In both Stege and Earthrise, the toyline seemed to be scrambling to find something toyetique to add to its range of G1 Done Again, and found itself making new toys of City Helper Guys like Cog or Brunt and then turning Micromaster Bases into robots.  But in Kingdom we've run out of characters from the 80s to turn into armor for your other 80s guys!!!!

So what if we just took dinosaur skeletons, made them into new characters, and then let you reconfigure them into dinosaur skeleton armor with FOSSIL Technology (Fossilized Osteo-Skeletal Shield Integration Loadout Technology) for your G1 Done Again guys?  And we called them FOSSILIZERS?  Yes please!!!!!  

In a way, Paleotrex isn't 100% a new character.  He's technically the body to the skull mace that the original gorilla Optimus Primal toy came with.  But we're counting it.  He's a gangly robot with long T. rex leg arms and tiny T. rex femur legs.  His skull face flips up to reveal a robot face.  He's utterly unlike anything we've gotten in Transformers before.  It's nice!

He reconfigures (like the Weaponizers and Modulators before him, he doesn't transform traditionally -- he comes apart and goes back together differently) into a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.  The head's a little too upright and the tail's a little short, but otherwise it makes a lovely undead dinosaur.  

And you can take him apart and figure out how to attach him to the 5mm ports in other current Transformers.  His instructions offer two possibilities, but there are undoubtedly others.  COVER YOUR TRANSFORMERS WITH DINOSAUR BONE ARMOR.

Do it.

Do it now.

One of the things Hasbro's seemingly trying to establish recently is that a toy's price point isn't necessarily related to its size.  They've been making the case that it's more about budget.  Which is true!  And it's always been true.  But it's faced an uphill battle versus customer expectations.  But maybe a Leader Class toy isn't necessarily a very tall guy, but a Voyager Class-sized figure but with more budget and extra parts.  Maybe a Deluxe Class figure could range from the size of Bumblebee to the size of Prowl to the size of Ironhide.  It's about the size of the character more than $20 = 5 inches always.  

This has understandably upset some folks because they look at the size of, say, Optimus Prime in his Leader Class package, and he's relatively small, even though he's flanked by a giant semi trailer.  They're expecting a figure that fills the package.  On the other hand, it means we get toys like this Studio Series '86 Hot Rod, who's the size traditionally of a large Deluxe, but has way more parts and paints and complexity than you'd manage at the Deluxe Class pricepoint.  

There's always been trade-offs for having toys at certain pricepoints.  For example, a toy at a certain pricepoint only has so many plastic sprues budgeted, so you end up with a lot of, for example, Hot Rods with orange fists, because even though his fists are gray in the cartoon, they're the only thing that's gray, and so they end up being included in one of the other plastic sprues.  So if you upgrade Hot Rod to a Voyager, then, bam, you've got more plastic colors to play with.  He can have light gray plastic fists, and his lower legs can be a darker gray, and he can have a yellow spoiler without having to paint it.  

(He may end up having yellow other things, though, as is the case with Studio Series '86 Hot Rod, because even Voyager Class toys have their limits.  And so the yellow spoiler shares a plastic sprue with other small jointing parts that need to be cast in unpaintable plastic for durability.)  

What I'm getting at is that this Hot Rod feels luxurious for his size.  A larger size class of effort went into this smaller toy, and you can feel it.  He's a near-perfect representation of the Animated Movie character, and probably the most perfect you could manage at the size.  He scales properly with other recent Transformers figures, with him being about the height of Ironhide and Ratchet, taller than Earthrise Arcee, and shorter than Stege Springer.  

His head opens so you can flip out magnifying goggles over his eyes.  His right hand folds in to reveal a wielding torch.  His left hand folds in to reveal a 5mm peg so you can attach his buzzsaw accessory.  He comes with both of his rifles and two effects parts that can plug into his exhaust pipes so it looks like he's either zooming in car mode or firing out of them in robot mode.  He comes with a Matrix of Leadership, which his hands can hinge open to hold, and there's also an effects part that fits over the Matrix itself so it looks like it's glowing with energy.  And as with all other Studio Series toys, he comes with a cardboard display background.  Hot Rod's is of the interior of Unicron where he opened the Matrix.  

