Transformers Legacy: The Art of Transformers Packaging
I’ve kind of got mixed emotions righting this review, because the book is amazing in many ways but also isn’t 100% what I was expecting. I’ve got a thing about toy packaging. I love card art and box art in general but also the actual tangible qualities of the packaging that enticed you as a kid to buy it off the shelves. Plus all the other ephemera such as instruction booklets and leaflets etc. So I was really hoping that this book would have actual photographs or scans of the boxes of all the G1 toys, including things like the instruction booklets. Not just a few but all the main well known G1 toys. That’s what I was hoping for. But when reading the opening section of the book they very quickly explain that for some reason they couldn’t get good enough quality scans of the actual boxes. I really don’t know why, because there must be enough high quality boxed G1 toys out there.
So it turns out they just focussed on the actual original artwork which was used within the packaging. Not the actual layouts that covered the boxes with all the logos and toy names etc, but just the artwork of the figure that was used on the box. That is still pretty cool. I just wish they had more archival materials of all the packaging materials and booklets and logos etc. I would also have loved some more insight or commentary into the packaging information or perhaps some interviews with artists or marketing employees involved in the packaging process. There are still some cool bits of information though and there are a couple of very cool posters too. My interest is mostly in the G1 toys so only really about a quarter or a third of this book is relevant to me but if you appreciate the whole gamut of Transformers and love the artwork then I do think you will really enjoy this book. The imagery is really crisp, and it is a beautifully made 300 page book.
I do love having this book on my shelf but I kind of feel I still have to rely on my other Transformers Vault