More About Me

HEXdidn't...: A Brief Autobiography
in Terms of TransFormers Toys

(updated 11/8/2024)
I first started collecting TransFormers toys when they debuted on the shelves of UK toy shops back in 1984 - they were something new and very exciting, considering I'd grown up with wind-up tin robots, Dinky/Matchbox/Tonka cars, Lego, Action Man, Star Wars and Masters of the Universe. Before TransFormers, most of my toy purchases were quite random and didn't really constitute 'collecting' (OK, I had a fair few MotU figures, and even a vehicle or two and the Castle Greyskull playset, but even the largest collection - Star Wars - wasn't exactly extensive and, in any case, my mother now considers all those toys to be hers!). I used to dip into toylines but get bored fairly quickly. Nothing ever captured my attention or imagination the way TransFormers did. I was one of the lucky few to get Optimus Prime for Christmas in 1985, when he was released in the UK in pitifully small numbers, causing (I'm told) the kind of nasty scenes in toy shops you hear about all too frequently with 'fad' toys these days. I almost didn't as, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I told my mother I wanted Grimlock instead (because, at the time, Grimlock was cooler than Optimus Prime in the Marvel comics) and she was understandably rather upset at my caprice. Looking back, it seems weird that I genuinely wanted Grimlock because, these days, I think the Dinobots were ridiculous (and still are, thanks to Age of Extinction/The Last Knight).

When the TransFormers animated movie happened, I wasn't exactly blown away... The TV series had been good (for what it was), but the characters looked nothing like the toys - I have always favoured the more toy-accurate UK comics from 1985 - and, while I found the movie exciting for the time (I watched it at least twice in the cinema), I was pretty nonplussed when it killed off Optimus Prime and set up Rodimus Prime as the new leader - TransFormers, as a brand, is all about change, after all.

I collected TransFormers toys - and read the Marvel comic - for about four or five years and then stopped, more or less, because I'd got to high school and felt it was time to "put away childish things" (though I never did put them away literally, let alone dispose of them). I felt that the toys that came out of the animated movie and those that came after were becoming steadily more disappointing, so I didn't think I was missing much. Conveniently, making this decision meant I missed what I, personally, now consider to be the low point of what later became known as 'Generation 1': Micromasters and Action Masters.

The toyline faded from my consciousness entirely for more than ten years until, one fateful day (in the run-up to Christmas, if I remember correctly) I was out shopping with my best friend in a Harrow department store, and I discovered Beast Wars in the toys section. After I'd stopped laughing at the concept of robots transforming into animals, I picked up Optimus Primal and Megatron, just for old time's sake. I honestly thought that would be the last of it...

Some years later, though, I saw the three 'Car Brothers' from Car Robots/Robots in Disguise in the window of Computer Exchange, basically opposite that same department store. I didn't think much of them at the time, but a trip to Forbidden Planet (in its old, murky, crowded location on New Oxford Street) introduced me to some of the larger toys in the line. I left clutching Ultra Magnus, Megatron and - against the good advice of my best friend - also Galvatron, soon after picking up Optimus Prime in Woolworths.

It wasn't until the 20th Anniversary of the toyline, in 2004, that I started properly collecting again. My job at the time left me with a fair bit of disposable income and a lunchtime web search provoked solely by curiosity turned up news of the impending release of MP01 Convoy. After that, I found BT01 Smokescreen in Forbidden Planet (by this point in its swanky new digs on Shaftesbury Avenue) and was thoroughly bitten by the bug all over again. I started buying Takara's TransFormers Collection reissues, the Toys'R'Us exclusive Commemorative Series, old Armada toys, Energon toys (even some imported Superlink), then imported Galaxy Force toys as well. After re-discovering the Beast Wars TV series online, I saw the toys in a whole new light and started searching for those, grabbing not only the original TV series characters, but some of the more esoteric toys from the Japan-only extensions to the line. By the time Classics arrived in 2006, I was well and truly hooked again, and updated versions of G1 characters with contemporary designs and superior articulation were just what I wanted.

A friend enabled my rekindled addiction by buying me my first year's subscription to the TransFormers Collectors' Club as a Christmas present in 2006, and I renewed every year till they shut down at the end of 2016, despite the loss of their forums early on in my membership and some of their extremely weird choices in terms of their exclusives. Their 'Figure Subscription Service', which operated independently of their annual exclusives, started out well, but year 2 was of barely any interest, year 3 was of none at all. While year 4 seemed to be a no-brainer because it built a combiner, the end result was very disappointing, and the final year featured only one figure I wanted.