As with SS86 Scourge, you can appreciate the equal care given to these guys versus the live-action movie toys.  They're trying to achieve an onscreen look, and in that metric they succeed handily.  

And, yeah, his transformation involves his arms spinning around on a central axis so that they flip sides, just like in that one transformation sequence in the movie that everyone's always wanted to see replicated in toy form.

I may be a jaded ol' Transformers fan, but warms even my cold heart to see Hasbro look at their Studio Series stuff and think, okay, we're taking great care to faithfully bring these live-action movie designs to action figures, so what if we extended that to other Transformers?  I mean, it's the sort of thing I'd assume I'd roll my eyes at -- and I do, at first, from a distance, but once in-hand it's hard to argue with the results?  

Maybe the important part is who I got my hands on first.  Scourge is pretty different from your usual early-years Transformers design.  His development process was animation design first, then toy, then new upgraded animation design based on that toy.  Scourge stands apart being this... muscular bearded vampire guy who transforms into a bar of soap.  There's always been a lot of compromise between those two modes, since they're largely incompatible.  But in Studio Series, its mission statement seems to be to try VERY VERY HARD to make it work, moreso than usual.  

This means he's got a nigh-perfect screen-accurate robot mode.  It feels like they started from that, made sure it wasn't compromised, and then built a vehicle mode around it.  Literally.  Scourge essentially has to be a shellformer, if you're doing any kind of accurate Scourge.  And he has big cape wings, which really says "Hey, I fold inside myself."  So, yeah, lean into that.  

Most of his transformation is getting his vehicle mode folded into his cape wings.  Usually Hasbro paints the wing shapes on the inside of the spaceship hull and calls it a day, but they tried to get the actual shape approximated as best as possible, here.  And I appreciate it.

I also appreciate the pink fingernail claws.  I feel like those are an important Scourge visual element that's not always remembered.  And there's this trapezoid on the front of his chest that's painted a slightly different blue than the plastic underneath.  It doesn't show at all in photography, so it's something you can only appreciate in person.  It's a paint operation you'd expect to be left out in the budget because it's an obvious thing to cut if you gotta, but it really adds some great color depth in person.  

Finally, there's no point in doing a Scourge toy if you can't have his head pop out of the top of the spaceship soap so he can fly around staring daggers at things.  And this toy can!  So we're all up in this.  

Studio Series '86 Scourge is running on all Scourge cylinders.  Even if he's not your particular kink, you have to respect the dedication to the kink.  They set out to make mothereffin' Scourge and by God they friggin' did.  

He's a very attractive rich milky blue, too. 

I remember a time that everyone in the fandom said they were sick of Bumblebees.  In those early live-action movie years, half of all toys were seemingly Bumblebee.  And, honestly, for good reason.  Bumblebee was incredibly popular.  But fans claimed oversaturation, which was probably true at times.  Then the Prime Wars Trilogy and subsequently the War for Cybertron trilogy hit, and... there was not much Bumblebee.  Just one regular-ass Bumblebee across that six year span, to my recollection, in Titans Return.  Just a Bumblebee drought.  

Now, Hasbro is giving you the Bumblebee you probably wanted.  A to-scale licensed Volkswagen G1-style Bumblebee.  Huzzah!  The one actual Bumblebee you probably want and then afterwards give up Bumblebees forever.

And it's a Walmart exclusive.  The folks who sort-of put up preorders, but just cancel them on you for fun because they misjudged their stock, then three hours later put them up for preorder again, and then cancel them on you for fun because they misjudged their stock, then... you get it.  

Anyway, Walmart toy preorders suck.  They don't care, because they don't have to.  They're Walmart.

What I'm trying to say is: it's hilarious that this Bumblebee toy is panning out this way, given Bumblebee's toy distribution history.  

The toy itself is pretty familiar if you've picked up Earthrise Cliffjumper, or Hubcap, or Bugbite.  He's that toy reshelled, keeping the robot parts but getting a new altmode (and head).  He transforms exactly the same, but into a different model of car.  There are parts that fit a bit more tightly than on the other three uses of the engineering -- his fists grip onto the 5mm pegs inside his rear car kibble in vehicle mode much more tightly, and it's a shove to get the front of his roof plugged into his hood during transformation.  

