Slugfest am coolest!

by David Willis on March 11, 2013 at 7:34 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Shattered Glass Slugfest is the last of the pre-existing characters in this eHobby set.  The rest of the dudes are all new to the universe.  SG Slugfest was one of the first Recordicons to get the spotlight, as he showed up in the first Shattered Glass text story, “Dungeons & Dinobots.”  While regular Slugfest is dumb and really insecure about it, Shattered Glass Slugfest is dumb and pretty self-confident — not in an arrogant way, but in an adorable way.  I picture SG Slugfest as a Transformers version of Andy from Parks & Rec, though with less talk good.

Slugfest is given two stickers to use if you wanna.  One’s just a “Dinocon” label.  The other’s a restraining bolt, which was used on him in his first appearance.

The toy itself is one of the more fun Mini-Cassette toys, mostly due to its spring-loaded stegosaurus plates.  Unfold the head and tail and they pop right up.  SG Slugfest’s colors are kind of like Grand Slam‘s, but without seeing if SG Overkill is blue and gray like Raindance, it’s hard to say if that was intentional or not.  (I suppose that could be up to me, considering I draw these guys.)   Slugfest’s weapons were silver in the prose illustrations, like Grand Slam’s, but they’re copper chrome on the toy.  It makes him less like Grand Slam, but even if that were the original intention, the copper really makes him look pretty and less monochrome, so I’m totes okay with it.

I’ve seen some folks express worry that placing the restraining bolt sticker over the hinge joint on his neck means that it would rotate along with the joint when the toy is transformed.  For me, this hasn’t been the case.  It’s seemingly stayed in place.


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I am a Blaster master

by David Willis on March 10, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Posted In: Blog

When SG Blaster was first introduced in the Shattered Glass text stories, he was based on the original Blaster toy but with colors swapped.  That probably put him outside the jurisdiction of the Transformers Collectors’ Club, toy-creation-wise.  Except for those wacky Seacons, they stick with modern toys.  I wanted a toy of SG Blaster to exist, and so that meant hoping e-Hobby would do one.  Ha ha ha, as if that’d ever happen.

WELL HUZZAH.

So while the new SG Soundwave isn’t particularly necessary, Blaster was a must have, especially since toys of Soundwave already existed.  He hasta fight somebody!  And with him come some guys to shove in his chest.  So sweet deal, all around.

Unlike a lot of Shattered Glass color schemes, Blaster’s doesn’t seem to be based on anybody else’s.  He’s not Blaster in Soundwave’s colors, for example.  No, he seems to be a new color scheme.  Part of his new scheme was some tribal tattoo-y things on his shoulders.  When SG Blaster’s toy was first announced, those tribal tattoo-y things were absent, and there were only recolored versions of his original stickers there, like any other reissue.  I was relieved when we learned about the sticker label sheet that comes with the set, which included large stickers to wrap around his shoulders and give him his tribal tats.  I’m especially relieved that they’re a perfect fit.  There’s also another sticker that belongs to Blaster, a yellow sphere with a stick through it.  According to the eHobby videos, that seems to go on his right shoulder, so that’s where I put mine.

He comes with the SG electro-scrambler.  I imagine it’s super-lame and not terribly courteous.


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Yippy kay-yay, Cobra!

by David Willis on March 9, 2013 at 9:59 pm
Posted In: Blog

Man, I expected to  have this toy last year!  Remember when the second G.I. Joe movie was coming out in 2012?  Good times.  But now the film is finally in 3D and/or has extra Channing Tatum, and unless the movie gets delayed eight months at the last minute to add a dimension AGAIN, maybe we’ll actually get to see it at the end of the month.  There’s only so many more dimensions you can add!  It already had time!  What’s next? Will we be adding Mr. Mxyzptlk?

Anyway, the movie’s sudden rescheduling occurred just as the movie’s tie-in toys were starting to hit stores.  Awkward.  And so we never got to the later waves with Bruce Willis in them.  I mean, dude, Bruce Willis G.I. Joe toy.  You gotta.  And so I did.

It wasn’t until I left the register that I realized, wow, so that’s why this thing’s so heavy.  Buried in the packaging, basically entirely hidden, is Joe Colton’s giant-ass missile launcher that’s as big as he is.  I’m not sure why you’d obscure half your product, but there it was.  And what you do is attach this massive man-sized missile launcher to the top of a tommy gun so Joe Colton can sort of hold it, plug four missiles into it, and then pull the ripcord out of it, launching the missiles in turn.  In theory.  The thing that aggravates me about modern Joes is that NO ONE CAN HOLD THEIR WEAPONS, EVER.  Now, couple that inability with a gun that weighs as much as the actual figure.  That ain’t happening.  Even if you don’t want to stand the thing up while holding its man-sized weapon, getting the thing to actually stay in his hand is a chore.

(The photo I included above is the result of about half an hour of trial and error.  It fell over immediately thereafter.  Retakes, to be safe?  Hell no, I called it quits.)

It’s too bad.  I’d really love my Bruce Willis toy to have a hilariously oversized missile launcher, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth.  So toss that stuff in the bin and resign yourself to only trying to get him to hold his normal-sized weapons.

