'Transformers' Toys Live Up To Big-screen Robots

And that's by design — literally. Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman went to Hasbro's "Transformers school" to get to know the Autobots and Decepticons before crafting their story about alien robots who come to earth and befriend an American teenager.

"Even if I wasn't involved," Orci told a crowd at BotCon, "I'd want the toy to match the movie as much as possible."

The toy company's designers also worked hand-in-hand with director Michael Bay to ensure that the giant robot characters on screen would have matching downsized counterparts at toy stores worldwide. (Hasbro Inc. is a production partner on the picture, and its chief executive is credited as co-executive producer.)

"The movie is a challenge, but it's a good challenge," said Hasbro senior design director Aaron Archer. "As (Bay) has ideas and his team has ideas, we put our lore and our characters in there and mix them back and forth. Then the guys at Hasbro have to figure out how to take this awesome car image and this awesome robot image and make it move in such a way that you end up with those looks."

The big-screen 'bots are entirely computer generated. Their detailed transformations look spectacular but only exist in a digital world, making them far more complicated than their toy doppelgangers. A souped-up police car, for example, undergoes countless intricate, incremental changes to become the evil Decepticon Barricade. The plastic toys, however, must face the realities of 3-D physics — and be user-friendly enough for a kid to enjoy.