I attended a couple of AutoAssemblies while that was running, also managing to get to a couple of TFNations since that took over in 2016, but never managed to drag myself across the pond for its big brother, BotCon (though I came close in 2015, visiting Chicago a month or two later). Thing is, I am an utterly unsociable person, so 'community' events like that are somewhat wasted on me. They're a great opportunity to buy more toys, and playing 'YouTuber Bingo' can be fun, but I'll rarely get into much conversation while I'm there, and many of the guests end up answering the same old questions time after time... Generally, I get my fix of plastic crack from shows like the MCM London Comic Con, buying online or, on the rare occasion I visit bricks-and-mortar toy shops, my local branches of The Entertainer and Smyths. Someday, I hope to visit Japan (but I'll probably need a bigger suitcase for the return journey).

When the first live-action movie happened in 2007, it divided the fandom over its new, hyper-detailed robots (and its over-reliance on human characters, giving the robots only a few minutes of screen-time in a movie that clocked in at almost two and a half hours!). While I now think it was a terrible movie, it brought a wonderful new aesthetic and forced Hasbro to re-think the toyline and increase the complexity of the toys, for which I was - and remain - thankful. I honestly don't understand those fans who, to this day, insist everything should look like the 1980s cartoon. Sadly, due to the erratic nature of those at the helm of the franchise, and the audiences who rewarded them for bigger explosions, increasingly delerious editing and ever more obnoxious human characters, each new movie basically ret-conned the last, to the point where none of it made any sense and, after inflicting Age of Extinction upon myself and my best mate, I decided to give The Last Knight a miss entirely. Truly, I was glad when the much-vaunted Writers' Room was disbanded and Paramount called time on the Michael Bay era - allowing the director to work on better things, and the studio to reinvent the brand.

Thankfully, the 2018 solo Bumblebee movie, directed by Travis Knight and starring the amazing Hailee Steinfeld, turned out to be far closer to what I (and other fans) wanted out of a TransFormers live action movie - scenes on Cybertron, identifiable robots with defined characters and a largely coherent story featuring character growth in both its protagonists... just a shame it had to reinvigorate Hasbro's Bumblebee Merchandising Machine right along with the movie franchise...

The movie toylines themselves have gone through a massive transformation, with the 2007 movie toys being quite startlingly intricate for the time, yet vastly superseded by the 2009 Revenge of the Fallen line in terms of both complexity and the scope of its sublines and extensions. Later toylines suffered from cutbacks and, by the time The Last Knight's toys were on the shelves, they were getting back to almost 2007 levels of comparative simplicity. However, shortly after that, Hasbro launched Studio Series - almost their response to Marvel Legends or the Black Series of Star Wars toys - which started to remake toys of characters from all the movies, paying closer attention to scale (in robot mode, at least), offering finer detail and even, once in a while, improvements in complexity. This line's sole focus was movie toys, allowing Hasbro to more clearly define their main toyline in whatever direction it might take.

I liked TransFormers Animated a lot more than I expected to, but preferred the darker, more grounded TransFormers Prime, and my favourite series is still the much-maligned Beast Machines, largely thanks to the powerhouse performances of Garry Chalk ('my' Optimus Prime/Primal) and David Kaye. I mostly dislike the new cel-shaded CGI series 'Robots in Disguise' due to its weird mutant Decepticons though that hasn't stopped me picking up a few of the toys here and there... and have even dipped my toe into the Cyberverse toyline, despite it being more kiddy-oriented and, to be honest, a bit crap... so it's basically business as usual for me, as that's what happened Armada, Energon, TF Animated, and Titans Return...

...Speaking of, as a TransFormers fan who pretty much hated the HeadMaster gimmick back in the 80s - admittedly more because of the hopelessly oversimplified, Mini Autobot-level transformations than the HeadMaster gimmick per se - I found the Titan Master gimmick far more agreeable, and was looking forward to whatever followed. Do I regret buying the Platinum re-release of G1 Trypticon, when the Titans Return version looks so good? I honestly don't, because the G1 version has a battery-operated walking function which is cooler than the ability to swallow Titan Masters or a fully-articulated Titan Master Full Tilt. Sadly, Hasbro utterly fumbled Power of the Primes, and it felt like the line ended prematurely because they forgot what they were doing, or never really had a plan to begin with. They even stymied Takara Tomy's TransFormers Legends series by forcing a 'Unification of World Brands' which meant that their partners in Japan had to release toys exactly as they were in the US market, rather than improving them with new paint jobs and accessories.

