Combiner Wars was wonderful to me, but one thing it did fall short with is beasty dudes.  Of the guys from that line who actually combined, the Deluxe and Voyager Classes, only Sky Lynx (and his redeco, Deathsaurus), were beasty dudes!  There were buttloads of vehicles, sure, and, heck, even Sky Lynx himself is a vehicle and then a beast, but the entire line of Deluxe Class guys were just carcarcarcartruckcartruckjetjetjettanktank and so on.  

And so I'm grateful that with Titans Return, I have been granted more Deluxe Class beasty dudes.  Say hello to Twinferno, who used to be "Doublecross," but thanks to the inability to get that old trademark, he has been gifted a new name that is about 30 times cooler.  The original Doublecross toy was the first Transformer ever to have organic detailing (his dragon mode had furry arms), and if you rolled him along the ground, there was a spiked gear in his chest that caused him to spurt out sparks from, uh, his sternum.  Unlike the other two sparky beasty guys he originally shipped with, his beast mode heads' necks were too long for the sparks to launch through the mouths proper, and so out the collarbone or whatever they went instead.  

Hilariously, Titans Return Twinferno has the spiked gear sculpted into his chest, but it doesn't do anything.  It's just there to remind you of the thing the older toy could do but this one can't.  That's some Masters of the Universe Classics-level bullshit, there.

Twinferno's a great robot.  He looks pleasingly proportioned with his new big stompy feet.  I do love the stompy feet.  I especially love how they transform out of the beast mode's hind legs.  The hind legs just wad up, swing under the robot legs, and become feet.  This allows the tail halves to have that room on the side of the robot legs to themselves.  It's an amazing improvement and I love it.

(Note: I generally try to keep my photos of old toys next to new toys in a left-to-right chronology, but my vintage Doublecross has one of his wings broken off and so I put him on the right hand side in the below photographs instead of the left so you could see his single remaining wing better in beast mode.)

I love less the beasty mode.  Because the little head robot dude has to ride inside the beast mode, the beast mode has to fit him into the torso somehow, and now we end up with this.... super long torso.  It looks very awkward to me.  This beast is like 80% torso, with these legs all the way at the bottom and these tiny arms all the way at the top, and the torso is so long and ungainly that it makes even the dragon necks and heads look unimpressive in comparison.  I am a disappoint.

As a result, I think this guy's going to spend a lot of time in robot mode.  I mean, my guys spend a lot of time in robot mode anyway, but as an upright-standing beasty guy, he could have had a chance at remaining that way in display.  But no!  He looks kinda dippy in that mode, so he'll just have to be Big Stompy Foot Robot Guy perpetually instead.

Twinferno's head guy, Daburu, is sculpted to look like White Leo from Battle Beasts.  In Japan, Battle Beasts were part of Transformers continuity, and they even had an episode about them in the Headmasters anime.  Doublecross was in that episode, so I'm told, and so that's why his head is a little white and black lion dude wearing an eyepatch.

I'm not sure I'm the specific audience for that reference, but I'm sure someone will enjoy it, and it certainly bothers me none.

I really do love that new "Twinferno" name, though.

I own Titans Return Hot Rod because I wanted Getaway.  As mentioned yesterday, Getaway was shortpacked, and so he was only available from BigBadToyStore in a set of everybody from the case.  I am not super into the market of Deluxe Hot Rods Who Don't Look Terribly MTMTEy, and if I were, I'd probably prefer one in magenta with solid gray boots, which is what TakaraTomy is likely to do with him.  And so my plan was to skip Hasbro's Hot Rod and wait to see what TakaraTomy did.  I've got Cloud Rodimus, which is phenomenal, and so any additional Hot Rod would have to be amazingly fantastic to not be surplus-to-requirements.

But, again, if I wanted a Getaway, I had to get a Hot Rod as part of the package deal, so here we are.

And, actually, I'm pleasantly surprised with him.  The 2006 Classics Rodimus which this Hot Rod essentially replaces is... well, yeah, it's ten years old.  And even then, for its time, it was a little awkward.  Its cardoor skirt was interesting, but constantly got in the way of itself.  It had no rotational bicep articulation, and so its arms couldn't point outwards to shoot at anything.  It was pretty scrawny for a Deluxe of its time, as well, being hardly larger than his wavemate Bumblebee, who was small but came with a little jetski on a trailer to compensate for his lack of mass.  And so 2006 Classics Rodimus existed for a long time, filled an important character role, and had some neat ideas, but was often a chore to do anything with.

