Cybertron Shortround

Up until recently, when one thought of TransFormers hovercraft, there was pretty much only Seaspray. The Cybertron toyline forever changed the seascape by introducing a whole new character - Shortround - with a hovercraft vehicle mode, a geeky personality and (apparently) a dangerous (to himself) obsession with Chromia (aka Thunderblast).

There's probably a very good reason that seafaring TransFormers are a rarity. Even if one assumes Cybertron has no oceans of any kind, the very nature of its sentient robotic life is inclined toward adapting to its environment, and lack of exposure does not automatically preclude the ability to acclimatise. That said, I just don't feel that the open ocean on Earth presents as many opportunities for TransFormers stories as the land... I mean, even in the G1 TV show, the Decepticons gave up on attacking oil rigs after a single battle with the Autobots, despite the fact that the Autobots were largely unable to fly after the pilot episode, let alone travel over or through water.

Galaxy Force Dark Ligerjack

There's something a little bit sad about Galaxy Force Ligerjack. Obviously the character is one who, having been defeated in battle, obtained an upgraded form - supposedly through the power of the key, according to the cartoon, though that's not a feature reflected in the toys - but also the toy itself is only part of what it should have been. Designed from the start to combine with Galaxy Convoy or Master Megatron/Galvatron as a new arm, his original design included fingers and thumbs for this additional mode, and the key gimmicks were rather more extensive. Evidently too costly for the final toy, these additional features were removed, leaving gaping holes and rendering the arm form a bit useless.

My reason for not buying standard Ligerjack was mainly that I disliked his colourscheme... so, naturally, when the 'Dark' version was announced, it made it onto my want list immediately.

Alternators Battle Ravage (Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Convertible)

The connection between Generation 1 and Beast Wars might seem tenuous if one were to look at the toys in isolation. Aside from a very familiar-looking head on the Maximals' leader, there was no real visual continuity. It was the TV show that very cleverly posited that the Maximals and Predacons were descendants of the Autobots and Decepticons, respectively, and the two small teams travelled back in time to prehistoric Earth, where the Beast Wars were waged.

Why am I writing about Beast Wars in the writeup for an Alternators model? OK, kids... this is where it gets complicated (and also involves a major Beast Wars spoiler for anyone who's not yet enjoyed that series): In the TV show, Tripredacus agent Ravage - a rebuilt version of G1 Ravage - is sent back in time to put a stop to Megatron's plans, but ends up helping due to a fragment of message from the original Megatron, encoded on the Golden Disk. He ends up getting destroyed, but not before downloading his consciousness into his ship's black box, only to be recovered in the present day and installed in a Binaltech body... along with G1 Ravage, stasis-locked in his cassette form, in the dashboard of his Chevrolet Corvette Z06 alternate mode to provide the body with a Spark. So Binaltech Battle Ravage = Beast Wars Ravage + G1 Ravage... but BW Ravage is a future version of G1 Ravage, for whom the events of the Binaltech story must already have happened, so Binaltech Battle Ravage represents an infinite temporal loop of Ravage personalities.

Or something...

Now, I hadn't planned on buying BT11 both because I wasn't overkeen on BT06 Tracks and because a humanoid form of Ravage didn't appeal... but then my best mate gave me the Alternators version for my birthday!

New Tag: Electronic

It occurred to me today, as I've been looking at a couple of toys with battery-powered features, that I've so far neglected to add a specific tag to any posts where the toy features any electronics... Since that rather sells them short, I figured I'd spend a little while trawling through posts and adding a new tag where relevant.

I may have missed some... and, for the moment, I've deliberately omitted things like the TransFormers Prime toys with Poweriser weapons (mainly because they were all a bit crap) and MP05 Megatron (LED in the Fusion Cannon, which I removed anyway)... but it looks as though I have more than 50 TransFormers toys with electronic features of one form or another.

For those who prefer not to have to brave the tags list at the very bottom, I've added Electronic Toys to the top menu, just below the blog masthead as well.

TransFormers (Movie) Hardtop (Target Exclusive)

There are times when I really don't understand Hasbro. Their strategy with the TransFormers brand generally seems pretty haphazard, their strategy with specific toylines often seems not to be fully thought through... but their strategy for store exclusives can be utterly baffling. The only consistent thing is their inconsistency.

When the first TransFormers live action movie came out, the new toys featured novel and impressive engineering, the likes of which had genuinely never been seen before. It may not have been perfectly accurate to the on-screen CGI, but the movie toylines were the first step in a quantum leap in toy engineering than continued over the next few years.

And yet, for a set of Target Exclusive, movie branded Scout class figures, Hasbro mined their back catalogue for repaints. The selection was, somehow, very Energon-centric despite the clear disparity in aesthetic. Then again, the other line selected was Cybertron, which generally wasn't much better. Hardtop - a repaint of the Cybertron figure of the same name - turned out to be the best match, at least as far as his vehicle mode was concerned, since it's not a million miles away from Landmine.

Studio Series #51 Soundwave (Dark of the Moon)

The live action movies' treatment of iconic Generation 1 characters tended to play fast and loose, both with their appearance and their characters. Soundwave's first appearance was in Revenge of the Fallen, as a satellite orbitting Earth, molesting other satellites with Hentai-style cyber-invasion tentacles, and pooping out Ravage, and then having no bearing on the anything till the next movie. But in Dark of the Moon, Soundwave was just another silver-coloured, sharp-edged, gun-toting brawler in the movie. His main contributions to the drama were threating Carly with his tentacles and deciding - on the instructions of Dylan Gould - to execute the Autobots who had been captured in the city. He was a far cry from the laconic, calculating opportunist of old.

