Hasbro's second livestream of the month was on YouTube yesterday, out of an intended four streaming events intended to kick off a celebration of the Transformers brand's 40th anniversary.

They talked about the HasLab crowdfunding for Omega Prime (which performed better than they were expecting; they were hoping to reach 20,000 backers and surpassed it). I didn't end up supporting the project, but I'm glad people are happy about it. As a point of interest, they ended up with 28,230 backers, and at $250 each, they collectively raised over seven million dollars from fans to make this toy happen. $7,057,000 to be precise. Insanity.

Evan Brooks was jet lagged from having visited Japan, and was uncharacteristically tired and unenthusiastic.

Four of the Star Raiders toys (formerly reported as Star Seekers) went up for presale, both on the Walmart web site as well as limited quantities on Hasbro Pulse. On the Hasbro site, Filch was the first to sell out, followed by Cannonball and Lockdown, and Ferak is still available as of this writing.

The Hasbro team talked about how Ferak's alternate face sculpt was specifically modeled to resemble the original Floro Dery concept for Cyclonus, which appeared in Marvel Comics, reasoning that since Ferak was originally a comic book character, it made sense to pay tribute to the comic book appearance for Cyclonus. I won't buy Ferak, but I would love it if they did a full-blown Floro Dery version of Cyclonus.

Also, in my mind I have always pronounced "Ferak" with the understanding that the root word was "fear," so that it sounded like "FEAR-ack," but throughout the livesteam they kept saying "fuh-RACK" as if it rhymed with "attack." Defintiely not how I've been hearing the name in my head.

We also saw the Target-exclusive ̶c̶o̶r̶p̶o̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶s̶e̶l̶l̶o̶u̶t store exclusive Optimus Prime toy emblazoned with Target store logos, and Bullseye, the redeco of Siege Ravage. I had thought Bullseye was intended to look like a Target gift card, but according to Hasbro, he's actually a bubble mailer, which seems... a lot more weird, honestly. He's available for preorder for $59.99 and ships in June 2024.

Next week is supposed to contain more exciting reveals. A lot of fans in the video chat and comments were hoping to see Studio Series '86 Swoop, of whom there's been no mention thus far. Ben MacCrae mentioned that his favorite toy of the year is being showcased next week, and I wonder if there's a connection to the reported reuse of the Rescue Bots Chase toy. But, I guess we'll see!

Zob (seriously, seven million dollars)