>>5853883Warden is the best lead designer Transformers has had in ages, and if not for the budget cuts, we'd be having the best lines Transformers have ever had short of MPs right now. Unlike Aaron Archer's team, there's no bullshit or disorganization towards updates. archer would make stupid claims like Dinobots or combiners all looking too similar and impossible to get updates of, or inserted his personal bias like Sky Lynx and Headmasters being stupid and refusing to update them. He squandered the movie toy budget bonus on a bunch of Bumblebees and expanding the Bayformer lines and making the Classics line imitate the Bayformer designs. We where getting a bunch of toy-only movie shit but still couldn't get a complete 1984 line-up or new Ultra Magnus!
I respect Warden a lot, really. he did the GI Joe 25th anniversary line, which I thought was immensely cool. At the time it was right before Classics and while MP and Alternators where veering off in bizarre directions, and I remember wishing we could get a TF line at retail just like that; loving recreations of the classic stuff.
Plus Archer and his team robbed us of what we should've gotten back in 2002 instead of armada, a proper G1 remake. At the time, 80's nostalgia was coming in big , and GI Joe, Masters of the Universe, and other 80's stuff where coming out with remakes that harkened back to the classic 80's material and respected older fans. Meanwhile, Transformers got a belated attempt at ripping off Pokemon when that fad was dying down, with all of Archer's lame OC donut steels, like Hot Shot.
To make things worse, at the time G1 had a comic that was selling amazingly well, coming in on top sales for comics. That should've been the line for 2002, not Armada, a G1 reboot. We still feel the effects of archer's decision to this day,and there's yet to be a proper complete G1 update.
