This is part 13 in a series.
So, we’re going to cover four franchises today; Furbies, FurReal Friends, Baby Alive, and Rom: The Space Knight. Why are we doing these all in one post? Well, the integrations of Furbies, FurReal Friends, and Baby Alive into the Hasbroverse are all similar. As for Rom, I don’t know that much about him, so it’ll also be short. Additionally, this series is getting long, and we still have a lot of ground to cover, so I’m trying to consolidate a bit.
Furbies and FurReal Friends –
These are both relatively easy. Pets have known psychological benefits for humans. If you’re going to start expanding across the stars it’d be nice to send your astronauts out into space with pets. However, pets consume resources, so if you include living pets on a spaceship or space station, you need to send more food, water, and oxygen, which adds more weight, which requires more fuel. If only you could get the psychological benefits of pets without the demand on resources that pets require. Wait, what if the pets were robots?!
That’s a great solution! But if you do animals like dogs and cats, or any existing animal that humans are remotely familiar with you run into the possibility of triggering the uncanny valley, where the animal is almost perfectly real but there’s just one thing that’s off about it, and instead of bonding with it, humans will reject it. That’d completely defeat the purpose of sending these robot pets. How can we get around that?
What if the robot pets weren’t mimicking an existing animal? That’d do it. And that’s how Furbies are introduced into the Hasbroverse, as pets for space fairing humans that won’t trigger the uncanny valley, and thus confer the psychological benefits of pets to humans in space without the Furbies consuming the limited resources on spaceships or space stations.
Eventually, once humans have mastered the replication of animals well enough, instead of bringing along Furbies, these space fairing humans can be accompanied by FurReal Friends, which perfectly mimic the behavior of real animals and do not trigger an uncanny valley response. Furbies and FurReal Friends that appear in Hasbroverse shows are then sold in Toy Stores and Online.
There may even be some story issues with Furbies and FurReal Friends being Artificial Intelligences and going haywire due to the influence of Unicron’s body on them, depending on the series they appear in, and whether or not the series takes place on Earth or in Space. The fact that Furbies and FurReal Friends in space don’t go haywire, while those on Earth sometimes do hinting at the fact that the presence of Unicron’s body in the center of the Earth is leading to problems with AI on Earth.
Baby Alive –
Well, it’s a well-used plot on teen dramas and sitcoms, teenage characters need to take care of a sack of flour, or an egg, or a baby doll as part of a health education class to teach them what life with a baby is like. Only this time, instead of using an egg or a sack of flour, the teenagers use a Baby Alive doll, a somewhat sophisticated AI that behaves just like a real baby. You can use this in almost any series that features teenage characters, and depending on the overall tone of the series, these Baby Alive dolls could potentially go haywire and must be fought off, thanks to Unicron. Or nothing violent could happen with them, and the conflict is just the kids in charge of taking care of the baby not really being mature enough for that responsibility.
Rom: The Space Knight –
In StarCom we left off with the Dire Wraiths returning to their home planet, and invading Earth. Rom has to fight them off on his home planet and hunts them down on Earth as well. This can happen at any time after the events of StarCom, and that’s pretty much it. The planet that Rom and the Dire Wraiths are from has an entity sleeping at the center of it, this entity is the embodiment of Science, Rom being someone who uses science for good, while the Dire Wraiths use science for evil. Potentially, Rom doesn’t end up using his special gun to banish all the Dire Wraiths to the special dimension it sends them to though. He gets all the Dire Wraiths on his home planet, and all the Dire Wraiths on Earth, but there was a third group that went out into deep space. Depending on what happens later in the Hasbroverse, if this third group exists, they find Unicron’s spark, and we’ll see what happens with them later, maybe.
That’s it for these four franchises. Next up is Gobots.
A New Hasbroverse 