I was sort of ambivalent about New Titans Return Hot Rod ever since seeing images of him.  He seemed to be kind of a boring direct update, the same toy again-ish, even more than Transformers collectors tend to be used to.  He's got real similar arms, with the oversized shoulders, and his hot rod engine still ends up on his sternum, which is something he and Classics Rodimus share but few other Rodimi/Hot Rods do.

In hand, though, I've been enjoying him way more than I thought I would be.  Titans Return Hot Rod is a sizeable Deluxe Class toy (the tallest in the line so far by a smidge), and his engineering removes all of the little annoyances of the older toy.  His arms are set out from his torso, giving them room to move, he's got that bicep articulation, and his thighs are unencumbered by any sort of door skirt kibble.  Also, hey, he's got waist rotation, which is a bonus.

Oh, and his head pops off and transforms into a little dude who can ride inside him in car mode.

The car mode is more appealing to me, I think, as well.  The 2006 toy's car mode is a wedge -- which is fine, because Hot Rod's car has always been this doorstop with wheels, but the new 2016 toy adds some more interesting curvature in there to keep things interesting.  

Hot Rod's hips were, however, a little loose, causing him to do the legsplits constantly, but dabbing some floor polish into his balljoints and sockets fixed that easy-as-you-please.  

It's also nice, I GUESS, that Hasbro was able to finally get that "Hot Rod" trademark back after so many damn years.  But with a Hot Rod showing up reportedly in Transformers 5, I guess this was the time to put all your trademark ducks in a row or whatever.  "Rodimus" isn't a great name, but "Hot Rod" isn't super swell either.  It's... just what he is.  It's like naming Ravage "Cat."  (Sidestepping for the moment, of course, that Ravage's name in Japan IS "Jaguar.")

Being a Deluxe Class-sized guy fits better scale wise into my MTMTE/Lost Light display, but the Cloud Rodimus I have, while way too tall, looks more like MTMTE Rodimus, with his pointy head and yellow fists and yellow forehead.  This means Deluxe Titans Return Hot Rod is a little surplus to my requirements, but the toy is fun enough I don't regret owning him.  I like him enough I might still buy the TakaraTomy one if it's decoed in a way that pleases me.  I only own this guy as the "cost of doing business" of needing to get Getaway, anyway.

That motherfucker.

Time for more Titans Return guys!  In this third wave of Deluxes, there's Breakaway (Getaway), Hot Rod, Twinferno (Doublecross), and Triggerhappy.  Getaway is easily the boringest of the four for a few reasons, the most important of which is that he's just Chromedome with a new face.  There's been a lot of parts sharing so far in Titans Return, like a thigh or a gun here or there, but Getaway is the first Deluxe to just be somebody else's toy with a new face.  

(I'd say "new head," but that's not really accurate, as only the face itself is new, and the tiny robot guy who makes up the rest of the head is unaltered in sculpt.)  

Getaway also reminds us that budgeting for paint is done across a wave, not just on an individual toy-by-toy basis.  You CAN add more paint to one toy, but you gotta steal it from the budget of another toy in the case assortment.  

And, um, Getaway is clearly the loser, here.

Seriously, this guy is super white.  I mean, sure, the original Getaway toy was a white car, but this toy is... hella white and unpainted, even beyond what the original Getaway looked like.  Like, he should have at least blue arms, for starters.  (Adding blue paint to his arms is the first thing I did after finishing these photographs.)  And he could stand some red on the fronts of his shins.  Some, like, eyes, maybe?  The original toy didn't paint his eyes separately from the yellow of his lower face, but that's something that I think one can get away with better if other things on him are painted well.  And, well, they ain't.  So.  

The best thing about him is also kind of a curse, as well.  His face is a great interpretation of how he looks in the comic book series More Than Meets The Eye.  It makes him look like MTMTE Getaway because, well, that's MTMTE Getaway's head.   The thing is, Getaway is hated in MTMTE.  He's kind of being a jerk right now.  And so, hooray, own a sort of okayish toy of this incredible jerk.  

Did I mention he's also shortpacked?  I had to buy a set of the entire wave to get him from BigBadToyStore; that's the only way he was available.  

