>>7929917It was the movies really that caused the change in thought. Prior to the Bay film, they STILL didn't really care about the characters as characters per se, and there's even a concept art they showed off explaining what they sought to achieve with making the movie concept arts into toys-- and it has a note that "Ratchet is not a major classic character"-- effectively showing that there was a small pool of characters they effectively were untouchable in design. Everyone else they probably welcomed the wild and crazy name reuses, as even during the Unicron Trilogy you had Hasbro constantly going "make the bad guys LOOK more bad" for design differences.
Though one of my favorite movie design concept arts is Soundwave where Archer (the brand manager) drew a G1 as fuck looking head and included a footnote saying "CLASSIC head design is KEY to fan reaction", and the movies just said "fuck it he has a monster face with two eyes and fangs"... and at the same time, Aaron sent back design sketches for Jetfire that were this