He comes with the same giant bazooka as the other guys, too, so this'll be some folks' fourth bazooka.  Giant weaponry seems like an odd mismatch with G1 Bumblebee, though if you bought Centurion Drone and his massive accessory box, there's a tiny Bumblebee pistol in there you can give him.  Really, Bumblebee with any gun seems weird to me.  I remember when Bumblebee was reintroduced into the original Marvel comics as a Pretender, and he just whipped out this gun and blasted Megatron a bunch, and I was like DANG, what.  

Bumblebee's your little friendly buddy, and he should have a little bit of a tummy.  He's a chub.  He should be a chub!  They gotta stop making him this badass muscle car, I tell ya.  

I am happy to inform you that this toy is a chub.

Some of Stege was a little too stegey, y'know?  Just so much molded surface detail that they looked like a popcorn ceiling all over.  Many toys escaped that look, but some did not.  For example.... Stege Soundwave.  Sure, he transformed into a sci-fi drop ship which kinda looked like Soundwave's robot mode taking a nap, but honestly his worst quality was that he looked like a gravel road.  Just, like, entirely too much detail.  He looked like somebody loaded up an image of cartoon Soundwave into Photoshop and just hit the "Add Noise" filter like 30 times.

Which is a huge reason why I'm more into the new Walmart exclusive Netflix Soundwave, which really exists as an excuse for Hasbro to retool Stege Soundwave into a version of himself that can become a microcassette recorder again.  But they removed a lot of the steginess and replaced them with new parts that aren't so greebly, and now he's not nearly so much of an eyesore.  I mean, the parts that are left unretooled, like his forearms, kind of stand out a bit amongst the new parts, but that's honestly fine because what was so bad about the greebly was that it was uniformly greebly EVERYWHERE.  So if it's just on his arms or whatever, that's an improvement, even if it sticks out.

Anyway, yeah, Soundwave's a tape deck (microcassette recorder) again.  He comes with Laserbeak and Ravage, who also have a small bit of retooling and some updated deco.  Both get new heads -- Laserbeak gets an Earth condor head instead of his Cybertronian head, while Ravage gets the same head design but snarling.  Laserbeak gets more paint on his wings, while Ravage has his microcassette tape detail painted on him.  I collect Ravages, so I was kinda stuck getting this set regardless, even though I'm happy to have the less Stegey Soundwave.  

He does have the cartoon red eyes now instead of my preferred yellow toy/Marvel eyes, but I might be able to swap those.  We'll see.

Now I'm asking again, Hasbro, where's my gaddang Buzzsaw?

Those of you trying to remember who's Runamuck and who's Runabout, RunaBout is the Black one.  It's simple!  Keep that in your brain.

Anyway, it feels like six decades ago Hasbro had their last "vote on some stuff to see who we'll make," and we chose Runamuck, and so Hasbro made Runamuck (at regular retail), and they also released Runabout (as a Target exclusive).  They were the two Battlechargers back in 1986, which meant you pulled them back and they raced forward and autotransformed into robot mode.  Y'know, like 1987's Throttlebots but with autotransforming. 

Because of this, their robot modes were pretty simple!  The roof of the car flung forward, and there were sort of arms and sort of a face, and both wheels stayed behind on the ground.  They didn't really have arms (just door panels folded out) and so the guns attached on the toys by clipping over their shoulder.

Well, now you can replicate most of this again, just minus the pull-back motor autotransforming!  Runamuck and Runabout's weapons can be held in their hands, sure, but there's also 5mm ports on the tops of their shoulders so you can have them don their weapons like the original toys.  And even the character models drew both sets of wheels behind their feet, and so, yes, these new toys have two sets of wheels behind their feet -- though one set's fake, while the real rear wheels fold behind their torso!  Ridiculous cartoon accuracy isn't just for 1984 characters, my friends!  The Battlechargers are getting in on it, too!

Their transformation(s) are... a little more involved than the other carformers in Stege/Earthrise so far?  Like, they've been finding a nice happy place where transformation isn't super simple but also isn't annoying complex.  Things just go where they're supposed to, easily!  But the Battlechargers kind of throw a small-sized wrench in this trend.  Even forgetting that they have fake roof-chests in robot mode that they... honestly don't seem like they need to have, there's a lot of fiddly manuevering in the robot shoulder area during conversion.  It's not a fun time!  I mean, it's not the worst or anything.  It's just not fun.  The bar has been pretty high for a while, and this kind of whiffs it right below.  