I mean, with his arms painted blue, he's nice enough.  But, like, you still have to paint his arms blue.  

I was tentatively excited about the Transformers: Robots in Disguise cartoon that started up a while ago.  I was super excited about the Decepticon in the preview clip.  It was a lobster robot that transformed into a car.  And his name was Bisk.  You know, like the lobster dish, bisque, but spelled funny.  A reddish orange lobster robot who transforms into a car and is named Bisk is, like, the most perfect thing.

But the toyline decided, nahhh, and gave us nothing but Autobots and one goddamn single boring-ass Decepticon for the longest time.  Yeah, there's a Decepticon who transforms from a wolfman to an SUV.  I don't care.  Wolves are boring and also Steeljaw was boring.  He was a boring character.  Where's my fucking lobster car???

It was this lack of lobster cars (or any non-Steeljaw Decepticons in general) that put me off a mainline Transformers cartoon for the first time.  Sure, I got myself a Strongarm, whatever.  But if the cartoon is gonna dazzle me with all these animalistic Decepticon weirdos and only give me the boringest one, then I'm out.  Out, I say!

A large number of months later, finally, there's a Bisk toy.  There's several, actually!  There's some simple quick-change ones and a smaller pocket-sized one, and a "real" Warrior Class Bisk toy.  It's too late for me to start caring about the rest of this toyline I've mostly avoided, but heck yeah I'll buy a Bisk.  I ordered the Japanese TakaraTomy Adventure version of the Warrior Class Bisk toy, because he has a little more paint.  

And, frankly, he's goddamned amazing.  If this guy had been, like, wave one or wave two, I might have bought the rest of the line just on the strength of him.  Again, he's a fancy Batmobile-esque sports car that transforms into a lobster robot.  He's got big lobster claws and big lobster-stalk eyes and a little lobster tail that hangs down behind him.  He hunches over like a goofy weirdo and has a dopey grin.  He comes with two black pistols that can plug into the tops of his claws.   And his name is fucking BISK.

instead we got like sixteen goddamned sideswipes all in a row.

Important stuff up front:

Combiner Wars Liokaiser is now available exclusively at Entertainment Earth.  There's a coupon code, SINGLES, which gets you $20 off, free shipping, plus a free diorama.  

So here's Entertainment Earth's exclusive Liokaiser.  The original Liokaiser was a combiner guy from Japan's Victory toyline and cartoon, and so he's not really a household name over here in the states by a mile.  BotCon did one of his components, Leozack, as a standalone redeco of Starscream back in 2009, but otherwise, he's not really made a splash here.  So what we have here are a buncha Combiner Wars guys retooled into Liokaiser dudes.  There are some laterations.  Leozack and Jarugar, the two components who made up the original combiner robot's torso, are out.  They're replaced by Deathsaurus, the Decepticon Leader from the Victory toyline and cartoon.  That change is one of the WHAAAAAAAAAA??? deals I enjoy.  A Sky Lynx retool as Deathsaurus?  I never would have thought of that.  Sign me friggin' up.  

Deathsaurus, like all the other main components of this new version of Liokaiser, has some retooling.  His is the least, though, as his single new part is a new "hat" for the top of the beast mode head.  It gives the head a fin and some angrier-looking eyes.  The colors, for the most part, aren't Deathsaurus's.  Since Deathsaurus is replacing Leozack and Jarugar, he's mostly in their colors instead of his own.  He still has the white dragon head with the golden beak, and his weapons are a familiar shade of Deathsaurus gray-blue, but he's largely teal and black and white.  

The original Deathsaurus walked on his hind legs, and you can get this version of him to do so if you want.  I do wish I could get the forelegs to sit flush with the torso, but there's some parts bumping into each other keeping the ratcheting from clicking into the proper position.  Ah well.  If I display these guys in uncombined mode, I'd probably keep Deathsaurus on his hind legs, just to make him more Deathsaurusy and distinguish him more from Sky Lynx.

