Primus apotheosis

by David Willis on December 1, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Posted In: Blog

Man, why didn’t this head option for the Inferno mold exist back in 2010?  It’s perfect for Pyro.  Instead, we got Inferno’s head in blue because all of the slots for head retools were used up on other figures in the BotCon 2010 set.  Back then, I figured I’d get home with my set and  immediately tape over the mouth and then paint the tape silver or something.  That mouth had to go, man.  It just did.  But I never got around to doing that.  I’m pretty lazy.

So anyway, now Hot Spot is a thing that exists, and he has a head that’s pretty Pyro-y.  It’s probably more Pyro-y than Hot Spot-y.  And so I waited until our stores started getting piles of Hot Spots and grabbed an extra one to steal a head from.  I got some Cobalt Blue and mixed in a bit of Napoleonic Violet, and apparently that matches Pyro’s blue pretty damn well.

I could have made his faceplate gold or yellow, to match the head this head’s replacing, but I have never ever ever painted yellow or gold without it looking like utter crap.  And so I left him with a silver faceplate, which happily matches the original Pyro toy.  Huzzah.


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One Metamorphin’ Dudicus.

by David Willis on November 18, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Posted In: Blog

Because God loves me, he gave the world a version of Fall of Cybertron Bruticus in Generation 2 colors with Generation 2 symbols in Generation 2 packaging, so that I may buy the hell out of it.  Honestly, I am not super-familiar with Bruticus’s Generation 2 colors — like, before this fall, I probably couldn’t have told you Blast-Off was white or Vortex was blue off-hand — but despite this, this version of these guys is really setting off my happybrains.  And, really, there is a huge deficit in yellow/purple Transformers, so thank you, G2 Onslaught.

Since this guy is G2 colors with G2 symbols in a G2 box, that makes him a new iteration of the original Combaticon characters from the Eighties, rather than an iteration of the new Fall of Cybertron/Aligned characters the first releases of the toy represented.  (Continuity families are a tricky business.)  This means that as a special bonus, even though this is just another set of Combaticons all with the same names and personalities, they still count as separate, different characters in my brain.  These guys’ll go on my G1/G2 shelf, with the San Diego Comic-Con version hanging out with my Aligned/WFC/FOC/Prime guys.

Earthy beigeness be damned, this guy’s way prettier than the original.  Yes, I’m talking about an entity that includes a space shuttle that has purple camo.  Realism doesn’t really enter into my appreciation of this guy.  It’s all tingling nerve endings.  A perfectly visual stimulus, absent from reason.

This guy’s an online exclusive in North America.  He’s sold out at Amazon, which is where I got mine, but Big Bad Toy Store still has some.


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mix it up

by David Willis on November 11, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Posted In: Blog

This is another one of those cases where I’m absolutely sure I’ve got somebody’s original toy in my basement, but I couldn’t manage to locate it.  But I did manage to find someone almost as good.

TF2010 Highbrow was a movieline toy who came out a few years ago and he transformed into a sweet knock-off of a P-38 Lightning.  He also had an alternate head built into the mold that looked like Ransack, a Generation 2 Decepticon who transformed into a Corsair.  Appropriate enough, right, a potential reuse from one World War II plane to another?

So who knows why Hasbro instead named and colored him like Ransack’s helicopter buddy Powerdive.

(Nevermind why the helicopter was named “Powerdive” to begin with.)

So I found Ransack’s toy, but not Powerdive’s original toy.  But hey, as I said, he kinda fits here anyway.   Enjoy my photo of old Ransack next to new Powerdive.

I passed on Highbrow at the time because I figured that at some point his awesome toy would likely be done as a character I liked better.  And that sort of paid off, considering the whole identity issues here.  Those aside, though, I’m pretty damn happy with this toy. It’s a dark green crazy WWII-ish plane with a shark painted around the cockpit.  Despite being a movie toy, he transforms pretty cleanly, too.  You can untransform his arms so they end in his rotors instead of fists, which I think is a good approximation of his original Rotor Force gimmick.

There’s only two things I don’t like about him.  The first are his stubby forearms.  The second is the specific mechanics of his gimmick.  Now, I love myself button-activated spinning rotors, and this guy has two of them.  However, they’re the kind where if you don’t hold the button down, the rotors stop spinning.  The best spinning rotors you can crank over and over and get them spinning faster, but these are set up to aggravate you.

Other than those two things, I really like him.  If you find him at Toys”R”Us (he’s an exclusive there), I’d snatch him up.  He’s worth it just for the plane mode.


