Posted August 26, 2013 at 8:40 pm

COMPLETE LAZERBACK MOLD POWER

Ahem.

Man, I hate the name "Lazerback."  Can I just not say that anymore?  That Z is like nails on a chalkboard.  From now on he's "Dingus," which is less embarrassing.

But now Dingus has two dragon brother buddies, and at least one of their names is incredibly awesome.  The yellow dude is Vertebreak, and he's showing up in American stores now.  The green dude is... *looks up on the wiki* Gaidora, which apparently means something like "Supernatural Dragon."  I don't know Japanese, so I am no judge on how great that wordplay is.  But it's probably better than Lazerback unless there's some misspelled acronym in there that I'm unaware of.

I really think there's some sort of name-awesomeness balance that's being kept, like they can't do a really awesome name without first throwing a terrible one out there, because a leap from Lazerback to Vertebreak is pretty stark.  There's whiplash.  

Vertebreak is a standard redeco of Dingus, going from red and purple and yellow to yellow and orange and brown.  The redeco is very autumn.  He's like if a dragon were disguising himself as a horn of plenty.  

... *looks up name again* Gaidora is in sparkly green and red and black, and he has a new head.  It's a very nice-looking head, but I think it's a little too standardly-detailed for the very stylized TF Prime body it sits on.  Over in Japan, he features in a series of direct-to-CD-in-your-toy-purchase anime adventures.  They take place in Transformers Prime continuity (mostly in the far past, I think), but are rendered in a generic cel-shaded-CGI-robots-with-cel-animated-people anime style.

Toy-wise they're the same solid beastformer as Dingus was.  It's forelegs to arms and hindlegs to legs, transformation-wise, but the simplicity results in two satisfying modes.  

This is how starved I am for beast Transformers, that I own all three of these guys.  Waspinator and Rhinox (and maybe Rattrap????) need to come sooner.

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