Liokaiser's legs are a pair of Brawl retools, Drillhorn and Killbison.  (Killbison is "Ironbison" on the packaging for likely "we can't have Kill in the name" reasons.  Same with Deathsaurus, who uses his untranslated "Dezarus" name.)  These two are the weak point of the set for me, if only because I just don't like the awkward Brawl mold.  I mean, the two are tanks, so it makes sense that Brawl would be used for them, but they're still an annoyance.  Drillhorn uses the Nosecone version of Brawl, so he can have his drill, obviously, and both have new heads.  What's interesting about their heads are they have articulated stuff on them.  Killbison's antenna fold out from inside his head, and Drillhorn's horn folds out as well.  This is so that their heads can fit into the space needed for transformation.  I'm surprised that this extra tooling step was taken, rather than granting the pair new heads that are made of a single piece but with smaller, molded-in parts.  It makes me happy, regardless.

The arms are Hellbat ("Fellbat" on the packaging for GUESS WHY) and Guyhawk.  Both jets, but they're different jets, one retooled from Skydive and the other from Air Raid.  (Though Skydive and Airaid do share some parts already.)  Hellbat, like the tanks, gets a new head with flip-out parts: his bat wing ears.  Guyhawk is the only limb whose new head is a solid object.  Guyhawk, to me, is the stand-out deco of the entire set.  He's pink!  We don't see many pink toys.  It's a very lovely pink, too, and I thiiiiiiink it represents properly in photography.  

Combiner Wars Liokaiser has another new component, Ion Scythe.  He's a reuse of an Arms Micron toy, which were the Mini-Con partners Japan produced as part of its Transformers Prime toyline.  He transforms from a bird cyclops to, what, a pair of pliers?  I dunno.  An oddity: In Japan, Arms Microns were solid plastic colors with only stickers to deco them.  Ion Scythe has those stickers painted on him.  They could have painted anything on him, but they painted his Japanese stickers on him.  Okay!

How to properly transform your Liokaiser is... well, it's sort of ambiguous.  The instructions show one way and the packaging photography shows another.  Specifically, the tank legs are transformed in the extra-tall configuration, which you couldn't use normally on most Combiner Wars combiners because the extra-tall configuration doesn't work if you don't have two Brawls to be the same height as legs.  But there are two Brawls, so one can take advantage of this symmetry and make Liokaiser more leggy than other combiners.  The instructions show the legs transforming as Brawl usually transforms for leg mode, in a shorter configuration.

Personally, I like to transform the tank legs shorter, and then rotate them 90 degrees sideways as to replicate the original Liokaiser's legs better.  This means Liokaiser can't bend at the knees the way a humanoid usually does, since the knees now bend inwards, but if you have a few Combiner Wars toys, you know how unreliable a combiner's knees can be anyway.  Just have him stand at attention and save yourself some Giant Toy Pratfalls.

I tend to display my Liokaiser with my BotCon Leozack.  Leozack was left out of this version of Liokaiser, but I have a toy of him, so it's nice that he still gets to hang out.  Jarugar is out of luck, I guess, unless you're cool with Kreons.

When your stomach is in knots and you find yourself just dreading the very act of passively existing, I find it beneficial to find small things to force myself to do, just to keep momentum going.  Momentum is king.   You might not do those small things well, 'cuz your brain isn't quite working at capacity, but you kinda just have to make yourself do things anyway, pushing up and through your emotional numbness.  "Fake it until you make it?" maybe?  Not quite, I dunno.  Too platitude-sounding for what shitshow's going on in your mind.  But it's close enough.

With that in mind, let me talk for a bit about Transformers Masterpiece Beast Wars Optimus Primal.

It's Beast Wars' 20th anniversary, and while Hasbro's been all "beast wars, what is that, optimus isn't no dumb monkey, have g1 recycled forever," TakaraTomy has stepped up and given us this amazing thing.  (I've been singing TakaraTomy's praises in contrast to Hasbro a lot more these days, I feel.  Am I weeabooing up or something?)

Let's consider the Generation 1 Masterpiece toys.  Generally, they try to replicate a look from the cartoon, and the cartoon they're sourcing from was cell-animated.  And so the toy, despite all its attempts to look like the cartoon as much as possible, must always fall short, because.... hey.  Three-dee object existing in front of you.  Flat cell-animated image.  And you get into these debates like with the upcoming new Masterpiece Generation 1 Megatron: should he have a silver/chrome finish like a gun or his original toy, or should he have a flat matte light gray like the cell animation?  There's always this dissonance between the source and the product, no matter how hard one tries.  Masterpiece Shockwave might be the closest to achieving a seamless transition.

