Hasbro is spreading their Beast Hunters stuff into the Kre-O line as well.  This set based around Optimus is the only set that's out so far, and it's only been spotted at Meijer.  But I had to have it for Reasons.

Well, Reason.  Finally Hasbro's started giving names to the little human dudes who come with the bigger sets.  Usually they're just "driver" or "pilot" or whatever, but this time the human's named and designed after the kid from Transformers: Energon, Chad "Kicker" Jones.  As were his toys in that toyline, his name is better trademarkable as "Energon Kicker," so there y'go.  Another set that's not out yet comes with "Col. Daniel Witwicky," which is Sparkplug Witwicky's full name and rank in IDW comics.  If they keep on throwing awesome pre-existing human dudes into these sets, I am going to be very pleased and also very poorer.

The rest of the set didn't disappoint, either.  I really feel like these later Kre-O sets are hitting a groove.  The sets from the first year annoyed me as they got more complex.  Even the mid-sized sets built its robots from many strata of thin tiles, and as a result they weren't that fun to put together.  This Beast Hunters Optimus Prime set avoids that without being a pile of specialized bricks.  It feels more efficient and creative.

There was another pleasant surprise: there are two different choices for hands on each wrist.  On older sets, there was just a generic fist-block for hands.  But here, we get slightly rubberized hands molded into various poses.  There's  a sword-holding hand and an open-palm-fingers-splayed hand for the right arm and a clenched fist and pointing finger for the left arm.  This is the damn coolest thing.  I was going to build the truck mode first (it looked cooler) until I saw I had all these hand options.

Even forgetting the hands, the robot mode is a satisfying completed build.  Lots of articulation is built into the robot mode, and not just on the limbs and ball-jointed waist.  Prime's knee-kibble points foward, you can play with his shoulder stuffs similarly, and the winged backpack with working missile launchers can raise up from his back to position over his shoulders.  There's a lot to do.  His sword doesn't come with a scabbard, but that's okay, because this is construction block stuff, so just peg it on his thigh.

His truck mode is neat-looking, too, but it sort of sits in the shadow of the awesome robot mode build.  It was interesting to discover that the trailer is actually mounted on an articulated ball-jointed arm that comes out of the hitch.  The roof is more lightly pegged-in so you can remove it easily to fit a Kreon inside.  And, again, missile launchers and deployable wings.

There's an unnamed dragon dude, too.  He looks kind of like Lazerback, but not quite.

The only thing that bugged me about the set was the stickers.  The sticker boundaries weren't cut very precisely, and so if you have two stickers which are supposed to have symmetric deco, one of them is sometimes a little offset.  It can be a little annoying, especially with the dragon's eyes.  You can line up the boundaries of the stickers themselves so they're symmetrical, but one eye will still look a little dippy as it's wandered across the surface of the sticker.

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.

Okay, so I make a cameo in this thing that has puppets and Vangelus and Derrick Wyatt and Transformers.  It's The Isle of Rangoon's video review of the Eighties Transformers series episode, "B.O.T."  I am way super glad I only have a cameo, because "B.O.T." is something I really wish to never experience again.  It's not a good episode.  Hence,  you know, the "review."  I'm sure the subject matter takes a beating and that the exercise is vicariously satisfying.

Me, I still have PTSD.

I've always wanted to do one of the annual BotCon customization classes, but never had before due to needing to fly in a day or two early.  I've got comics to draw!  But when this year's BotCon theme was revealed to be Transformers Animated, I had to ensure that I got in.  The customization toy is almost always a mold from that year's toy set, and I wasn't gonna miss a potential new Transformers Animated character.

And, hey, whaddya know.  Animated Minerva.  She's a white and red redeco of Animated Arcee (also used for Animated Drag Strip that year in the box set) with a new part that gives her antenna.  The piece doesn't alter the toy itself, rather, you place it inbetween the front and back halves of her head when you screw them together.  It's a very fragile piece, since it involves two thin stalks of resin, so I'm gonna have to be careful with her.  For the trip home, I folded her up into car mode and shoved her in the box set's foam insert area for Drag Strip.  Like hell was I gonna wad her up in my suitcase!

There's two classes, Wednesday and Thursday, with about 25 people per, and each participant is given a tray, tools, a booklet, and a big bag of unassembled parts, screws, and rivets.  The toy parts are all still on their plastic sprues.

The booklet outlines all of the tools you're gonna use, plus identifies each of the toy parts as being part of the torso, head, right arm, etc.   The first step is removing all of the plastic toy parts from the sprues and organizing them by these groups.  This, like basically everything in the class, is more difficult than one would imagine.  Very few of the parts come free cleanly.  Most you have to sand or knife away the excess residue.  But some you have to take, like, scissors to, because the connection point to the piece and the sprue is really thick.  Clamp down hard as you can, finally the piece gives way, it goes flying across the room...  and then you get to sand or cut away what's left of the sprue attachment point.

Once everything's removed and separated, you put the thing together piece by piece.  Most things are relatively easy to put together, but some things, like where the rivets go in, are difficult to work with.  There's rivets of various size, and the only difference between them is a millimeter or two.  (That's why you get a ruler!)  Once the correct rivet is sorted out, you have to try to get it through the joint you're trying to create.  This usually involved pliers.

As the toy's being assembled, it's probably smart to paint some things as you go.  The red on the top of her torso, for example, was something a lot of people airbrushed.  This involves taping around the sides of her torso piece so that the red doesn't go where you don't want it to.  I tried this out myself, but I ended up with a goopy red thing because I don't know what I'm doing.  So, woo, I ended up dumping the torso in the glass of delicious-looking clear blue thinner, sanding off what didn't wash off, and hand-painting the red instead.

After several hours, you're done.

It's rough, but very rewarding!  I feel very strong ownership over my Animated Minerva.  I made her!  I'm like her daddy!  AND NO DON'T TOUCH HER OH MY GOD THE ANTENNA.

On the strip's subject, I just got back from visiting two Targets.  The first wouldn't get stuff out of the back because I wanted one toy out of an assortment, and the guy didn't think it was okay to open an assortment for one guy for a collector, which is very reasonable, and the second Target totally got me a Bumblebee.  That Target actually had ZERO Transformers out on its clearance-tagged pegs, so I figgered that probably greased the wheel, so to speak.

Hey, remember last year when Tfwiki.net and Allspark.com put their money together to get a 25-year-old catalog off eBay and put the unused money towards Hasbro Childrens Hospital?  Well, we're auctioning it back into the wild, with the full proceeds going towards that same charity.  Go take a look.