Newsflash:  I am, like, super into Combiner Wars.  I want every Transformer already in my collection to be redone as a Combiner Wars limb or torso or accessory, I don't care if it means I would then own six hundred Dead End retools, I am up for it.  

So imagine my interest in Combiner Wars combined (get it?) with my love for Beast Wars, and you've got this Predacus guy.  And then imagine my interest in Ravage combined with both of those two things already, and, yeah, this BotCon 2016 set is in my wheelhouse.  Because Ravage is in it.  Hell, the first thing we saw was Ravage, and I was sold.  Everything else could have been soggy dead puppies and it still would have been a great set, because at least one part of it was a Ravage who could become an arm or a leg.

Ravage himself is a Combiner Wars-style recreation of his appearance in the Beast Wars cartoon, crossed with his Alternators toy where he was a robot with a jaguar head who transformed into a black sports car.  You have no idea how much my jam that is.  All of my jam.  Ravage is Breakdown with a new kitty head.  A very flat, as seen from the side, kitty head.  What I'm saying is he has no back of his skull.  It's like the Invisible Man is wearing a Halloween mask of Ravage's face.  

But it's okay.  I don't care.  It's Ravage as a Combiner Wars limb.

I may be somewhat biased.

Ravage's partner leg is Tarantulas, who's Combiner Wars Rook with a new head.  We just got a vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas last year who's essentially perfect, which would in most cases make this new vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas surplus to requirements, but you forget that I want all characters ever to be able to be a limb or a torso, so he's still desired.  He's a Tarantulas who can become an arm or a leg.  He's a want.

The other three, now, these guys are interesting!  They're the Tripredacus Council from "The Agenda (Part 1)," also known as "that time that it was really cool that Beast Wars started connecting itself to G1 a little but then fandom started thinking that connecting BW to G1 was what BW was all about and then we never got anything else out of new Beast Wars fiction ever."  Ahem.  But I digress.  The Tripredacus Council!  We've never got toys of them as they've appeared on the cartoon, as they were essentially three random robot dudes who got randomly assigned names from the components of Tripredacus, the Predacon Beast Wars combiner.  But here they are, and they turn into vehicles, because they aren't beasts right now/yet.  

Ram Horn is the guy on the show who had little wings on his head and whose face was made mostly of Rattrap's, but with a nose.  He's got a new head and that head sits atop Brawl/Nosecone.  Combiner Wars Brawl/Nosecone is not that great of a toy, but I guess it's an appropriate use, nonetheless.  Ram Horn was a rhinoceros beetle, and so using a tank with a drill is kind of evocative of that kinda beasty shape.  

Cicadacon is the guy on the show who had Megatron's face incased inside a DEVO hat with little horns.  Sadly, his Combiner Wars toy does not have his own new head, and he's the only toy in the combiner that doesn't have a new head!  It makes me a little sad.  He's just Skydive with no sculpting alterations, and while he has the same general shape for his helmet, he lacks the little horns and most importantly he lacks the Megatron face.  I need that triangle nose, man!  

Sea Clamp is the guy on the show who had a head that looked like somebody had five minutes to extrude a CGI block into something resembling a face and then somebody else's mouth was pasted onto the chin.  Sea Clamp's original toy was a lobster, hence the name, but Combiner Wars doesn't have much in the way of sea vehicles.  Or any sea vehicles.  But he's Scattershot, who's a spaceship thing, and maybe you can pretend spaceship things are sea vehicles, right?  He has a new head.

He also has another new head in his tummy for the combined mode, Predacus.  Ravage and Tarantulas become the legs and the Tripredacus Council becomes everything above the knees.  You'd think, seeing three red guys and one black guy and one dark blue guy, that he'd look a little mismatched, but honestly he looks pretty great.  There's Tarantulas and Ravage's colors duplicated on the combiner chest, and they want you to swap the red and black fist/foot/weapons with each other so that there's a better scattering of colors, and it basically works.  He's a very attractive combiner.  His new head is based on Tripredacus's, of course.  