Due to distribution issues, I never did get my hands on the original DotM Deluxe class toy, and ended up skipping on the Human Alliance figure because they all got downsized for the third movie, and Soundwave's robot mode proportions were bonkers. I did eventually pick up the repaint of the original Deluxe, Darkside Soundwave, from Takara Tomy's Movie Advanced line at one of the London Comic Cons, but he lacked the original's Mech Tech weapons and his robot mode is a bit lankier and slimmer than the CGI character from the movie.

The Studio Series version came along with a more accurate-looking robot mode and a fully silver-painted Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and, given the secondary market cost of the previous versions now, he seemed like the best option... at least until a Masterpiece version - either official or Third Party - arrives.

TransFormers Encore 07 Sky Lynx

Generation 1 was a strange old time... For all the Japanese/Asian market exclusives we get these days, Hasbro's approach to the franchise back in the day led to several TransFormers-branded toys that were not, at the time, released anywhere but the USA, and the final waves apparently only surfaced in Europe, long after I'd stopped collecting.

Toys like Shockwave, Omega Supreme and this one were licensed for US distribution from companies other than Takara, and who frequently already had some sort of domestic and non-US distribution in place with other companies (ToyCo's Astro Magnum came to the UK as Tandy/Radio Shack's Galactic Man, while Toybox's Mechbot-1 turned up in Grandstand's Converters line as Omegatron). Takara - quite rightly - declined to distribute toys made by others and, even in those days, Hasbro's distribution in the UK was less than optimal.

As far as I can tell, though, the toy that became Sky Lynx wasn't picked up for distribution by anyone else in any other territories, making him that much rarer and harder to find until Takara Tomy's 2008 Encore-branded re-release. This, naturally, has seen its price increased on the secondary market but, right at the start of the year, I found a second-hand Sky Lynx on eBay, priced at a little over half the current average, once shipping from Australia was taken into account

Naturally, I hit the 'Buy It Now' button as soon as I saw it - opportunities like this don't come along very often!

AM20 Arms Micron (TFPrime) Ironhide

Here's another of those strange situations that sometimes occur within the TransFormers brand. Illustrator Ken Christiansen, in his role as freelance designer/concept artist for Hasbro, submitted an awesome design for a TransFormers Prime version of Ironhide - channelling equal parts Generation 1 and movieverse. Hasbro, in their wisdom, took the design, changed the colour, and released it as Sergeant Kup instead, with Ironhide only appearing in the Cyberverse Commander size class.

...Only for Takara Tomy to later return to the originally intended colourscheme and release it within their Arms Micron spin on the TransFormers Prime toyline, along with a single Mini-Con weapon in place of the twin cannons from Christiansen's original design.

Really makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at both companies, doesn't it?

Universe 'Standoff Beneath the Streets' Springer vs. Ratbat

Hasbro used to release quite a few multipacks of TransFormers toys, but I didn't tend to pay much attention to them. Either I already had one of the figures in the set in one form or another, or at least one of them was crap (witness the sheer number of multipacks that included a variation of the awful Armada Sideswipe mold).

However, when the 'Standoff Beneath the Streets' set turned up, it seemed like a good deal: two great figures from the Cybertron/Galaxy Force toyline repainted as G1 characters in a set which - I gather - paid homage to a particular IDW storyline. The only downside was that one of the characters, Springer, was traditionally a Triple Changer, but the mold used was not. 2007's BotCon Springer gave him a single, ground-based vehicle mode, Hasbro were now giving him his helicopter mode via the GF Live Convoy mold.

But, for me, the main event was the first re-use of the Noisemaze mold - one of the most interesting figures in the Galaxy Force line.

TransFormers: Prime Beast Hunters Ace (Jet) Vehicon

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson, having bought the dinky Legends class TransFormers Prime Beast Hunters Jet Vehicon figure, despite Takara Tomy having released a full-size (Deluxe class) version the year before in their Arms Micron line. Sadly, though, it seems I repeated almost exactly the same error the following year, and picked up this little variant, at a time when Takara Tomy's AM Jet Vehicon General would still have been more cheaply available than it is now.

And the less said about my error with the other Vehicon General, the better.

But, since we're here, let's take a look, shall we?

FansProject Lost Exo Realm LER-06 Echara

(Femme-Bot Friday #72)

Having bought Comera and almost immediately broken one of her ankles, I was rather more dubious about picking up her slightly-remolded sister figure. Aside from a handful of cosmetic changes, they were identical, and it seemed likely that the ankles on Echara would be just as troublesome. Add my general disdain for Dinobots, and I'd pretty much convinced myself not to bother.

Then TFSource had a sale, late in the summer of 2019, and she was essentially half price. Where a Femme-Bot is concerned, that's an offer I couldn't refuse.

Clever/Sneaky TFSource. Now I have another Dino-Femme-Bot in my collection.

Studio Series #46 Dropkick (Car)

Dropkick and his partner Shatter have both been given two separate Studio Series releases, each with a single vehicle mode, rather than a single, triple-changing version (that particular hurdle has been left to the Third Parties). Given that the car-form Shatter was an utter travesty and helicopter-form Dropkick was apparently pretty disappointing (even if it did give rise to helicopter-form Drift), I initially had reservations about car-form Dropkick.

Early photos seemed to suggest he was rather simpler, and perhaps more traditional in his execution compared to his partner. Still, of the Bumblebee movie figures released up to this point, none had been without flaws, and there was no reason to expect any better from this one, right?