Runamuck comes with Runabout's gun.  Runabout comes with... both of their guns, which combine end-to-end.  

y'know that "generations" tag was a lot more useful for searches before Transformers Generations became, like, 99% of what I collect, huh

Here's Vertebreak, Kingdom's first-wave Core Class Fossilizer!  Fossilizers are going to be skeletal animal creatures (likely all prehistoric animals) that transform into robots.  The larger Deluxe Fossilizers will break apart into bone armor for other toys, same way the Weaponizers and Modulators did in previous lines.  However, Vertebreak is just Core Class, so there's no taking apart action.  They just transform and that's that.  You can give the skeletal tail sword to other toys, though, as it's still 5mm compatible.  Maybe even stick a head at the end of it, pretend it's a spine, and have somebody go all Mortal Kombat fatality on somebody else.  

Vertebreak transforms into a skeletal dracorex (possibly a juvenile pachycephalosaurus).  Legs become legs, arms fold into the torso, head becomes chest... the toy's basically a simplified Universe '08 Dinobot.  An interesting thing to me is that even though Vertebreak's jaw slides with the rest of the skull into the lower torso during transformation, the jaw is also sculpted on the back of the robot head.  Faux kibble!  When there doesn't even need to be, since this is an entirely new character!  I guess the control art was just insistent on the placement of the dinosaur jaw in robot mode.  

So far, Vertebreak has no available profile information, so we don't have a gender for them.   Sub-Deluxe size class toys who weren't Laserbeak or Ravage didn't make it into the Netflix cartoon, so it's possible we won't ever know!  

The third part of the War for Cybertron Trilogy, Kingdom, wasn't forecast to hit stores until March, and yet here we are, in November, with the initial trickle of them into one or two stores.  Amazon's even scoot up their estimate for delivery of these guys from February to next week.  Iiiiiit's happening!  Anyway, I threw my preorders in the garbage and grabbed a set of the first wave of Core Class figures from eBay.  

'Cuz if I can get a Rattrap now I'll get a Rattrap now.

Part one of WFC, Stege, was about the Autobots and Decepticons on Cybertron, pre-Earth.  Part two, Earthrise, is about them eventually getting to Earth and grabbing up some Earth alternate modes.  And Kingdom?  Apparently it's about Beast Wars!  I mean, there'll still be some Autobots and Decepticons, but we're here for the animals.  And taking the place of the $10 Micromaster two-pack pricepoint is the new Core Class pricepoint, which is some scaled-down G1 guys and some smaller Beast Wars folks.  (Presumably, the scaled-down G1 guys are for interacting with this year's Titan Class playset, which we don't officially know much about, but it'll be the Ark.)  

Rattrap is the lone returning Beast Wars character in the first wave.  (The other two are Vertebreak, a new Predacon; and a mini Optimus Prime.)  

The War for Cybertron Trilogy has been doing their best to deliver cartoon-accurate robot modes of Generation 1 Autobots and Decepticons, and it was interesting to learn how that design ethic would handle the Beast Wars characters.  It turns out that the way we're going is robot modes that do their best to ape (aheh) the Mainframe CGI models, while the beast modes are taking a more naturalistic approach.  This is versus the Masterpiece Beast Wars toys which aim to copy the CGI models in both robot and beast modes.  So Rattrap's rat mode, you see, tries to look more like your typical actual rat than it does the cute CGI rat he transformed into in the cartoon.

And, honestly, I'm big into that aesthetic.  I mean, I've got the Beast Wars Masterpiece toys if I need my Dinobot to transform into an awkward featherless duck or whatever.  I'm very happy for Kingdom to embrace better animal modes.  Rattrap's in particular is very pleasing!  It does indeed look like a little rat.  Enough so that I guess you should worry a little if you've got a-rat-nophobia or whatever.  In rat mode the toy is essentially immobile.  There is no articulation.  It's just a rat.

Which, at this scale, is fine enough.  This is a smalllllllll toy.  Maybe two inches long.  And I gotta tell you, this is the most complex toy I've ever seen at this tiny size.  He's got a lot going on in transformation.  Lots of little steps, and thankfully it all plugs in together well, mostly using various tabs that fit into the cooling vents in his balljoints.  Very economical.  It has to be, at this size.  