When the War for Cybertron Trilogy was announced, I was already beginning to suffer a bit of G1 fatigue, so when the concept of a story set at the dawn of the war turned out to be yet another thinly-veiled and poorly thought-out reboot of G1, it simply meant I could give my wallet a bit of a rest, and focus on Studio Series, actual G1 toys, or Third Party products.

Frankly, I think Hasbro completely lost the plot with the War for Cybertron line... Siege was ostensibly set on Cybertron at the dawn of the war, the toys came pre-painted with battle damage, and some of my concerns about changes to the size classes over the years seemed justified. Most of the toys looked like they were built out of hyperdetailed boxes, and vehicle modes ranged from unimaginative to just plain shit. The line - and the associated comic from IDW - even started out with Optimus Prime already present (rather than Orion Pax or some other pre-leadership identity), and then Hasbro produced two toys of the character in quick succession - one barely different from a terrestrial truck, the other a retool of their new Ultra Magnus mold misguidedly based upon the Galaxy Force toy - while other key characters remained absent. Worse still, Hasbro's first official attempt at a Tetrajet ended up as a robot folded up into a box, carried underneath a Tetrajet shell that barely features in the transformation process. Was that really the best they could offer in 2019?

All that was rendered moot, though, because the second chapter, Earthrise, ditched Cybertron and its aesthetic entirely to become basically G1 all over again, like a reboot of Classics bringing with it a handful of characters who weren't done full justice back in 2005/6. The third chapter - Kingdom - exposed exactly how lost the plot really was, featuring Beast Wars characters... Admittedly, some of them are OK - the oft-used phrase 'miniature Masterpiece' certainly applied - but some were crap... Fossilisers, which acted as a continuation of the Weaponiser concept, just don't make any sense within TransFormers, but might have worked really well as an unrelated toyline in their own right. Having got most of the Beast Wars crew in-hand, I generally found something to like about them, and certainly appreciate the attempt at show CGI-accurate robot modes coupled with the (slightly) more realistic beast modes... but have to confess that I'd have preferred a new and unique take on their robot modes, particularly with such lacklustre, incomplete paintwork.

Of course, not content with fumbling their new toyline once, Hasbro took the idea of cocking up to new heights by re-releasing toys from each chapter with new paint jobs and in new packaging, in partnership with Netflix, ahead of a TV show that was constantly a season behind the toyline, despite only have six episodes per season. Worse still, the Kingdom line delivered new versions of Cyclonus and Galvatron... while Scourge and other characters from the 1986 animated movie appeared in the Studio Series '86 line. The character and toy designs from the movie were part of what started putting me off TransFormers back in the 1980s, so for them to come back again in their original form after Classics/Generations reinvented them for the better ten plus years ago, just feels like Hasbro are losing their way all over again. The emergence of the TransFormers R.E.D. line - essentially modern-day Action Masters - completes the uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

Via their own online shop, Pulse, Hasbro have clearly attempted to redress the balance and fill the void left by the cancellation of the Collectors' Club in 2016. They have produced numerous store exclusives, increasingly bonkers movie tie-ins, Generations Selects repaints and 'capsule programmes' like Shattered Glass and the Golden Disk Collection but, while it's admirable that their prices are substantially lower than those of the former Collectors' Club, their choices of characters have been largely direct rip-offs of Club exclusives or BotCon sets without the premium paintwork.

Hasbro's decision to continue the Generations concept with a new line called TransFormers Legacy - which was pitched as being new takes on characters from every TransFormers continuity - sounded like a wonderful addition to the franchise... But I found the first couple of waves revealed to be a massive disappointment. Rather than a truly new take on existing characters, they were simply G1-ified which, after most of a decade of G1 focus, feels to me like an ill-considered move. Worse still, to present a character like Bulkhead, of whom an excellent toy already exists, as a plain, simplistic box of a toy, with Scout class engineering on a toy to be sold at the Voyager pricepoint, feels like a kick in the teeth for the fans. Making matters worse, the concept art the toy is derived from looked much better, so it's clear that the blame for this - and what initially seems to be another crappy line of simplistic toys - is very much with those who engineered the toy and approved this aesthetic. The same is very much true of the likes of Arcee and Knockout: the former is a wholly new figure, but looks too generic due to its built-in repaint potential, the latter is a retooling of Studio Series '86 Jazz, which was a deeply flawed figure in its own right. Later waves did nothing to improve on this and, while some halfway decent new toys appeared - such as Starscream from both Armada and Galaxy Force - halfway is no longer good enough for me to consider spending they kind of money Hasbro are asking for.

