TransFormers Collectors' Club 2016/Combiner Wars Thunder Mayhem

By the time BotCon 2016 rolled around, Combiner Wars was already winding down but, as well as the show's exclusive gestalt boxed set - (Dawn of the) Predacus, the Club was creating another combiner of its very own via the 2016 Subscription Service, this time collecting a motley crew of Decepticons - a pair of former Triggercons and a pair of Double Targetmasters, with a former Pretender as their leader - calling themselves the Mayhem Attack Squad and repackaged as Combiner Wars repaints, with the torso figure receiving a new head of his own and a new head for the gestalt.

I've dealt with all the components individually, so it's about time I had a look at the completed Subscription Service 4.0 figure, Thunder Mayhem...



My first impression was that he's a bit of a jumble. The original Thunderwing, in and of himself, was predominantly white, but this thing is a mish-mash of clashing colours, even by G1 gestalt standards. The default configuration gives his largely green body one red-ish leg, one sandy-coloured leg, one off-white arm and one pink-and-blue arm. He's made up of three aircraft, and one pickup truck, attached to a brightly-coloured military vehicle of indeterminate purpose. There doesn't seem to be any pattern or consistency to the gestalt - he is very much the sum of his garishly-multicoloured parts. On the upside, he does only have two different colours of hand/foot gun... but since they don't match the limb they're attached to in all but one case, that doesn't help him come together as a single giant robot, it just means that his extremities are more consistent than his limbs.

I mean, I get that it's basically inevitable, given that this specific interpretation of Thunderwing is the sum of the Club's own version of the Mayhem Attack Squad (first featured almost ten years ago now, at the end of 'Cheap Shots', the comic packaged with the Club's 2008 exclusive, Nightbeat), but I feel as though there was probably a better way of achieving this... Like maybe having the torso as Thunderwing made out of either the CW Silverbolt or Scattershot mold, and then Thunder Mayhem being something else entirely.

To be perfectly honest, I was ambivalent about this set from the start - hopeful, but not expecting much - and never really got excited for the end result during the course of the 2016 Subscription Service. Having tried out all the components and the gestalt, I've packaged them all away again, and have yet to decide whether to hang on to them or sell them. As a general rule, I'm pretty reluctant to sell things - I've yet to use eBay for anything other than buying - but there's nothing else in my collection that I'm quite so ambivalent about as Thunder Mayhem...

It's entirely possible that I might like him more if there was a set of decent Third Party hands and feel, such as those produced by Perfect Effect... but do I really want to pay Third Party prices for a set of accessories for a gestalt I don't even like that much?