The perfect rat transforms into an unreasonably-well-proportioned robot mode.  Other than the more-realistic rat head on the chest, it achieves the look of the lanky CGI model.   The only real compromise is the robot feet, which become the rat's rear feet.  The was a choice to make them fully robotic or fully rat feet, and the choice was to go with a creepy midpoint.  Rattrap's feet are an organic redesign of his three-toed metal robot feet.  It's a compromise, again, but this is the scale we're working at.  Two inches.  

A friggin' incredible Rattrap at two inches.  

It's Sunstreaker!  You know, Sideswipe's brother (because they both transform into Lamborghinis and so I guess that's how being a brother in Robotworld works)!  Also known as the first Transformer to be designed, back in the day?  He was #1.  These days, they wait to do him whenever because Sideswipe is more popular (he's red!!!), and since they both transform into the same thing, Sideswipe gets priority. 

But here he is, in Earthrise, a year later after Sideswipe got released in Stege.  You avoid the alt-mode overlap that way, but in Earthrise, there's another kind of overlap.  Both Wheeljack and Runamuck transform essentially the same way!  They all get hood feet and roof chests.  You could easily just make one toy and swap out heads and deco to get reasonably faithful versions of all of them.

HOWEVER, Sunstreaker is entirely new!  .....he's.... extremely similar to Wheeljack, to the point that they essentially share engineering, but the two share zero parts.  Both have an empty torso box that you flip the head into, both put their car roofs on a lever that you rotate around the torso during transformation, both wrap their arms around the back of the car mode (though in different directions), both telescope out their legs the same way...  They feel like the same toy, even though they are not.  

(Runamuck, meanwhile, is absolutely different engineering up and down)

A fun thing about Sunstreaker is that instead of rotating his feet around for robot mode, his feet are sculpted and painted to look like car hood on both sides.  Saves you a step and some engineering, I guess!  

A less fun thing about Sunstreaker is that, unlike Sideswipe, his car mode isn't entirely painted.  This means only his translucent plastic parts get painted yellow to match his yellow plastic, and so he isn't as coherent as Sideswipe is.  Photography of Sunstreaker drastically exaggerates the difference between paint and plastic in person, to the point where you honestly don't notice that there is a difference most of the time.  But put Sunstreaker in front of a camera, and his yellow plastic and paint contrast flares up like this is They Live or something.  Keep Sunstreaker away from cameras!

Which would seriously bum Sunstreaker out.  Dude's vain.  

Quintesson Judge is a Transformer, sort of!  I mean, okay, the character isn't a Transformer.  And also the toy... barely transforms.  Into not a thing.  So a certain sub-100 percentage a Transformer!  

But you don't care!  In fact, if Quintesson Judge transformed better, into a real thing, he'd probably accomplish Looking Like A Quintesson Judge less well than you'd want.  And you just want a Quintesson Judge toy!  The sort-of transforming is just there to justify his placement in the toy line to the marketing execs.

Yeah, you just venitian blind up his five faces, pull down some ramps, unfold his chair, and balance his hat on his faces.  It's a.... tower!  With a flattened chair!  And a cage?  Yeah, a cage.  The cage is neat!  You can put Rung in it and have him do sexy cage dances.  

Two of the five Quintesson faces don't come assembled.  You attach them yourself!  In theory!  Some folks, many folks, nearly all folks... have expressed difficulty.  I know of at least one friend who ended up returning his because he couldn't get the red one attached.  It's the red one that gives the most difficulty.  And a reported few just gave up, shaved off the connectors, and just fuckin' glued the face onto where it goes.  

I spent... 30 minutes getting the red face on mine to connect properly?  My fingers were very sore!  I have a second Judge as of today, and I expected to battle it out with this one, and then it just popped on in 15 seconds and I actually was a little disappointed.  I was all geared up for a fight.  But it means... some won't give trouble, I guess?  Or maybe I'm just getting better at it.

(The Judge who comes with the Hasbro Pulse exclusive Pit Of Judgement set, back up for preorder currently, comes completely pre-assembled, if you're looking to avoid this situation.)

Anyway!  Judge!  He judges.  Press a lever on his back and his heads rotate a click around.  That's all anybody wanted, and the toy delivers.  

Plus he comes with a chair.

I love toys that come with chairs.