Cybertron Crumplezone

Much like Ransack/Gasket, Crumplezone/Landbullet was a toy I decided I didn't want or need - on import, at least - until I experienced the figure as pre-Beast Wars Optimus Primal in the Dawn of Future's Past boxed set from BotCon 2006. As its own figure, This toy looked ugly and poorly-proportioned, with a hideous pairing of muted, military green and eye-searingly bright acidic green, and the vehicle mode wasn't particularly exciting.

However, DoFP Optimus Primal worked really well, and showed me what a fun toy he was, so I ended up buying the Hasbro version on the cheap. Being one of the larger Cybertron/Galaxy Force figures, he features some electronics, but is that enough to redeem such a terrible colourscheme on so ugly a toy?

Studio Series #81 Wheeljack

It is my strongly-held conviction that the War for Cybertron Trilogy was a poorly-conceived, poorly-executed mess of a toyline that nevertheless produced a handful of great toys. Part of its problem was that it didn't keep to its own brief - Siege was supposed to represent the early days of the war, yet each figure came with extensive battle-damage paint apps. The most egregious problems, though, were that there were some critical omissions from the Siege portion, the Earthrise toyline was rendered pointless by it's own Netflix tie-in show, and the best toys in Kingdom were Hasbro's perfunctory acknowledgements that Beast Wars was a popular thing back in the 1990s, though clearly not popular enough to warrant its own, specific branch of the franchise rather than insertion into yet another of their interminable attempts to perpetuate their golden age of G1.

The omissions, while not obvious, became clearly problematic in the opening moments of the Netflix show, which paralleled the pilot of the G1 cartoon, showing Bumblebee and Wheeljack on an Energon scavenger hunt. This would have been a great idea, but for the fact that Bumblebee's Siege toy only got released under the Buzzworthy banner, while Wheeljack did not get a Siege toy at all. That said, neither of them actually transformed in the TV show, so perhaps their absence from the Siege line is not important to some people.

Surprisingly, it fell to the Studio Series line to present a Cybertronian Wheeljack figure - based on the CGI sequence at the start of the Bumblebee movie - and, based on the average quality of War for Cybertron toys, I'd have to concede that this was probably for the best. So, let's take a look at what is - in my opinion - one of the best War for Cybertron toys not to appear in the War for Cybertron lines, and try to get to the bottom of what makes it so good.