Hey, remember the Jumpstarters?  If you're old enough, probably, because they were those two pull-back-and-go autotransforming dudes who weren't on the show, which means you probably got like sixteen of them at Christmas after they were the only things left on the shelves.  For years of BotCons, you could probably come home with a basket of them at $5 a piece, despite being vintage guys.  

I don't mean to trash talk 'em too much -- I mean, their concept was actually pretty cool.  You pull them back on their wheels in vehicle mode, they lunge forward, a trigger trips, and they flip up into the air and (hopefully) transform and land on their feet.  And by "transform" I mean they unfold at the hips and then they're done.  Again, these were simple guys, and they were simple guys who weren't advertised in the cartoon OR in the American comics, so they weren't exactly sought after.  Dudes didn't even get animation in their television commercial!

But, hey, Titans Return has given us a new Topspin (the jet guy of the two Jumpstarters), and he transforms like a real big boy Transformer now!  And jeez does he.  Dang friggin' dude takes what was once a simple "put your own face between your legs" transformation and makes it a whole deal.  He doesn't even fold over anymore.  Instead, his lower legs open up and swallow the thighs, then his arms collapse in on themselves to get rid of his biceps and his fists, then those arms hide up against the hull of his vehicle mode.  But before that can happen, Topspin does this Triggerhappy-esque thing where you disengage his hips from his body, then rotate the entire front of the chest around, and then reattach the hips to the other side of the torso.  Reveal the, um, "forks" at the front of the jet mode and then put his cockpit together, and you've got him in vehicle mode.

Yeah, he's got a cockpit now.

You transform his head into a dude and you put that dude inside it.

There's a lot going on here.

Like other Titans Return toys, he has two weapons which combine into a larger weapon which his head guy can sit inside.  Combined, it kind of looks like a Combiner Wars fist/gun to me, since it has four finger-ish guns at the front.  

Also, this guy feels huge.  He's not that much larger than the largest of Titans Return Deluxe Class guys, but he just feels massive.  He's wide and bulky and he looks like he could stomp you.  (It helps that his wavemate Perceptor is relatively scrawny.)  Topspin's searing Allspark Blue is vibrant and I like him.

I found him at Walgreens.  

Look, I have a lot of toys to talk about, but we have to get this little thing out of the way first.  In the "Are We Sure This Isn't A BotCon Exclusive Idea?" Department, Hasbro's retooling Fall of Cybertron Bruticus as, well, the Wreckers.  The torso is now Impactor, with a new Impactor head and a new handheld harpoon gun.  Impactor's never gotten a toy before.  He was a Marvel UK-only character that recently got new exposure in Last Stand of the Wreckers.  The limbs are the Jumpstarters and the Deluxe Autobots.  Topspin and Twintwist haven't gotten new toys since 1985.  Roadbuster and Whirl have had plenty of new toys since then, but none with their actual heads.

And the head of this combiner, dubbed Ruination, is based on Emirate Xaaron, another previously non-toy guy.

And and the chest of Ruination has the old BotCon Wreckers logo, the blue Autobot symbol with the hammer forehead.
Plus with a dark blue helicopter, a green jeep, a light blue tank, and a white shuttle, the toy seems to serve as an homage to Robots in Disguise Ruination as well, with the orange/golden chest of the Car Robots version seen in the animation.  This thing is an homage within an homage baked inside another  homage.  An homage turducken.

Seriously, what in the hell.  Mind, this is a good "what in the hell," but what in the hell regardless.

My only reservations are that Xaaron is not the best head choice for a giant combiner thingy of murder.  He was a politician at worst and a resistance movement figurehead at best.  But still.  Xaaron head.  It's hard to complain.  (Plus no matter what continuity we're talking about, at least two of these guys are dead.)

But, yeah.  I will buy this.  I will lick it.  It makes no sense, but I don't care.  Rule of Cool overrides all else.  Why is it not next spring yet, I put to you folks.  I think TFWiki needs a new category for "Things That Should Not Be Normal Retail Releases Yet Somehow Are."

A few days ago I talked about Roadbuster, and here's Topspin, who's his Wreckers NASCAR buddy.  Like Roadbuster, he's named after a guy who was a Wrecker in Generation 1, and he's even in a similar blue-and-white color scheme.  It's a nice bit of multiversal symmetry.  (The third guy, Leadfoot, is not named after a former Wrecker.  It's too bad.  "Broadside" really would have fit the red-and-white dude designed to look like a fat bearded man.  There's no deluxe Leadfoot known about at the moment, but there's bound to be one later on.)

Topspin's head looks like he has long hair and buck teeth.  Take from that what you will.

One of the conceits of the Wreckers (and perhaps Dark of the Moon vehicles as a whole) are that their vehicle modes have these halfsy weaponed-out modes.  Roadbuster's toy was "normal," or "stock," as I believe the jargon goes, but Topspin is sculpted into the halfsy weaponed-out mode.  His surface is all split and shifted with bits of tech and weaponry poking out.  In addition to his MechTech gun (which goes from crossbow gun? to claw), Topspin has four additional 5mm-pegged guns.  In robot mode, they all end up on the weird harness behind his shoulders.  It's hard to figure out exactly how this harness is supposed to be configured in robot mode, even with the instructions, but I've done my best.

One thing I didn't notice about Topspin until a second pass was that he doesn't have claw hands.  It looks like he does, but he has little sculpted "normal" hands underneath them.

The transformation isn't as clean as Roadbuster's, but it's not that much worse, really.  It just takes a few extra seconds of wiggling to get him back into vehicle mode from robot mode.  It is kind of neat how you layer his arms and legs together underneath the car mode, but still not as intriguing to me as Roadbuster's simple-yet-explodey transformation.  That, plus my affection for the "stock" version of the NASCAR alternate mode makes me prefer Roadbuster over Topspin.  There's no guarantee they'll do a "normal" Topspin, but if they do, I'll snatch him up.  I don't know much about NASCAR, but NASCAR cars do look cool.  Certainly more cool than cars in plain colors.

Wheeljack > Sideswipe