I’m at Phoenix Comicon right now! Come see me and Joel Watson at Booth #243. That’s a different booth than advertised earlier, ‘cuz our original location blew huge monkey balls and we got ourselves moved.
As you come in the entrance to the exhibitor hall, we will now be in the back left corner, amongst the dealers.
(“He ends most of his speeches that way.”)
Hey, everyone, let me introduce you to The Perfect Springer. And, no, actually, it’s not because he’s a Triple Changer again for the first time in forever. I mean, that’s nice. I like that. It’s cool. But what makes him the super best is that he takes the bulk of his visuals from Nick Roche‘s Springer redesign for Last Stand of the Wreckers — which, you know, is an awesome story, because I keep telling you that it is.
I would have been happyish with a based-on-the-old-cartoon Triple Changer Springer. But Last Stand of the Wreckers Springer? That gets me instantly to climax. It is Boner City over here. In four hours I’m gonna have to call a doctor.
Admittedly, this particular rendition of LSOTW Springer is taller and thinner than how he was rendered in the story itself. He was a wide mass of dude in that thing. This toy is thinner than that, though still, you know, not being a stick. It’s probably one of those sacrifices you gotta make because of physics, as this guy has two altmodes to transform into, and if you bulk up his legs you kind of end up with a fat car and helicopter. His proportions do resemble more Roche’s original control art, versus Springer’s actual appearances.
There are some other changes to the design for this toy, but they’re ones I’m satisfied with. Mostly, it’s that his altmodes look less made-up vehicle-y by a smidge. Springer’s new car mode looks a lot more like a car versus a four-wheeled vehicle of some undetermined sort.
Let me tangent here: Man, what the hell was with original 1986 Springer’s toy, anyway? I’m not sure that thing is a real Triple Changer. It has a robot mode and it has an okayish helicopter mode, but his car mode is just the midtransformation step with the propeller removed. It barely pretends to have rear wheels. What an awful thing. And how awesome is it that this new toy has three distinct modes that are all great? I mean, even the shape of the windshield changes. Looking at either vehicle mode, you couldn’t tell at a glance that it has a second one.
Springer doesn’t have any engineering hurdles like Blitzwing’s shoulders. He’s, as I’ve been saying, pretty damn perfect. The only part of the transformation that gave me pause was how to attach the gun under the cockpit in helicopter mode. The instructions just give you an arrow and the words “ATTACH WEAPON.” Well, yeah, great, but HOW? Apparently there are some… notches? I just kind of use excessive force and some shapes that look like they complement each other eventually snap together.
The propeller spins very satisfactorily. And it transforms into a believable sword seamlessly. It’s not that giant plank of wood on a peg the original toy had. I’m impressed at the amount of articulation he has, too, despite the engineering demands. He has a turning waist and even though his hands bury inside his own forearms while transformed, he still has articulated wrists. Voyager Class is also the perfect size for a Springer — dude was larger than everyone else in the cartoon (he was Optimus Prime/Rodimus Prime’s height), and in the comic he wasn’t no shrimp. So he’ll look right next to a Deluxe Hot Rod, Kup, or Blurr.
you will buy this
you will buy this now
I suppose it was inevitable that we’d get a toy of the last of the three original Decepticon Triple Changers. We got Astrotrain in 2006 and Tankor (Octane) in … 2008? and here we are in 2013 with Blitzwing! I am a little surprised he turned out to be a Voyager and not a Deluxe like the other two. Not that this is a bad thing — lord knows Triple Changers are kind of a huge engineering challenge, so giving yourself more meat to work with seems like a smart idea. Though it does mean he kind of stands out next to his dinky pals, and if I had to pick one of the three to be the Giant One, I’d always pick Astrotrain. He’s the guy that carries everyone else around, after all.
However, he goes pretty well with RTS Lugnut, and I think I care about that more.
This Blitzwing even has the same face-changey gimmick as the Animated Blitzwing. (2008′s Animated Blitzwing is likely why it took from 2008 to 2013 to get a “Classics” Blitzwing. They’re both Voyagers who are Blitzwing in Blitzwing colors who also Triple Change into a tank and a jet. He is kind of redundant to this guy on many levels.) I’m happy to see stuff from Animated stuffed into G1, rather than the other way around as it tended to. And it’s not like Blitzwing loses anything by gaining this gimmick, mostly because there wasn’t much to him to begin with.
This toy really makes use of the complexity of the size class. He’s huge and full of hinges. This density of joints is absolutely fine except for at his shoulders. They just don’t peg together well, and so if you try to rotate his shoulders around, his chest comes apart. This is annoying and stupid. There is a way to fix it that involves unscrewing the front and back halves of his torso and sanding down the connection points so that everything’s smashed together tighter in robot mode, but it sucks that you gotta do it. I attempted it, and it fixes it a little, but I think I need another pass or something. If this weren’t a thing, there’d be little to complain about.
