I'm ExVee; my name is Chris. If you read Gizmodo, or know people that do, you probably heard about a photo of a small piece of deco work on the brand new Power of The Primes Jazz, which says in a Cybertronic font "MAGA". It's a font whose development is credited to longtime super-fan Jim Sorenson, and which has been used on Transformers toys here and there for a while now. One notable use was on Titans Return Seaspray where it was used to inscribe the name Alana inside the forearms, referencing Seaspray's love interest from an episode of the G1 cartoon. What you may not know is, I'm the one who took that original photo, with only the best of intentions. But, we all know where that can lead you. Keep reading...
Regular readers of the site here will know I do toy reviews and galleries, so it was in the act of examining the new Jazz for an upcoming review that I noticed on a tiny bit of tampograph work (just a few millimeters across) that there was some little squiggles. Hard to really make out, but I was pretty sure they were one of the Cybertronic font types that sometimes appear on the toys as easter egg kind of content. I took a photo as close up as I could with my phone and set out to try to decode it. The thing is, so tiny was this rendered that the finer details of all the characters blended together and became harder to distinguish blobs. I thought I was able to pick out a couple of them, but I hit a wall. So since I am friends with many sharper eyes and more knowledgeable fans in my social media circle, I took to Twitter for some help in figuring out the message. That's where the avalanche started. One of my mutuals, @TheLastGherkin was the first to make the leap as to the part I couldn't work out. The letter M. And then a lot of thoughts went through my mind.
Foremost among them being, "I don't want to call more attention to this." Sadly this is the internet and we rarely actually get to make those decisions. I saw this come up on some of the communities I frequent, and the response ranged as one might expect, with even some extreme points of view considering boycotting further Hasbro Transformers releases on the belief that this was sanctioned. I acknowledged on at least one platform that I was the origin point of the photo, but mostly chose not to really engage with it. Stuff blows over. I went about my day. That is, until I got an e-mail. And then a Twitter notoification. And another, and another. That was around when Gizmodo had somehow picked up the story, and it was clear this was not going away nearly as soon as I'd hoped.
WHY
— Chris (@chrisrtxv) November 17, 2017
Why do you put Cybertronic text on here so small it can't even render clearly? The only letter I can clearly make out is A. pic.twitter.com/jzu4toOHIb
We do not intend for our products to carry political messages, and apologize to anyone who was offended by this message.
In the past, other inside jokes and messages have been hidden in more plain sight on the toys using normal fonts and number sequences to reference specific things. Occasionally things they can't explain to us until after a statute of limitations has probably expired. (true story) This isn't something I want to see go away. I hope it doesn't have to. I hate that the poor judgement of one individual might lead to that. And I regret that I helped bring attention to it to begin with. Not because of the political buzzword carried in that deformed font of squiggles, but because of what we might lose as a result. But I just have to remind myself, if it wasn't me, someone else would have found it instead soon enough. After all, this is the Transformers fandom.
We won't stop until we've discovered all the secrets.
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