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Beast chores

by David Willis on November 9, 2012 at 10:23 pm
Posted In: Blog

The second novel set in the War for Cybertron/Transformers Prime Aligned universe introduced a third faction of Transformers, pirates named Star Seekers, who roamed the universe angry that the Autobot/Decepticon war had ruined their homeworld.  Seems pretty fair.  The book strangely goes out of its way to avoid naming the leader of the pirate faction for the longest time, dropping familiar names for his crew, only to finally reveal the name of the pirate leader guy at the very end, super dramatically.  …it’s Thundertron, a completely new guy with an underwhelming name.  Weird implementation of subterfuge.

Hasbro seemed pretty super-excited about Thundertron and the Star Seekers.  At the subsequent BotCon, they revealed designs for all of the Star Seekers and implied that these pirate guys would figure big in the future.  So far, that’s only manifested in this toy for Thundertron.

It’s not a great toy.

I was excited for it because it was an animal.  I love beast toys, and new ones come along so seldom.  Plus, hey, a pirate, why not.  But sadly, he’s kind of a mess.  His robot mode is okay-ish with annoying shoulderpad things and his lion mode is pretty awful.  There are some good ideas here, but they’re outweighed by the not-so-good ones.  It’s neat and interesting that his robot arms double up on themselves to form only the biceps of his beast forelimbs.  However, this means his lower arms and claws, which become his annoying shoulder pads in robot mode, are attached to the body separately.  Pegging all this together results in stubby, immobile forelimbs.

Hey, remember the original Cheetor’s back legs, which looked amazingly awful?  Well, this guy’s got the same legs.  It’s one of those things I took for granted we’d never seen in a Transformers beast toy again, and certainly not on a Voyager Class toy, but here they are.  The lion mode tries to obscure this arrangement with a pair of wings.

But the weirdest part is how the lion mode’s tail attaches in the middle of his back.  Not from the top of his butt, but practically up at his shoulders.  Do not understand.

At least since he’s a pirate, one of his robot feet is removable so he can have a peg-leg.  The robot foot can peg onto his robot arm like a claw weapon.  His primary weapon is just like the others from his size-class, a two-moded weapon that’s spring-loaded to stay in one mode.  So if you want him to have a sword, you have to hold his weapon open in place.  Unlike Magnus, there’s no tab to keep it in the second mode.

Yeah, I don’t really like this guy.  I like that he’s a pirate lion and he’s a prose-only character, but he’s an awkward robot who transforms into a bad-looking, immobile beast-thing.  I had the Japanese version, Leo Prime, on preorder, but I canceled that ‘cuz I don’t think I want two of this guy.


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He thinks he’s television show people

by David Willis on November 7, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Posted In: Blog

Ultra Magnus and Ironhide seem to be two characters in the Transformers Prime toyline who weren’t slotted to appear in the television show, but got multiple toys as if they were important characters anyway.  (Well, okay, we didn’t get Ironhide’s larger toy as himself, but as Kup, but the concept still stands.)  That Ultra Magnus got two toys caused some folks to speculate that he’d show up in Season 2, but SPOILERS: he did not.

Now that I have Ultra Magnus’s Voyager Class toy, I dunno if I’m sad that this awesome design isn’t in the show or grateful that a non-show character has a toy strong enough to make me like it this much.  ’Cuz I do.  Like it this much, that is.  It’s a charismatic chunk of fossil fuels.  If he were real, I’d follow him anywhere.  It doesn’t hurt that Ultra Magnus borrows pretty heavily from the Animated version of the character, with his big truck-front shoulderpads and the massive hammer.  And it super-doesn’t hurt that this Ultra Magnus is founder of the Wreckers, and you know me and my Wreckers.  (The massive hammer really helps him fit in with the iconography of that group.)

His transformation is pretty simple, but clever enough that Magnus doesn’t look simple.  Magnus basically lies down and stuff folds around his robot parts to form a truck.  My favorite part is the two pairs of rear wheels which unfold from vehicle mode to wrap around his shins.  The only annoying part are his fairly loose shoulders.  They’re not quite stiff enough, and so they easily sag under the weight of his large weapon.

His large weapon, as I mentioned, is a giant hammer, but its default mode is an equally-large gun.  Like the other electronic-light-up weapons of the Transformers Prime Voyager Class toys, one mode is transformed into the other through spring-lever action.  Unlike the other weapons, though, Magnus has a latch that locks the weapon into his ax mode so it can stay there without you having to hold it in place with your fingers.  This is very good, ‘cuz Magnus needs his friggin’ hammer and I care much less about the gun.  It can also stow on his back if you want to keep his hands free.

There’s a second accessory, a missile launcher with a red missile that looks like a call-out to the missile launchers of the original Ultra Magnus.  You can peg it wherever.

I imagine Magnus knows Bulkhead, the former Wrecker.  I wanna know more details of their shared history, though I doubt we’ll get any anytime soon.  We’re also expecting a whole combiner team of Wreckers soon, too, so Magnus won’t always be so lonely.  (Of course, before then we’ll get a Fall of Cybertron Magnus toy which will probably work better aesthetically with them, but meh.)


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