My complaints:  Some plastic tolerance issues!  Sometimes their fist/foot/guns don't fit securely into the wrist or ankle pegholes.  You can have hands drop off the arms and it's annoying.  Also, man, Brawl/Nosecone is not a great toy.  He's the weak link in this chain of robots.  And, yeah, Ravage is missing his brain.  Whatevs, I don't look at him from the side anyway, and really the limp wrists and Brawl are more of an annoyance than that.  There's also unfortunately the comic book he comes with but let's keep this a happy place in the wake of a very important day.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first airing of the Beast Wars cartoon pilot on syndication!  I watched it on television that day, like after school or something.  Because of course I did.

The only thing better than giving us pre-beast toys of the rest of the original Beast Wars Predacon crew is giving us those pre-beast toys in Combiner Wars form.  Terrorsaur mostly delivers on this!  For some reason he doesn't come with his hand/foot/gun, so you have to borrow somebody else's.  Or you can end up with a combiner with a limp, I dunno.

But, yeah, Terrorsaur satisfies me.  We got pre-beast Megatron, Waspinator, and Dinobot way back in 2006, and then pre-beast Tarantulas nine years later in 2015.   With Terrorsaur here, we're just one original Predacon down, and Scorponok is promised from the Figure Subscription Service before the end of the year!   Huzzah.

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is in his cartoon deco, rather than the original toy deco which replaced the silver and other silver with black and purple.  As such, Terry's a little less vibrant than some may remember him, but the silver and charcoal, with the edges here and there of orange, do manage to keep him visually interesting.   

He's got a new headsculpt which is... well, it's goofy-looking, but in a way that Terrorsaur kind of looked all the time.  Those first few Beast Wars CGI models were kind of rudimentary.  This toy gives him a kind of awkward toothy grin, like he's stifling a chuckle after a fart, but honestly that's not too far off-character.  

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is also essentially perfectly scaled to his fellow pre-beast Predacon pals, as best as he can be, anyway.  Tarantulas is an abberation, being so tall, but otherwise CW Terrorsaur clocks in at just shorter than Dinobot and quite a bit taller than Waspinator and waaaaaaay shorter than Megatron.  These are all correct Nerd Measurements.  If pre-beast Tarantulas weren't done so perfectly I'd be more resentful of his size screwing up the otherwise perfect scale.

I keep wanting to say, "one of the best BotCon toys this year," but honestly, they're all pretty damn great, so unless they all get to tie for second and first place, I dunno.  But this Airazor?  It's a pretty good toy of Airazor!  If you don't mind that she's not a bird!

Combiner Wars Airazor (she doesn't combine) is a redeco of Slipstream who herself was a heavy retool of Windblade.  There's no changes to Slipstream's sculpt, just a different deco, and yet it works pretty damn well as Airazor.  The head is painted up to kind of resemble Airazor's beaky bird hat, the fake sculpted cockpit on her chest is a reasonable vehicleish facsimile of a falcon's head, and the whole brownish-black/tan/yellow/extrayellow thing going on with her, with the dash of translucent green, is pretty fancy.  It's not a group of colors you see together a lot in Transformers, if ever, especially since the retail line has been kinda overwhelmingly White And Red for the past year as Combiner Wars has retreaded 1986.  Whoever designed the deco on this toy, good job.  

I don't reeeeally want to get into the convention comic in which Airazor featured right here, right now, because, again, as I said, there would be swearing.  

So let's instead say this is superfab Airazor bein' all jetty in the years following her enigmatic disappearance following the events of Primeval Dawn!  Let's unfridge her.  Yup, she's returned from the distant past to the less-distant future, maybe to participate in some Universe wars or something.  It could be fun!  Think of all the adventures she could have, y'know not being a super important Autobot from the end of the Great War or anything like that.

That'd be ridiculous.

Anyway, she technically replaces the other Airazor-as-a-jet-instead-of-a-bird exclusive toy we got a decade ago, which is a replacement that is FINE BY ME.  Timelines Airazor is, like, one of the worst things ever, and I own her because I am dumb.  First of all, she's the Energon Slugslinger toy, and Energon Slugslinger is terrible.  Like, it's one of those infamous Toys That Hate You.  There is no love for humanity in its engineering.  It was designed to snuff out your life force.  Now, imagine that toy with an Airazor head and at exclusive limited-run prices and representing a fundamental misunderstanding of the character herself.