But Beast Wars' source material is a whole other animal.  (so to speak)  It was CGI, albeit mid-Nineties television CGI, and so the characters from the cartoon are "real."  They don't look different when you look at them from the side versus the front or back, they have texture, they have alternating gloss and matte... and, frankly, they're more visually interesting.  Ironhide and Ratchet are just cardboard box towers.  A CGI model like Optimus Primal has curves and contours and nuance.  Relatively speaking.  This was 1996, again.

And that's where Masterpiece Optimus Primal really succeeds.  He's glossy where he needs to be, he's matte where he needs to be, and, god of gods, his terrible texture-map-in-lieu-of-actual-modeled-fur-because-this-is-1996 is honest to god printed all over him.  It doesn't come out well in my photography, but it looks like someone lightly hand-painted fur pattern everywhere on him that needs to be so.  These interplays of various glossies and faux texture map honestly make the toy come alive.  It's like the CGI model is standing on your shelf.

The painted-on-texture also has me a little on edge.  Does this stuff scratch off easily?  I dunno!  I don't wanna test its endurance so much!  And so I'm extremely careful with this guy.  There is a small bit on his forearm, right over a seam between two adjacent plastic pieces, where you can see the texture painting wasn't successfully applied.  And so I'm always eyeing that.  During transformation, you have to rotate his robot head out at the same time as rotating in his gorilla head, and you have to get the rotation just right through this very tight space so there's no scraping the top of the gorilla head.  I worry that I'll untransform him some day and find a scrape.  And I have no idea how baseless this fear is, as this is a new painting technology to me.  

The transformation is similar to the original, mostly because it kind of has to still be "arms become arms, legs become legs," but the differences are interesting to me.  In the original toy, the ape head folded down and flipped over to become the robot chest; on this new toy, the robot chest is formed from the gorilla's stomach, while the gorilla head hides inside the torso.  The gorilla back rotates upside-down for robot mode.  The gorilla legs are a huge mess of parts on its way to becoming robot legs, rather than the original "just unfold them at the knees, switch the feet, the end" deal.  Lots of flipping and turning there.  I do recommend having fingernails.  There's parts that require a very thin edge with leverage to unsecure them from their location.  Usually on Transformer toys, there's little helpful edges or nobs that give you leverage, but that would mess with the contours and accuracy of each mode.  

He's electronic.  Push down his robot head, and his robot eyes glow.  He comes with a number of alternate faces.  Four for robot mode (neutral, screaming, Dreamwave smirk, and mouthplate deployed) and three for gorilla mode (neutral, growling, smiling).  

He comes with his swords, which he can hold or store on his back, and he has both his flip-out shoulder missile launchers, and his forearm-deployed cannons.  You definitely need your fingernails for the latter.  You can do some folding on his backside to reveal his flight jets.  

Other than my apprehension regarding the texture painting, there's not a lot for me to complain about.  It's about as perfect as a Season 1 Optimus Primal toy as can be possible.   In robot mode, he might as well be a fancy maquette reproduction of the CGI model.  In ape mode... there are seams, but they're all understandable.  And the choice of different faces brings whatever character is otherwise missing.

I think I'll like him if my emotions come back.

I have a lot of Combiner Wars Ratchets!  Three and a half, to be imprecise.  I told you about my first BotCon Customization Class Ratchet way back in the summer, but there were five more potential decoes for that customization class toy.  I made four of them total: Marvel Ratchet (already linked), G2 Ratchet, SG Ratchet, and... Medix.  (Medix is the .5 of my 3.5 Ratchets, as he's not really a Ratchet but shares a body.)  

So I had these three Ratchets.  One more Ratchet and a torso, and I could have an entire Ratchet combiner!  But that would never happen, ha ha ha ha ha!  

Ha.

Ha ha ha ha.

TakaraTomy revealed that they were getting their own Ratchet release, swapping him in for the Smokescreen we got over here, for their version of Sky Reign, the Sky Lynx combiner.  Obviously they were gonna cartoon-colors him up, and they did.  Cartoon Ratchet was the only customization class option I didn't make.  But this Ratchet would make four Ratchets.  I'd have enough limbs for a Ratchet combiner.

