Titans Return Krok & Gatorface

Since I wasn't that inspired by the G1 HeadMasters, I've not felt the need to buy their Titans Return remakes. However, one mold in particular - Skullcruncher/Skullsmasher's - tickled me more than any of the others, I just didn't like the colourscheme.

Thankfully, Hasbro decided to come with a repaint fairly quickly, referencing an Action Master figure, just for added fun, and the new colourscheme - black, purple and acid green/yellow - looked far better than Skullcruncher's green, pink and grey...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2007 (Timelines) Weirdwolf

The Games of Deception set from BotCon 2007 was a controversial one because of the updated G1 Seeker and Coneheads it so callously included (not to mention the Go-Bot) meaning - for a while, at least - neither Hasbro nor Takara Tomy were making them available as mass retail figures. The extras from that year's show were equally controversial because they included a Springer who wasn't a Triple-Changer, pretty much the first ever official Elita-1 toy (made out of a much-reviled Galaxy Force/Cybertron shellformer), and a completely out-of-context (yet very welcome) repaint of Galaxy Force/Cybertron Vector Prime as Alpha Trion, with an excellent new head.

Bagged along with the latter came a repaint of Galaxy Force Fang Wolf/Cybertron Snarl as another otherwise out-of-context character - Weirdwolf, formerly a HeadMaster, but now Nebulan-free and very much different from his G1 form.

The Last Knight/Premier Edition Nitro

Or 'Nitro Zeus', to give him the movie character's full title. Then again, I still haven't seen The Last Knight, and have no intention of doing so, so I have zero connection to the movie character or his nonsensical naming therein. Nitro was one of those toys which, almost like those from the extended range from the original movie and Revenge of the Fallen, simply struck me as being a pretty awesome TransFormers toy, at least as far as the early photos went. I was lucky enough to pick him up at TFNation last year (by the time I got in, there were only two left on the only stall that seemed to have them, and the other one was minus the head!), and he's now the last of The Last Knight's toys that I need to write about...

FansProject Lost Exo Realm LER-05 Comera

(Femme-Bot Friday #47)

This almost certainly isn't the first time I've made myself look like a bit of a hypocrite, having repeatedly denounced the very concept of Dinobots, only to buy one and find it's actually quite good, objectively speaking.

FansProject started their Lost Exo Realm series of unofficial Masterpiece Dinobots, surprisingly, with their own take on Sludge - where most other Third Parties seemed to start with Grimlock - and only got to the Dinobot commander after their versions of Slag and Swoop... But the bigger surprise was how they followed him - not with their version of the final G1 Dinobot, Snarl, but with a pair of original characters built around the same basic structure... Dino-Femme-Bots, no less.

Naturally, that piqued my interest, so I ordered the first of them, Comera, toward the end of last year, with a view to potentially getting the second, Echara, if it turned out to be good... Because if I'm going to make myself a hypocrite, I want to go full-on about it.

Titans Return Brawn

I've often mentioned that I'm basically ambivalent about much of the fiction associated with the TransFormers brand. Sure, I watched the G1 TV show (when I could - it wasn't exactly aired consistently in the UK, jumping between various time slots in myriad different early morning TV shows), and I'm a huge fan of Beast Wars, TF Animated and TF Prime... I also read the Marvel comic back in the day, but didn't think much of it once the decree came down to stop using the toys as art reference.

But, to cut a long story short, I'm pretty sure that G1 Brawn was a figure I bought largely because of a story in the UK comics - specifically, The Enemy Within (written by franchise stalwart Simon Furman, and brilliantly illustrated by John Ridgway, Mike Collins and Gina Hart) - in which Brawn gets electrocuted and suffers a psychotic break, while Starscream makes his first proper attempt to usurp Megatron, the net result being that one ends up pitted against the other in a one-on-one battle in the desert. It's not the greatest story ever - Furman is far from being my favourite writer at the best of times - but it showcased the characters far better than the TV show ever did.

Like many G1 Mini Autobots who are not Bumblebee, Brawn has had only a very few reworkings over the years - the most notable probably being the bizarre Deluxe class figure in the N.E.S.T. Global Alliance subline of Revenge of the Fallen. With Titans Return, however, Hasbro are trawling their back catalogue - if not actually scraping the barrel quite yet - for characters ripe for an update... And Brawn just happened to be another of the lucky ones...

Hunt for the Decepticons Sidearm Sideswipe

Revenge of the Fallen's take on the G1 character Sideswipe wasn't exactly a fan favourite. Everything about him was wrong, from the make of car to its paint job, from the look of the robot to the minimal characterisation. The original version of the toy wasn't brilliant, with a couple of clumsy, boring Mech Alive gimmicks and huge chunks of car panels hanging off its back, but Hasbro decided to take a mulligan in the Hunt for the Decepticons subline, creating a version of the character with guns rather than swords, and tidying up much of the transformation scheme.

Power of the Primes Battleslash & Roadtrap (aka Duocon Battletrap)

One thing post-Diaclone Generation 1 got right was its constant innovation within the concept of 'TransFormers'. Even when the toys these innovations delivered were objectively crap, and ridiculously simplistic compared to the sort of thing Takara had originally produced, it was the toymaking technology, not the new ideas, that let them down.

Combiners, HeadMasters and PowerMasters were all prime examples of this, as Hasbro's more recent reboots of the concepts have clearly proven: components of each gestalt have had reasonable vehicle modes and fully articulated robot modes, while the gestalts themselves are also fully articulated. HeadMasters and PowerMasters may have been boiled down to a single core concept for Titans Return, but each has delivered fully articulated 'bots in five different size classes, with varying degrees of compatibility with the mini-figures.

Power of the Primes has not only developed the Titan Masters concept further, but reintroduced another old G1 concept... Starting with the Duocon Battletrap.

I'd considered splitting this into three separate posts - Battleslash, Roadtrap and finally Battletrap... but I figured that'd just take me too long to complete... So here's the full set, all in one!