But there's a better one now.  You can bury the other in the back yard or maybe set it on fire.

Every year at BotCon, invariably there's an exclusive toy that really feels like somebody was saying, "hey, what's some cracked-out shit that Walky kid would like?" Well, this is this year's.  This is Under-3.

Under-3 was a McDonald's Happy Meal toy way back in the early Beast Wars days.  He wasn't part of the regular assortment, but a very simplified toy with minimal moving parts that was intended for children under the age of three.  Hence the name.  "Under-3" was printed on his baggy in the same space that the names for the other guys went.  He was a lion head that flipped open like a clam to reveal a robot sculpted inside that looked kinda like Optimus Prime/Primal.  That's it.

Bogglingly, a toy based on him is part of this year's BotCon offerings.  He's a strait redeco of Combiner Wars Streetwise, meaning instead of transforming into just a head, now he can transform into just an arm or just a leg.  And a yellow police car, but whatever.  His name is "Unit-3" on his profile card because I don't know.  The point is, that's just a callsign he uses, so his real name could easily be "Under-3."  That's what really matters.  Renaming Under-3 something else puts you on my shit list.  

He's a very striking-looking toy, making him easily one of the best exclusive toys available this year -- and that's in the company of TM3 Megatron.  He loses a little of the charm of the original toy (well, a lot of the original charm) by not transforming into a disembodied lion head, but I think being a new toy of that crazy-ass Happy Meal dude is its own separate charm.  He's Under-3.  For adults.

don't talk to me about the comic he appeared in just yet, there would only be swears

Last year, we got three female Autobot toys in rapid succession: Windblade, Arcee, and Chromia.  And it was great!  But it'd be even cooler if we got female Decepticons, too.  As short supply as female Autobots are, female Decepticons are in even more dire straits!

And suddenly, TakaraTomy over in Japan, they saw this deficit, did some retooling, and BAM, gauntlet cast.  And one of these three new bad guy ladies is Blackarachnia.  She's technically a Predacon, not a Decepticon, but she was a Decepticon once, and she's often a bad guy, and so I'm fine including her in that group.  She's also different in that she wasn't retooled from Arcee or Windblade or any other recent mold, naw, Takara went back and grabbed Animated Blackarachnia from 2007 and used her as a retooling base.  I mean, Blackarachnia's a spider, and there aren't really a lot of spider toys to make stuff outta, so.  

Animated Blackarachnia is a pretty great toy to start off from!   It's actually a fairly inventive transformation, especially with how the arms and legs from from the spider limbs and how the torso is created.  The spider head folds down to form the chest and the pedipalps (which are balljointed) rotate and form the contours of the waist.  Seriously, it's pretty great.  

so what takara did was remove the pedipalps and replace them with new pedipalps that instead fold up and become boobs

I mean, I sort of get it.  If you're going to make a Beast Wars style Blackarachnia, her, um, chesty parts are an important part of the visual package.  Kind of, you know, in the same way you'd want your Jazz toy to have a chest made out of a car hood.  That's just what Jazz looks like!  And Beast Wars Blackarachnia puts the "rack" in "arachnid."  And, so, yeah, on that level, I understand.

But, damn, this does not leave her with much of a torso.  In fact, it merely leaves her with the original toy's spine.  She's got these two globes, a skinny stick to connect those to... well, the middle part of her pelvis that wasn't previously created out of pedipalps, and then legs.  She looks like something from the cover of Youngblood.  

That aside, she does make a pretty good Beast Wars Blackarachnia.  The new headsculpt is absolutely perfect, if set a little high on the neck, the paintjob is a good attempt at hiding the fact that she has hands and not claws (and you're supposed to leave her forearms half-transformed to achieve the look), and she's just generally painted meticulously all over.  You don't notice she no longer has a torso if your room's lighting ain't so great.

But it's just, like, what.

Way back in 2000, my third BotCon, we got two exclusive toys.  The first was Apelinq, Wrecker Commander, and the second was Shokaract, cruel lord of all time and space.  Once a lowly near-nameless Predacon grunt, the Hunter found the Dark Essence of Unicron buried on Earth and was awarded the Matrix of Conquest.  Now he was Shokaract, rule of Cybertron's future, powerful beyond measure, speaker of hilariously over-the-top Simon Furman villain dialog.  But since time travel exists, he guarded the Dark Essence zealously.  Of course, his own paranoia led to his downfall, and Shokaract's reign was erased from existence. 