IF ONLY THERE WERE A VOYAGER RATCHET TORSO

hey guess what i sent Cheetimus a Pyra Magna and told him to paint her into a lady Ratchet

Here's the thing about Lady Ratchet: the original preproduction intent for G1 Ratchet was that the character be a she instead of a he.  Bob Budiansky got saddled with this "write up 30 bios for these robots over Thanksgiving weekend" deal and came back to Marvel the next week with a character named Ratchet, named after Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, who was a party girl and a snarky-ass snarkster who maybe got a little drunk from time to time.  She was pretty awesome.  But Hasbro was all "um no, this is a boy's toyline and so they all have to be boys we mean genderless but really boys, okay??" and Budiansky was like "well okay whatever" and changed the gender and that was that.  

(Ratchet being a party animal, despite an aspect of the published character profile, never really made it successfully into either the original comic book or the cartoon.)  

And so my intent is that this Voyager Class-sized Ratchet custom represent Lady Ratchet, as originally intended.  No, not "Ratchette" or anything like that.  She's Ratchet.  If anybody's gotta signify their gender through their name, it's the Dude Ratchets.  Lady Ratchet came first, okay?

Anyway, Cheetimus painted this thing for me, expertly as he always does, and I got her in the mail just as my TakaraTomy Ratchet, the fourth limb, also arrived in the mail.  I had some small influence in Lady Ratchet's deco, such as demanding she keep the Marvel Red Helmet and such, but mostly I was like, "hey, Cheetimus, make this thing into Ratchet colors" and he delivered.  Yay!

I put a Reprolabels Autobot logo sticker on her chest (an unused one from the Thrilling 30 Jetfire set), gave her BotCon 2009 Leozack's sword weapon, and that was that.  Ratchet and her four smaller Ratchets combine to form Physicion.  Get it?  It's "physician" but with an O, because robots, I guess.  Look, I dunno.  

I'm not sure exactly why five different Ratchets are co-existing and forming a giant robot, but whatever the reason, it makes me happy.  

The year was 2001!  Transformers Beast Machines, the toyline, was not doing so great!  And so a bunch of tail-end product was shuffled into the next toyline as store exclusives.  A toy of Beast Wars/Machines Megatron as a robot that transformed into his Giant Head Spaceship Thing, But With Legs was eventually released at KB Toys as Robots in Disguise Megatron Megabolt.  The back-of-the-packaging bio recast the toy as not Beast Megs but as RID Megatron, the redubbed Gigatron from the Car Robots anime.  

I bought it, because, like, it was a BW/M Megatron toy I was worried we wouldn't otherwise get, and tried to personally ignore who the toy was "officially."  

I'm not good at this.  It bothered me.  I am anal retentive.  

Yeeaars later, Japan finally imported the series, sort of, but, like, on some weird nobody television station and released a bunch of Beast Machines toys in extremely limited numbers.  And so the toy that would have been Beast Megs was finally released as himself.  But he was, again, extremely limited, which made him both hard to find and expensive, and I was much poorer then.  I sucked it up and shrugged.  My Megatron Megabolt was close enough.

BUT I WAS STILL SECRETLY REALLY BOTHERED, YO.

Anyway.  I decided recently that this hole in my otherwise pretty comprehensive Beast Megatron collection was something I now needed to plug.  Easier said than done.  Once again, extremely limited production run.  Even if you have the money, you can't buy what isn't available to buy.  My pal Robowang grabbed one off eBay earlier this year while I was lax in searching there, and for a pretty good price, if I recall.  Like, it was listed under a typo or something.  Anyway, he got one.  He keeps it in his bathroom.  I think he does this to taunt me.

Finally, after checking eBay for "Beast Wars Returns Megatron" every other day for several months, another one popped up, and I grabbed it.  It's mine!

Megahead Megatron is a robot that transforms into a head with spider-legs -- y'know, like Mr. Freeze in New Batman Adventures.  If you roll the spider-legs-head thing along the ground, the wheel-gears on the underside open and close the mouth (and launch the missile out of the mouth) while the spider legs articulate up and down.  It's pretty awesome.  It's hard to not like a head with spider legs.

In robot mode, Megahead Megatron is.... very back heavy.  The whole spider-leg-geared contraption is an indivisible unit unto itself, and it's gotta go somewhere.  It goes on the back.  The robot mode's legs are a series of multiple ball joints, and you can imagine how well that goes.  If the ball joints aren't tight, he's gonna collapse like a marionette.   The balljoints on mine are thankfully stiff, but he's still a balancing act.

