Oh, hey, also I'm finally getting around to auctioning my BotCon 2010 bagged set!  It comes in a bag, and is bagged.  In the bag are five toys!  Even the toys are individually bagged.  There's a lot of baggage!

So if you want Pyro or Clench or Streetwise or Sky-Byte or Breakdown, you might want to check it out.  I was going to single out one of them as one you REALLY have to have, but that's basically all of them, because they're fantastic.  Well, maybe not Streetwise.  I mean, sure, he's Shaft, but he's not nearly as pretty as the others.

They are so pretty.

You should bid on them.

No toys today, but, here, have an image I put together for the Transformers Wiki.  Considering how frequently the animation studios mixed up their Hot Rods and Rodimuses, a visual guide to their differences seems like it'd be a good idea.  Monzo provided me some scans of some colored character models from old Japanese magazines, but I wanted something a little less grainy and a little more, uh, accurate.  So I took their character model lineart and colored it myself by eyedropping colors from select episodes.  Some episodes were by crappy animation companies, so I avoided those, as they had different color palettes and sometimes colored things wrong.

So, hey, Hot Rod is pretty pink.  It's kinda funny that, as he gets older, he gets more desaturated.  I say it's funny because when you die in Transformers, you turn gray.  So this is like a subtle commentary on aging.   You're halfway dead!  Kup also desaturated with age, so it's not just Hot Rod who has his mortality written all over him in Prismacolor.

(The ancient, bearded sage Alpha Trion, even in modern times, is bright purple and red.  When he was a kid, I bet you couldn't look at him without burning your retinas.  He was a walking lense flare.)

I scaled the models to each other according to how they're depicted in the animation materials.  (I've got a lot of this crazy stuff on my hard drive.)  So their relative heights are accurate, at least to that one height chart.

My favorite detail is the crotch.  Why?  Because it's their windshield and roof.  That's where the passenger cabin is intended to go during the transformation to robot mode.  If any toy ever attempted it, it'd basically look like Hot Rod or Rodimus is wearing a huge diaper, so I can understand why their toys shy away from that.

Hope you enjoyed character-design geeking with me.

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In which I don't think I have enough to say to create enough text to have two photos floating in it.

Hey, preorder the Robin statue!  I'm just gonna keep asking and asking until you do it, so you might as well.  It's the only way to shut me up.

Unlike Rodimus and Cyclonus, I didn't have any older versions of the Galvatron mold that was included in the "Challenge at Cybertron" three-pack. There's a pretty good reason! Man, that mold sucks harder than your mom at a nickel convention. He always looked kinda iffy, and I was able to play with my friend Graham's back when he came out, confirming my suspicions.

So, yay, now I have my own, and he isn't much better. I mean, I guess he has a little more paint on him? I'm not actually sure. His robot mode sure has more paint, but his tank mode has practically none except for the treads. They really could have tried to paint something on it. It's not like it had to be accurate to any onscreen cartoon tank or anything! They coulda had fun with it.

Once again, the left (cannonless) arm is painted over. I'm still not sure why! They're going for cartoon accuracy, and Galvatron's cartoon arms are purple. Entirely purple. And yet the purple-plastic arms are covered in gray paint. It's not like that arm shows up in tank mode or anything. It doesn't make a difference. Though in general, I do like the colors. Mostly-white toys with a much darker secondary color are always pretty.

But dude, this toy does not like to be transformed. It's not that it's complicated. The transformation's probably about medium difficulty. Nothing about it is frustrating on paper. But, damn, does he like to pop apart. His arm will pop off and you'll try to fix it and more of the arm will pop off of itself and then the backpack will pop off and then the cannon will pop off as you try to fix the arm and backpack. Later, you will lose both legs during transformation.

See, this is why I skipped him the first time.

Despite this, I may keep him. I use Energon Galvatron as my Galvatron now, and have for a number of years. But he's huge, and space is increasingly a premium. It might be nice to try a smaller Galvatron for a while so I can actually fit in all those Sweeps. And the new Cyclonus's Armada I have.