There's no way there'd ever be a toy of the Hunter!  That'd be just crazy!

Well, sometimes crazy works, and here we are fourteen years later with a danged Hunter toy.   Very recently we got a new toy of Beast Wars Rampage as this year's club membership exclusive toy, which mounted a very very very tiny new head on the body of Deluxe Transformers Prime Megatron.  A great idea with a kind of hilarious noggin.  Don't get me wrong, the thing is beautiful.  Absolutely gorgeous.  But that tiny, tiny head.  (It has to be, to fit in vehicle mode.)  Since Shokaract was originally a redeco of Rampage, folks clamored for a Shokaract redeco of him.  I did not.  I didn't think it'd be what I wanted.  Shokaract should be huge, not a deluxe.  Why would I want a tiny Shokaract?  It's not like they'd designate him his pre-Shokaract Hunter form.  And once we learned Club Rampage had a tiny head, that was another nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned.  Did not want!

Well, old me was dumb.  I love this thing.  It's probably my favorite toy of the whole set.  Somehow, amazingly, in these different, darker colors, Shokaract's head doesn't look so puny.  I'm not sure how.  Maybe it's just the color scheme creating an optical illusion.  But it's surpisingly okay.  And the toy itself is astoundingly pretty.  Shokaract was always pretty, so it shouldn't be that surprising, but still here we are.  And, yes, the goddamned thing is officially the Hunter, pre-finding-the-Dark-Essence.  It's like a toy just for me! 

Plus it comes at a pretty opportune time, since the original Shokaract is covered in blue chrome that does not survive well decades past his production.  The chrome on mine was falling off like autumn leaves just by picking him up and moving around -- and that's without all the dusting I had to do to make him presentable.  I was dabbing lightly with a cloth to keep from scraping his surface off too much.  Oof.  Some day I will just have to bite the bullet and send the thing to Cheetimus to scrape and repaint the blue.  It won't be chrome, but it'll be something I can friggin' transform again.  It sucks when you can't handle one of your favorite toys which is super expensive to replace.  

Anyway, the new one doesn't have chrome and so it's something that can actually be played with.  It's very, very welcome.  As of this writing, he's still available (with his fellow pirate Brimstone) on the Collectors' Club website and on Big Bad Toy Store.  

Tankor's wavemate is Rattrap, who's a Deluxe Classed version of his original 1995 Basic Class toy.  Back in 1995, all of the Basic Beast Wars figures had autotransformations -- in Rattrap's case, you move his rat mode tail and he springloads roughly into robot mode.  Most of these worked by cramming robot limbs up inside the altmode, resulting in a standard "robot guy with huge altmode backpack and a chest made from the head or ass or something" look across the size class.  Rattrap made it onto the Beast Wars television show, so it was established that Rattrap is that guy with a rat head on his chest and everything else from his rat mode piled up on his back.  

Well, now it's 2014 (ninteen years later!), and it's time to make a larger, non-autotransforming version of that same design.  He definitely still has most of his rat mode on his robot mode back -- if he didn't, he wouldn't look like Rattrap -- but there is an attempt to integrate more rat parts in with his robot mode.  Well, okay, only his hind legs.  Those unfold and pack into the back of his robot mode legs.  His rat hindfeet become his heels.  The rat backpack does collapse in on itself better than the original's does, which is nice.  (The show Rattrap's backpack SHRANK, which isn't exactly an option here.)  

Since new Rattrap doesn't auto-transform, that means all the business of shoving his robot mode limbs into his animal shell is now your job!  And, yikes, is it a job.  It is a quagmire down there, with everything competing for the same spot at certain points.  There's about three separate joints in each knee that need to be bent and compiled in a way Just So in order for everything to fit together as it's supposed to, and until you figure out this correct way, transforming him may take you quite a while.  

