Numerous reports from around social media state that former Kenner and Hasbro designer Mark Boudreaux, known for engineering so many vehicles, Titanium Series Transformers, the vehicles and playsets in Care Bears, and even a lot of work on the HasLab Sail Barge, has died. I have not found a primary source or mainstream news outlet to report this at this time, but he has been reported hospitalized for quite some time and has been suffering lung damage from COVID-19 and a ventilator.

He worked on the first Kenner Millennium Falcon as well as the final one we dubbed the BMF in 2008, plus so many toys in between. And since.  I was always hoping to reach out and elbow him into designing just one more mini-rig some day.

I was lucky enough to meet the guy on a few occasions and he pointed out all sorts of amazing little details on the vehicles he worked on, like the etchings on the interior of the lid of the then-very-hard-to-find Episode I AAT when that first was slow to get distribution. (It has since been reissued and repainted many times, and it's a great toy.)

I first read about his time at Kenner in Steve Sansweet's book Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible and I was absolutely thrilled to meet him when I was flown out to Plano, Texas back around 2000 when I was reporting for Philip Wise's web site Rebelscum.com. Mr. Boudreaux and everybody at Kenner (later Hasbro) were always really nice to me as a weird kid who grew into a weird adult and now works as a generally weird toy industry buyer. If it is indeed true that he has passed, he will be greatly missed not just as an incredible creative talent, but as a good family man and someone who was nice to bizarre people on the internet that clearly traumatized him so much, he would remember them years later.  We'll all miss you, and thanks for making so many of our birthdays and other gift-receiving occasions such a joy.