Some day we'll get a good Voyager Class Galvatron. And he won't suck! These are my hopes and dreams.

Preorder it! It's gonna be swell.

(Mike's statue is stuck in customs and will ship as soon as Patch gets them.)

Joining Rodimus in the "Challenge at Cybertron" set is Cyclonus!  Like Rodimus, he's supposed to be in colors that closely approximate his appearance in the television show, regardless of taste.  As a result, he doesn't actually look all that bad.  He's a bit too much of the same value, meaning he's gonna look like he's almost all the same color to some colorblind people, but he's not an assault on the retinas like Takara's attempt at the same thing.

The original American Universe Cyclonus (in the back of the photos) tried to spice things up by using a darker purple, a medium red, and some light gray.  It better-balanced these colors across the body by breaking up the torso into light gray and dark purple instead of keeping the torso entirely purple.  This bothered some people.  Those people are in luck 'cuz the "Challenge at Cybertron" version keeps the torso all purple.  And it decorates the drab purple with some more saturated purple that you kind of have to squint to see in nonoptimum lighting.  Again, most of his colors are all the same value.

And he comes with Nightstick again, who looks more like Nightstick since he now has silver legs.

I think I'm going to keep boy my Cyclonuses.  This new one can be Cyclonus proper, and the old Universe one can be Cyclonus's Armada.  Why him and not the original?  He looks more like he's in Skywarp's colors, particularly with the gray stripes running down his torso.  And, y'know, Skywarp became Cyclonus's Armada. So that works out!

Of course, old-Nightstick is becoming Krunix. Hell, that Nightstick was always Krunix to me.  Basically, it's nice to now have a Nightstick.

Geez, Cyclonus, you sure are a whole lotta purple.

So there's this exclusive three-pack of Classics Rodimus, Galvatron, and Cyclonus that's been released in Southeast Asia with no sign so far of release anywhere else.  Sometimes I get paid in toys for art, so I figgered I might as well check them out since Big Bad Toy Store had the set in stock.

This here is "Challenge at Cybertron" Rodimus in front of his regular American retail self.  He's an attempt at doing the toy in pure cartoon colors, taste be damned.  I was super-interested in this toy when a few stolen samples of him showed up online just before BotCon.  I was interested because it looked like he was pinkish purple.  Hasbro and Takara try their damnedest to pretend that in the 1986 Animated Movie that Hot Rod is totally red and orange and yellow.  Ha!  It is to laugh.  He's frigging pink. Magenta-ish, even.  Early in the toy's design stage, Hasbro was gonna release him in pink, before they realized that holy crap no this is a boy's toy that would be financial suicide.  The production version was dark red, and every Hot Rod or Rodimus since then has been too.

And so photos showed up online of this Rodimus who looked pretty damn pink.  So pink the plastic had a translucent quality.   Hot damn, I said!  That'll be mine!

The actual toy is not pink.  In person it is a very brilliant red which that is pretty damn opaque.  Think of the color of, say, raw meat.  Or maybe watermelon.  Vaguely orangey, very vaguely pinkish, but definitely red.  Denied once again!

As a result the toy is a different kind of eyesore.  I think I kind of like it, but it's definitely an acquired taste.  This toy is the Eighties punching you in the face.  Other than the missed opportunity to do the first pink Hot Rod ever, it's a valiant effort to make the toy look like the cartoon model.  The fists are painted entirely over in light gray, as are the spoiler in a drab yellow and the fronts of the legs in dark gray.  Most noticeable is the canopy area which is no longer a translucent blue, but the same solid raw meat red as everything else but with painted light-blue windows.

Contrast it with the original Classics Rodimus toy, with its attempt to update and subdue Hot Rod's original look into something more palatable.

The "Challenge at Cybertron" Rodimus is both horrible and great, in comparison, and I waver on whether I prefer the cartoony one or not.  It certainly stands out more on a shelf, good or bad.

And one of them has to go.  I don't need two Classics Rodimuses.  We'll hafta see which one it is.