That said, his rat mode is wonderful.  It's got a prehensile tail (it's soft plastic with a wire running through it) and he's got somewhat poseable legs and feet.  He's also got an openable jaw.  But what really blows my mind is that he's also designed to stand upright if you want.  There's a patch of fur-textured gray plastic you can rotate up behind his rat head so that when you bend the rat head forward while upright, there's no unsightly gap in the back of his neck.  Of course, there's always going to be those robot arms in place of his rat stomach, but making the rat mode able to get on its hind legs goes a real long way towards making the toy feel like Rattrap the character.  I think this is my preferred mode.  

The robot mode is great, but there are some small limitations.  His elbows can't bend a full 90 degrees, for starters.  This limits the amount of things you can do with his arms.  It'd be nice if his wrists rotated, too, and they look like they do, but it's possible this was something budgeted out at some stage.  His rat ears are also pretty large and tall (as they should be for rat mode) but they get in the way of most of his peripheral vision.  Photos of him need to be head on or from slightly above or you aren't going to see his head.  

On the plus column side, he's got some interesting weaponry in this mode.  He has a rifle that can split up into two separate guns.  Open up his left forearm and you can pull out one of his sticky bombs which he used on the show.  

In summary, this is a Rattrap toy with two great modes, some minor flaws, and an annoying transformation.  The latter deal should be somewhat mitigated once the proper leg transformation order is discovered, but not entirely.  It's a toy full of character and stuff to do. 

(Like Tankor, his comic book pack-in is published with terribly out-of-order pages.)

Transmutate is a heroic character.  She has trouble reading facial expressions, but that doesn't mean she lacks compassion.   She has a strong sense of right and wrong, and she believes in justice and making things equal for all.  But her lack of empathy makes achieving her goals difficult, and it gets her into trouble.  Yet she perseveres despite all odds.  

And it's unlikely that this time she's going to die at the end of her story so that everyone else learns an Important Lesson.  

Transmutate is a redeco of First Edition Transformers Prime Arcee.  She's in teal and a silvery gold plastic color that really likes to photograph an ugly brown.  (I have done some color nudging in Photoshop.)   The colors look pretty nice in person, especially with the translucent red accents to set off the neutralness of the teal and gold.  The toy's face has a smile sculpted on it, which is pleasant, but Transmutate's face is usually expressionless, so that feels a little odd in context with the character.  She's exclusive to the Transformers' Collectors Club, and so she comes in a medium-sized presentation box with cut-outs in the foam inside for both her and Rampage, who is the club's free-with-subscription figure this year and arrives separately.

I like the toy a lot for what it represents -- a kind of character we don't get much of, in Transformers or otherwise.  At least not the nondisposable kind.  She makes me happy.  

If I had a time machine, I would probably use it to go back to like 1999 or so and tell myself that this toy would exist.  Look, little dude, you don't have to pull all the parts off your Rhinox and sculpey yourself a more show-accurate one.  Just... wait a while.  You'll lose that thing anyway.  

Also in a few years you're going to stop believing the Earth is 6000 years old, so why not cut that shit out earlier.  You'll be free.  Let it go.  Let it go.  Turn away and slam the door!

The original Rhinox toy was designed to be kinda like a samurai guy.  He's got his samurai skirt and he gets a sword and a mace weapon and his mutant face splits out and kinda looks like the sides of a samurai helmet.  The cartoon model was all "hell naw" and removed a bunch of that and ignored his sword and just made him this huge unstoppable bruiser who's also super-smart and really good at being a leader and settling disputes and... okay, Rhinox was kind of on the edge of being annoyingly perfect.  But he was humble and kind of a homebody, so that kept that from happening.  Rhinox was never "i have to go now my home planet needs me," and other folks mostly ignored that he was clearly the most awesomely competent dude in that show.  

The original Rhinox toy was also a mess.  God dang.  Everything hangs everywhere.  He transformed from rhinoceros to a Christmas tree, I'm pretty sure.  Just cascading panels everywhere.  Thank goodness the newer, bigger Rhinox toy emulates the cleaner look of the television show.  The back end of the rhinoceros does split into quite a few parts, but they all compact neatly around him and usually lock down.  A hanging crotch skirt piece remains as the single remaining callback to his original samurai look.  (You can fold it up under his jaw-chest if you want to erase that motif completely.)  