But yeah, he’s pretty damn complex. Sure, you’d expect him to have wings that fold out, but he’s also got little extra wing contours that also fold out to create a more full and natural wing shape. His jet cockpit opens. His tank turret rotates. Additional treads fold out from inside his legs. Tank mode skin folds out from inside his crotch to fill in the front.
His knees are a little high on his legs, though. It results in some awkward posing. It’s somewhat understandable, given he’s got treads in his shins, but still it’s a thing.
It’s kind of amazing how distinct you can make the vehicle modes of a Triple Changer when given all this extra mass to work with. There’s even a surplus of pegs and tabs to keep everything where it needs to be in every mode. He’s… comprehensive. Other than those friggin’ shoulders, this guy’s pretty amazing.
I mean, he’s no Springer, but who is, really.
I was surprised at the number of vendors selling Transformers at Calgary Expo. It was a sizable representation! Quite a few booths were Transformers-only.
For example, there was this booth at the back of the hall, and, huh, they had mint carded 1984 Frenzy/Laserbeak and Rumble/Ravage sets for like $20 and, weird, is that a boxed Sunstreaker for $40? …oh. Right. I see. Counterfeit. Just buttloads of counterfeit Transformers. You’d only know because they weren’t hundreds of dollars. (Well, there are really slight ways to tell from examining the specifics of the packaging, like if something or another is a millimeter to the left, but that is not knowledge I possess.) Thought that was kinda skeevy. The guy who was selling them referred to them as “reprints.” I suppose that’s a euphemism.
But actual Transformers that were real Transformers made by real Transformers factories weren’t badly priced, either! Like the Axalon here. I think when he came out he was like $50 to import. He’s just a deluxe, but he’s “limited run” or something, and TakaraTomy needed the dough I guess and so they cranked up the prices for this leg of United stuff. But a booth at Calgary Expo had him for $30! Canadian! That’s like $25 American. So I scooped up the heck outta that.
And then Air Canada lost my luggage on the way home (nearly getting me stranded in Toronto since you can’t go through customs if your luggage ain’t security-cleared) and it took a few days for me to get him home.
BUT WHO IS HE?
He’s, uh, the Axalon. The Maximal ship from Beast Wars. As a robot. Look, okay, Takara released the Deluxe Class bug-machine-tank-thinger Unicron as “Ark Unicron,” aka “The Autobot Ship Is Possessed By Unicron Or Something” and so the story is that Primus made the Axalon be alive too in order to fight him. Crazy, right? It’s the kind of crazy I’d buy for $25 but not $50.
And, look, yes, I know, he has an Autobot symbol on him despite being a Maximal ship, and yes, I know that his toy was designed to be the Nemesis, an entirely different ship which was also around at the time so why is it the Axalon, but…
Yeah.
Crazy.
It seems like Hasbro’s trying to shove Ultra Magnus into their own cartoon programming through sheer force of action figure market saturation. We got the Cyberverse Ultra Magnus, then the Voyager Class Ultra Magnus, both based on the same design, followed by a Fall of Cybertron Ultra Magnus, and… okay, two more Ultra Magnuses? Oh, and these are actually based on the design from the cartoon? All right, then.
Seems like the way to get ol’ Mags into the cartoon was to make him a partial rebuild of Optimus Prime’s model. Likewise, that’s how this Beast Hunters toy works. It’s a retool of the “Robots in Disguise” Voyager from last year, which is a toy I didn’t own, so it was new to me, at least. And unlike the First Edition Optimus Prime I did own, this version tried to get stuff to transform into what it actually transforms into, rather than having a bunch of fake kibble. The chest windows become the real windows (such as they are), the air foil shoulders become the real air foils… that sort of thing. Though for some reason the toy doesn’t get to keep the smokestacks. They’re in the instructions, but not included with the released toy.
Also, because Ultra Magnus has new gigantic shoulders, Ultra Magnus’s truck mode has new gigantic Ultra Magnus shoulders sticking out the back of the cab. In robot mode, they can point forward and launch missiles. The missiles can store all sorts of places. There’s clips everywhere.
Weirdly, Ultra Magnus’s retool seems to be based on the Japanese “Arms Micron” iteration, as it’s got the Mini-Con peghole attachments still there on his forearms. Maybe it’s not really THAT weird, if TakaraTomy permanently altered the tooling to put those in.
Oh, and Magnus comes with a winged jetpack! It seems to be the same design that Beast Hunters Optimus Prime has, with the X-shaped wings and the metal shard tail. It clips up over the back of Maggy’s shoulders behind his head, and it’s amazingly snug. You kind of have to overreach the whole mechanism to get it to fit in. In truck mode, it just pegs into the hitch and you set the Forge of Solus on there.
(Yeah, he comes with a tiny Forge of Solus. Because Magnuses these days have hammers, and so I guess any hammer will do?)
It was hard to choose between this Magnus and the upcoming Premium Edition Magnus. Premium Magnus comes with a much better Forge of Solus, plus my mental image of Ultra Magnuses is “they are huge.” However, once Magnus showed up in the cartoon proper, I saw he was represented by being a Voyagerish size. Cartoon scale won out and I got the smaller version. Also the least expensive! That helps!
