Oh man, if only. Action Masters were based on the wonderful, groundbreaking idea of making Transformer toys that
don't transform at all.
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Action_Master
Within the MTMTE mythos, they were, in typically brillant Roberts' way, reimagined as the Militant Monoform Movement, a religious group that removed their transformation cogs as a way to reject Adaptus, and eventually the Functionist doctrine (after all, if you don't
have an alt mode, you can't be forced into a job you don't want to because of it).
Many of the toys from this line were of earlier, more well-known Transformers like Grimlock or Bumblebee, but a few were new characters specifically created for it, including Krok (our beloved Scavengers team member), and Skyfall (Ironfist / Fisitron's colleague and rival who sabotaged the latter's experimental gun. Interesting, most of the the other Action Master exclusive characters seem to feature often on Roberts' works (at least two seem to cameo on Last Stand of the Wreckers, his first work) so perhaps he holds more nostalgia for them than many other fans. :D
Funnily, Hasbro seems to be heading down that same path again, running out of gimmicks to re-sell Transformers toys even to adult collectors. I mean, the current line's gimmick is
dirt and battle damage. That's pretty low in the barrel to scrape. Once you've sold pretty much as good a version of every G1 character as current engineering allows for that price point, there's not many places to go from there that doesn't involve creating new characters en masse (which are kind of a tough sell for adult collectors). I expect things to get worse from here.
I never actually saw the movie on cinemas (most likely it was never even released on them here). I only watched it quite a few several years later (I was 15 I think, so at least 1992). Being a teenager and having already seen Optimus die in the comics as a kid, it was more like "oh, that's a really cool death scene". :D