In rhino mode, he's a very satisfying rhino, if immobile.  His butt and tail and horns and ears are all made of soft plastic.  There are no gimmicks in this mode.  He will look pretty and that is basically it.  Don't even open his jaw.  It's not supposed to be opened.  The jaw is for transformation and there's rows of very very not-rhinoceros-like sharp teeth in there for robot mode and the whole thing is hinged too far back in the jaw anyway to look good.  Don't do it!  Enjoy your static rhinoceros, dammit.

In robot mode, Rhinox has the articulation you expect, though I'm appreciative that his balljointed neck allows him to look up, which facilitates some nice chaingun of doom poses.  Speaking of which, he comes with two of those, as is Proper.  As with the original (single) weapon, pump the lever and the chain spins.  As not with the original, it's an actual chaingun thing, and not a weird rotating mace sawblade thing.  If you don't want your Rhinox to be encumbered with his weapons, you can shove the 5mm handles into the deep screwholes in the backs of his shoulders.  We always wondered where Rhinox was reaching when he'd grab behind himself and pull these outta seemingly nowhere, and now we know.

Rhinox is packaged mistransformed so that his torso is elongated.  Properly transformed, his crotch compacts deeper into his torso.  He's depicted this incorrect way on the packaging as well.  But done correctly, he's rightly stout.  

Two things I don't like about him:  1) His legs are a little loose!  Sometimes he's hard to stand.  2) I wish they'd kept his lips.  This new toy's mouth is more of a simple sculpted line.  Not only can't he be a samurai anymore, but he can't be a black dude, either (who is voiced by a white dude).  Stop this cultural erasure, Hasbro!

you totally need to buy him, for reals

he's so great

Man, Waspinator is the one guy in this wave of Generations Deluxes that is always hard to find!  He was missing when I got the other three in Austin (no worries, he was bought up by the dude who sent me there), he was the lone member of the wave when I found them yesterday, and there was just one lone Waspy remaining when I finally found him this afternoon.  He's not shortpacked or anything -- there's two of everyone in each case, and most places seemed to have multiple cases.  Folks are just buyin' up Waspinators and leaving everyone else.  

In your face, G1!

When folks learn we're getting new toys of old Beast Wars guys, they often wonder why.  It's an understandable viewpoint if thought about in the abstract -- I mean, usually fans want modern reimaginings of characters who are from Before Articulation, and Waspinator is definitely on the After side of that wavefront.  Usually folks want new toys of old dudes just to get those dudes with articulation, and Waspy's original toy doesn't fall short there.  

But once you get the original (well, mine's the Japanese release with bright green shoulders instead of pea green) next to the new one, you realize, oh, hey, Hasbro/Takara's gotten a lot better at things that aren't articulation in these past nigh-20 years.  Next to the new Waspinator, old Waspinator looks like someone blindly put him together out of mud.  Increased show-accuracy aside, new Waspy is just much more crisp and solid and visually interesting.  He's got a lot more going on.

Waspinator's lost his spring-loaded missile launching (he still has the stinger gun though) while picking up a wing-flap gimmick.  Pull on the lever on his back and they either swing forward or clap together, depending on how you have your wings placed into the balljoints.    He's also lost the head-swapping "mutant head" gimmick, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "robot" head exists in the tooling somewhere so they can pump out a Buzz Saw redeco in the future.  

Waspinator also transforms a little differently.  Instead of transforming Waspinator's robot legs into some amazingly oversized wasp legs, the legs instead try to hide themselves underneath the insect mode.  Well, "try."  They're pretty obvious under there, because they're actual robot legs, but they do run along the contour of the body.  It's also better, I think, than trying to do it the old way.  I prefer the insect legs to look like insect legs, even if they're sprouting out of robot parts.  

He's basically a perfect Waspinator toy, if what you're looking for is a toy of Waspinator-the-character, not toy-that-will-become-Waspinator-the-character.  But if you'd rather the latter, then you probably already have that one.  

Like the other Deluxes from this wave, Waspy comes with a comic book issue that features him.  It's not a great issue, but hey it's a comic book, and I'm sort of happy that Waspinator has been inserted into this continuity.  It's fun to see guys like Jhiaxus and Optimus Prime interact with him.  And since Wheelie's in there, too, it's not like Waspinator's the guy with the most annoying speech gimmick.