The head mode's missile launcher is springloaded to flip over the shoulders of the robot and land on the robot's head, giving Beast Wars Megatron's head a Beast Machines Megatron helmet and facemask.  This is also pretty neat.  There's magnets involved.  I don't think toys can afford magnets anymore these days.  Or springloaded missile launchers.  And certainly not both at the same time as the geared spider leg contraption, anyway.

The huge difference between this Megahead Megatron and the US release Megatron Megabolt is the red was swapped out for purple.  The silver plastic is also a little more purple.  And although the Japanese-release Beast Machines product mostly didn't alter the American paint operations at all, this guy has a new set of paint operations -- the teeth on the giant spiderleg head are now painted white.  It's a good addition.

Undocumented feature: Head mode fits on top of Fortress Maximus really nicely.  Fits even better if you pull the balljointed spiderlegs out.  

Yay, 3D printing!  It's getting to be not-crappy!  Now that Shapeways (the online 3D printing folks) has introduced a new material, black high-def acrylate, and my pal Trent Troop had a Dinobot head to purchase, I was like, yes, I will try this thing.

Shapeways' high-def acrylate, which currently only comes in black, is pretty close to looking like normal-ass molded plastic.  You don't see any layers in the plastic, like you're looking at a toy made out of lasagna, and the sculpted detail is very fine.  The only downside, at least for this project, was the piece comes in black, and I needed to make it gold and blue.  This meant.... base coat layer!  I was painting like some kind of adult, with preparedness and forethought and everything.  Whaaaaaat.  Luckily I had some medium gray acrylic paint sitting around from when I was painting up my BotCon Ratchets.

After that, it was only a matter of getting the gold and metallic blue paint on there.  After using plain-ol' Gold Leaf, I decided the gold needed to be a little more orangey-er, and so I mixed some orange into my gold and painted it again.  At this point, I think I've started to lose a little of the sculpted detail, but, eh, I don't feel like scraping it all off and starting over.  It looks nice, though!  I like it.

Trent/TheRobotMonster's got over 100 heads to choose from in his Shapeways store.  There's some Optimuses, some Pretender Monsters, Skeletor, the goddang Sogmaster, Krang, Rung and Tarn... there's a bunch there.  And all you gotta do is screwdriver away the head on the Titan Master toy itself, replace the head with the new one, and screwdriver the screw back in.  Easy cheezy.  You can make any Titans Return headmaster guy into Dinobot.  Or the Sogmaster.  

I gambled and it worked out.  Remember my blogpost about Titans Return Wheelie?  About how he's a great little robot and the transformation is interesting but he's kind of absolutely ruined by his car mode not holding together?  At all?  

Well, I got a second one (the one on the right in the photographs), the Japanese TakaraTomy one, and that one holds together fine.

Some American ones reportedly hold together in vehicle mode all right.  Maybe some Japanese ones don't.  But this one is good.  It's probably just plastic tolerances.  The design is maybe just not engineered in a way that it will hold together under all manufacturing conditions, I dunno.  But this one is fine.  

Ironically, I like the robot mode colors better on the new one, but the old one's car colors look better to me.  The one with the car mode I can't get to stay together is the one with the better colors.  Great.  But the robot mode on the new one is still alot better, as I said, so it's not all bad.  I like the gunmetal legs and the replacing of silver plastic with orange.  Plus it's nice that all of Wheelie's head is painted appopriately, not just his face.  

The one thing I don't like about the new one's robot mode is the much clearer translucent plastic canopy.  The smokey translucent plastic of the old one looked better on the robot chest, I feel.  Thankfully, you can just easily swap that, easy as one pleases.  Snaps off, snaps on.  The only downside is that it gives him THREE Autobot symbols in vehicle mode instead of the still-ridiculous two.  Ah well.  

I've got a photo of what that looks like on the left, with the slingshot accessory I stole from a previous Wheelie.

Wheelie comes with Go Shooter, who is the little boy who transforms into the head of who we call Siren over here.  It's nice that this Wheelie stays together when you try to fit Go Shooter inside.  I got so mad trying to get the old one transformed into car mode for the second photo above that I just gave up in a fit of rage.  Well, stole your canopy, sorry, and into the bin with you!