I also got The Rock, because, hey, Roadblock.  And this one doesn’t have a gun handle molded into his palm.  It does have an amazingly weird weapon set thing, though, that I didn’t have the patience to figure out.  It’s not worth it.  It’s never worth it.  Joe weapons will never ever ever ever ever fit into hands, ever.

 


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So now Shattered Glass Soundwave has more toys than Gears.

by David Willis on March 8, 2013 at 9:15 pm
Posted In: Blog

Out of the entire set of SG Soundwave vs SG Blaster and all their new little dudes, Soundwave was the most surplus to my requirements.  I already had two Shattered Glass Soundwave toys, and one of them already sort of looked like this.  I mean, I understand why they’re making him, what with this being a purposeful reuse of the Soundblaster/Twincast reissues, plus this being meant partially for Japan, where they don’t have BotCon sets with SG Soundwave in them.  But, you know, personally, he wasn’t a big draw.

BUT I STILL LOVE THIS GUY A BUNCH.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s the attractive colors?  White with shock blue with hints of green just stands out.  Maybe it’s that all of the crazy van deco is brought over as sticker detail.  Maybe it’s that SG Soundwave’s a fun-ass character.  He’s got a headband  and says “righteous” all the time.

And so ultimately I suppose I welcome him.  I think BotCon’s Soundwave will be my display version of the character since it remains my favorite; it’s an SUV, so it doesn’t transform into a simple box representing obsolete technology.  I do lose the interaction with the Recordicons, but I plan on keeping them all displayed outside his chest compartment anyway.  Chest storage is for tape guys you lost the weapons to.

In addition to the stickers which recreate Soundwave’s van deco (and it still works, because us old timers remember plugging stickers all over our Walkmans as kids) there’s also a sticker provided to give Soundwave his trademark headband.  You fold it over lengthwise, which is kind of tough to do precisely, and then there are perforated slots at strategic points along the headband so that you can loop the whole thing around his head and attach the ends over each other.  It works pretty well.

The only snafu is one localized to my toy.  Apparently some Chinese factory worker got some black paint on his fingers while painting the die cast feet and got his identifying marks all over Soundwave’s inner thigh.  It’s completely obscured in robot mode, but it was a fun surprise in cassette recorder mode.  I’ll probably take some turpentine or something to it later.  Or, more likely, I’ll never bother, because, as mentioned, you can’t see it in robot mode, and that’s how he’s stored in the box once he gets put away in storage.


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He is the night.

by David Willis on March 7, 2013 at 8:03 pm
Posted In: Blog

A few years ago, Shattered Glass Ravage was this new thing and I’d been asked to write a short tech spec bio for him to be published in the Transformers Collectors’ Club magazine.  This was before he got a toy.  Until then, he was just a guy I’d made up over New Years Eve and then started a Twitter feed for because it amused me and because I thought it heretical that there was no SG version of Ravage because Ravage is awesome.  In the following issues, the Transformers club folks asked me to write additional bios for SG Ratbat and Steeljaw.

Normal Ratbat, to me, is the stick-up-his-ass fuel auditor who hilariously managed to worm his way into the Decepticon leadership position in the Marvel Comics.  Everyone hated him.  He was an accountant!  And yet, y’know, an accountant is an important job.  And so my idea was to flip that.  What’s a charismatic but completely frivolous job?  Why, SG Ratbat was a self-help guru.  A famous one who everyone liked.  He was a celebrity.  He was a secret alcoholic (addiction to low-grade fuel).  I really liked the idea.

But then it kind of got blown away by Jesse Wittenrich’s accompanying art for the character, which I hadn’t seen prior to getting the issue myself, of SG Ratbat done up in blue and gray and gold, y’know, for funsies.    And I was like, whoa.  Obviously, SG Ratbat is… you know who.  What’s this self-help guru crap?   And so once I started drawing Recordicons, I made sure to marry the two portrayals.  During the day, Ratbat was a famous philanthropist and author, but at night he patrolled the city skies as Bat-Bot.  I literally couldn’t pass up drawing that stuff.  You know me.

And so here we are, years later, and we have a damn toy of him.  E-Hobby, Japan’s outlet for exclusive redecos of Transformers stuffs, likes to come out with new-character redecoes of Generation 1 reissues, and they’d just done a pair of Twincast and Soundblaster.  So who do they do those two guys as?  Apparently, the answer is to partner up with the Transformers Collectors’ Club and give us SG Blaster and Soundwave and a smattering of SG Recordicons, including Ratbat in his Bat-Bot colors.

These are toys for me and me alone.

So here’s my friggin’ Transformers Caped Crusader guy, in plastic, here in front of me, for realsies.  A neat addition to SG Bat-Bot’s look are the chest stickers they give you which paste on either side of SG Bat-Bot’s chest rubsign, which pushes the homage a little further.  I liked it so much I retooled SG Bat-Bot’s design to include the stickers in his next Recordicons appearance.  You do gotta be careful with them, though.  They cover the tape spools in his chest, and the gun accessories you peg through there could poke through them a bit if you’re not precise.  Oh, and always put him back in the cassette tray stickers-face-up so you don’t puncture them.

Did I mention he appears in a comic illustrated by Hidetsugu Yoshioka?  My character, this guy I helped make, drawn by him?  Oh my lord, man.  This world is nuts.


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