for 2012 is Hasbro’s new line of Transformers toys dubbed “Robots in Disguise,” the first wave out March 1, which offer new toolings of old favorites with more detail, but the key thing is that they offer moveable features that add to gameplay. They’ll include the likes of Ratchet, Arcee, Knockout and Hot Shot, but the larger Voyager series will have Optimus and Megatron with weapons that light up. Starscream and Bulkhead wil come in Wave 2, and then in the fall, they’re introducing the even more elaborate Weaponizers, larger bots that have even more spinning objects that come out from them.
Another big thing this year is the introduction of the Transformers Universe MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game being done with Jagex, which will debut in September. They showed a trailer which featured the rather distinctive vesions of the Autobots and Decepticons, which one assumes will lead to even further toys from Hasbro.
Another new take on the Transformers comes with their new Bot Shots battle game, which feature 44 smaller robots which can be launched at each other. When they collide, they explode open into a rock-paper-scissors type game with each bot having power scales that can be used to figure out who wins each battle. These will be launching on March 1 with an online game to coincide with the physical tabletop game, the Bot Shots will be offered at 5 dollars each with special launchers and 3-packes available, as well as special game packs showing that Hasbro really are putting a lot of thought into developing this game.
You can see some of the Marvel Universe toys below.
STAR WARS
Hasbro always offers cool Star Wars exclusive at Comic-Con and this year, they’re going to create a new “Kenner Lost Line” with six figures in a “Carbonite Freezing Chamber” multi-pack with one figure from each movie. As a Comic-Con exclusive, they’re offering a special variant of Jar Jar Binks (the Episode 1 figure), which is a Carbonite-frozen Jar Jar based around the joke created by a fan that ended up living at Skywalker Ranch. The other figures include clone troopers from Episodes 2 and 3, a sandtrooper from Episode 4, Princess Leia from Episode 5 and Darth Vader from Episode 6, all of which will be available at retail (separately) afterwards with the special “Kenner” packaging they’ve created for the line.
In 2013, Hasbro are finally going to introduce a figure based on Mara Jade Skywalker, Luke’s wife from the New Republic, who won the Fans Choice Poll of which “Star Wars” figure fans wanted to see.
Lastly for Star Wars, they’re offeing a new way to play Star Wars with the new Amp’d line, which are essentially customized vehicle toys launching with an Assault on Death Star playkit that offers a customizable Tie Fighter and X-Wing fighter with lots of parts and weapons that can be used to create different vehicle options. Future vehicles will include an AAT with Battle Droid Commander, a Jedi Starfighter and AT-RT, and it’s a bit like the Kre-Os where there will be roughly twenty different vehicles with different pricepoints.
That’s it for this year’s Hasbro presentation at Toy Fair, but we’ll be at Toy Fair proper over the next couple of days and we’ll have lots more pictures and fun stuff to share.
