Holy Lord Almighty, it's a new TransformersAnimated toy! It is a gift bestowed unto us from the heavens, shrouded in light and majesty. And it's from Japan, because, you know. Fuckin' America.
Transformers Animated is running now over there, in a surprisingly un-totally-rewritten way. (Though they remove a bunch of scenes to accommodate scripted infomercials for the toys.) And since the American toyline has kinda gotten waylaid, I jumped on their release of Blackout. At the moment, it's uncertain whether Blackout will see release over here. Ratchet and Arcee were released as Toys"R"Us exclusives in February, and Rodimus and Ironhide will reportedly see similar release this fall, but otherwise that's all we know of that's coming down the pipeline.
So, hey, hello, Japanese Blackout. It makes it easier that he's not very much like the other Japanese releases of the Animated toys. Most of them have been unevenly covered in metallic paint, which turns me off something fierce. Blackout emerges from this relatively unscathed. He's mostly unpainted matte plastic, like the American line, with a few spots of metallic lime green. I am fine with this. But if he were entirely metallic gunmetal, this purchase would have been a lot more bittersweet.
(Speaking of bittersweet, Blackout only showed up on the Animated cartoon in his pre-Earth body. This toy is based on the body he would have taken would we have gotten Season Four. His very appearance mocks me with what could have been.)
It's the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it.
Blackout is notable because he is an Animated character who's based on somebody who originated from the live-action films. I don't really remember Michael Bay's Blackout resembling Wilford Brimley so closely, but I'm not complaining. Still, you can see the inspiration. The helicopter cockpit splits to become the chest in much the same way, with the engines remaining on his shoulders, and the helicopter blades still hang off the top of his back. He's a great cartoony translation of the super-complicated live-action film design.
That said, in several ways he's very much like Animated Lugnut. They're both Voyager Class aircraft Decepticons whose cockpits split to form the torso and reveal their forward-jutting heads, and they're both short and stocky with tiny legs. They both even keep their weapons in their vehicle tails, though Blackout's is much cooler. Lugnut looked like he was basically carrying around a useless vehicle part on a stick; Blackout's rotor weapon shoots a disc.
Blackout is basically a better Lugnut toy. As well as the more playtime-friendly weapon, he also holds together better in robot mode. When you transform his chest into robot mode, everything pegs very securely. Even seamlessly! You can barely tell that it splits apart in transformation back to helicopter mode. His torso looks like an indivisible geometric shape.
Team Chaar REPRESENT!
If there's anything annoying about him, it's his arm articulation. His shoulders can't swing out from the torso, they can only rotate along an axis. If you want to bend his elbows (since otherwise the torso gets in the way), you have to rotate his arms at the bicep, revealing the giant gaps in his forearms where his hands store in vehicle mode. So he's pretty good at clenching his fist menacingly and little else. (This may be enough for some people.) On the other hand, both of his fingers are individually articulated.
All in all, I think he may be one of the better Animated toys. He's going to look way undersized compared to the rest of his Decepticon peers, since most of his Voyager Class mass went into making him as wide as he is tall (like both Bulkhead and Lugnut), but in a vacuum, he's outstanding. He has a great gimmick, and his visual aesthetic looks great in both vehicle and robot modes. And, hey, if you like automorphing, when you plug his pelvis into his torso, the rotor behind his head automatically springs back. He's pretty awesome.
If you've been wondering where this week's strips have come from, this should be an informative video!
Wednesday's strip was so hella long because cutting up the action into a week's worth of updates wouldn't have felt like it was in the spirit of the source material. Dinobot tearing through everyone takes up maybe 30 seconds, tops, and it's a dense 30 seconds. So I decided to pile it all into one strip so it kept the same feel. Action sequences are kinda dumb when metered out six panels at a time, anyhow. You lose all the excitement.
At any rate, hope you enjoyed my tribute to Dinobot. There's a short epilogue on Monday, and then we'll be back to the usual in the days thereafter. I promise Ghostbusters, Batman, Mario, Optimus Prime and even Superstar Funana!
Today is the last day of the Hall of Fame voting. Throw one more Dinobot vote onto the pile, would you?
The comic I drew about Optikk endeared him to me. I had to have him. Masters of the Universe figures are, in general, really fucking goofy, but Optikk, I feel, has some extra special goofiness that I enjoy.
1) He's an evil Space Mutant. He's an evil Space Mutant that has a special sticker decrying his goofy Space Mutant-ness right next to where it says "ADULT COLLECTOR" on the packaging bubble. (there is no shame here)
2) He's an eyeball man who can communicate his given name only through a series of blinks... despite having no eyelids. He can't even speak his native language! He is, for all intents and purposes, a mute eyeball man!
3) He is a mute eyeball man named Optikk with an eyeball-themed shield and an eyeball on the end of his raygun. (A raygun, mind you, that has an external revolving bullet chamber.)
Unfortunately, Dinobot's eye was bigger than his stomach.
And he was originally a New Adventures of He-Man villain, which I think was underappreciated. Campbell "friggin'" Lane makes a charismatic Skeletor. Hell, and with He-Man voiced by Garry Chalk, it's practically a Beast Wars voice cast precursor.
Optikk's articulation is what you'd expect from a 6-inch Mattel action figure. His chest detail is actually a plastic vest attached around your default Masters of the Universe chest. (That's right, he's got nipply pectorals under there.) I read that his arms and legs are recycled from Trap-Jaw, but with them done up entirely in gold, it's not immediately obvious. Sculpted into his back is a fake little dial that corresponds to the original Optikk toy's gimmick: if you turned the dial on his back, his eyeball would move back and forth. On this figure, you can do that just by manually turning the head itself.
Punch a Space Mutant? Can anybody punch a Space Mutant? I wonder.
He comes with an extra red eyeball that you can swap in for the green one, if you so choose. Apparently that's what color his eye was in the original cross-sell photography? That's sort of neat, I guess. I'm more in favor of it being an eyeball accessory for other figures. Some of my Transformers have heads small enough that they can fit up into its balljoint socket, so that's some more hours of fun.
Since I missed out on buying Optikk myself because MattyCollector.com is a piece of shit, a generous reader called Mysterious Stranger managed to grab me one and mail me it. He requested that there be a photo of Batman punching him. His wish has been granted.
It's not Dinobot, but it's Beast Wars! (Vote for Dinobot!)
This is Shokaract from the BotCon 2000 comic book. This is what he looked like in the original book. Andrew Wildman, the colorist, looooves his Photoshop filters so I thought I'd see what it'd look like if I dropped all that and recolored it, um, vanilla. Now you can see the Geoff Senior artwork more clearly.
