Prime Wars Trilogy
From Transformers Wiki
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The "Prime Wars Trilogy" is Hasbro's designation for a segment of the Transformers: Generations line that was launched in late 2014. While primarily based around the toy lines that make up the trilogy, it is also accompanied by cartoons of the same names and even has tie-ins in IDW's comic books.
The Prime Wars Trilogy was succeeded by the War for Cybertron Trilogy.
| Prime Wars Trilogy: | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Combiner Wars (2015-2016) |
Titans Return (2016-2017) |
Power of the Primes (2018) | ||||||||||
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Toys
The Combiner Wars toyline was launched in late 2014, continued throughout 2015 and ended in early 2016, upon which was succeeded by Titans Return which in turn continued through most of 2017. The first Power of the Prime figures started appearing in late 2017, and the final new ones debuted in Hasbro markets in mid 2018.
Initially, Hasbro had planned to simply continue the assortments for Titans Return, as implied by the product code and assortment numbers for the Legends, Deluxe, Voyager, and Leader Class figures, but for unknown reasons eventually decided to relaunch the assortments instead. Despite this, Buzzsaw, a toy designed with the Titans Return play pattern in mind, was released as part of the penultimate wave of the Combiner Wars Legends Class assortment.
Aside from the single figure assortments available at general retail, both segments also included giftsets featuring mostly redecos and retools of existing toys. The Combiner Wars sets (officially referred to as "Collection Packs") were mostly shared "online exclusives", while the Titans Return sets were store exclusives.
During the course of Power of the Primes in 2018, Hasbro released three exclusive "Special Edition" figures to commemorate the Prime Wars Trilogy, with each figure representing one part of the trilogy.
| Special Edition |
Cartoons
A series of three CG-animated cartoons produced by Machinima were released between 2016 and 2018, with each one treated as an individual season of a larger "Prime Wars Trilogy" narrative. The first, Combiner Wars, ran for eight episodes, each five minutes in length; the latter two seasons, Titans Return and Power of the Primes, were expanded to ten episodes at ten minutes apiece. Each one first premiered on the go90 platform in the United States before being released via other services worldwide. In January 2019, the majority of Prime Wars Trilogy content was delisted from these services due to Machinima's closure, only to resurface on the Rooster Teeth website the following March.
Combiner Wars was heavily promoted by Hasbro prior to its launch, but didn't see a release until 2016, by which point the toys had already run their course as a general retail line. To make matters worse, it drew devastatingly negative criticism. Despite this, Titans Return and Power of the Primes follow-ups were announced, with the former repeating both its predecessor's poor timing, being launched at the end of 2017 when the Titans Return toyline had already been succeeded by Power of the Primes, and its negative reception among a large portion of the fanbase. The latter, however, made it in under the wire with a mid-2018 premiere, arriving in the middle of its toyline's run, and while still considered a significant disappointment by fans, it at least fared slightly better than its predecessors.
Comics
IDW Publishing's original comic continuity featured a six-part Combiner Wars "event" comic that was told in alternating issues of the second Windblade miniseries and the The Transformers ongoing. Along with previous issues that also featured combiners, they were included (equipped with new covers) with the Deluxe Class toys that were distributed in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, while the figures available in Canada, Latin America, and Europe replaced the comics with cards featuring artwork of the characters.
A Titans Return "event" story was told in a similar fashion in the form of a special Titans Return comic and two issues of The Transformers and More than Meets the Eye each. Unlike Combiner Wars, the Titans Return comics were not included with any toys.
Notes
- It appears the trilogy's individual segments were originally supposed to have a more uniform naming scheme before Hasbro decided in favor of more individual names: Combiner Wars was initially supposed to be followed by "Titan Wars" rather than Titans Return, and "Prime Wars" was originally the working name for Power of the Primes before it was applied to the trilogy as a whole.