So, once again, almost 40 years after I first discover them and after 20 years as an adult collector of TransFormers toys, I no longer consider myself a collector, as such... Acquiring the likes of Trypticon (Platinum Series) and Sky Lynx (Encore) has given me a new appreciation of G1's clunky electronic toys that I would never have got from their more recent Titan and Commander class figures. Studio Series #72 Starscream has effectively cured me of my Seeker OCD (for the moment), but I do still have a fixation on motorbike Femme-Bots (24 and counting). I have great respect for the Third Party manufacturers of transforming robot models, proudly display their products alongside 'official' TransFormers toys. That said, Hasbro's crowdfunded, $600+ Unicron toy looked like an absolute disaster next to the contemporary Third Party version - size ain't everything, and the sheer number of planet shell panels tacked onto his legs and back speak to the lack of effort put in by their design and engineering teams, and later HasLab efforts have seemed underwhelming, despite achieving their crowdfunding goals. The funding method and final cost read like so many other crowdfunding follies and frauds that have emerged in recent years, yet there are still many fans defending these products.

When I say that I firmly believe that transforming robots are enough of a gimmick in and of themselves, I mean that the idea of a cool-looking robot that can turn into a convincing plane (and by 'convincing', I don't necessarily mean 'realistic', just something better than a mostly solid model plane with a folded up robot as its undercarriage), car, truck, tank, spacecraft... even animal... is enough. All I want/need out of TransFormers is a robot that looks like a robot that disguises itself as something else... and for that something else to not look like a folded-up robot.

Don't get me wrong, though. Some of the gimmicks have been cool. Lights and sounds still have their place (and, preferably, the full package rather than the frequently crippled speech effects in European releases). Separate weapons, rather than the integrated kind, can be a nice bonus (but work best when they can be stowed in the alternate mode). Gestalts and HeadMasters can be awesome (when they don't look like they were made by Fisher Price). Real world vehicle modes can make for amazing toys (when the license agreement or lazy engineering don't turn them into shellformers)

Ultimately, as someone who was introduced to the line by the likes of G1 Cliffjumper, I don't even require horribly convoluted transformations... I just want them to live up to the taglines: Robots In Disguise and More Than Meets The Eye.

...And if there are going to be glorified toy commercials in the form of TV series or movies, it wouldn't hurt for them to represent the toys well, to have decent stories, to be at least internally consistent... and to make some sense... and to air around the same time the toys are starting to hit the shelves, rather than a year or so later. The first movie not to be directed by Michael Bay was certainly a step in the right direction, but follow-up was a disaster exacerbated by studio interference, because they hired a rookie Director. The animated Prime Wars Trilogy shows by Machinima were awful and barely relevant to the toys, while the Netflix show for the War For Cybertron Trilogy was like a cheap knock-off in appearance, truly enervating to watch and, once again, barely relevant to the toyline. Come on, Hasbro - are your Marketing teams asleep?

In many ways, I think some of the Third Party companies have a better idea of how to make good TransFormers toys than either of the companies who created the brand, and they're not as constrained by budgets or toy safety guidelines as Hasbro or Takara Tomy because they're making adult collectables, frequently based on popular, yet previously underrepresented characters. FansProject seemed to take an early lead with their City Commander accessory set, Warbot, Function-X and, of course, Causality... but they have since lost momentum and been overtaken by the myriad other companies which have sprung up. While there are obvious downsides to the Third Parties (expense, random/incompatible scaling and their baffling habit of releasing their own versions of exactly the same characters all at the same time) they have clearly influenced Hasbro and Takara Tomy and encouraged them to up their game (witness the difference between a G1 gestalt, a Superlink/Energon gestalt, the hideous Power Core Combiners and the generally pretty spiffy Combiner Wars, as well as the curious choice Hasbro/Takara Tomy has made to release Titans Return versions of all the HeadMasters characters thusfar produced by several Third Parties). Yet even when Hasbro/Takara Tomy get it right, it seems some of the Third Parties are still willing to hit them with some one-upmanship... And not even the Studio Series line - Hasbro's attempts to improve upon their own older work, to get the movie bots just right while still keeping to the pricepoint of a toyline - is immune to Third Party improvements. Furthermore, the so-called Masterpiece line is fast becoming a joke thanks to the improvements made in KOs. That said, the improvements are becoming fewer and further between, following the legal action taken against WeiJiang and Black Apple some years back.

Meanwhile, a relative newcomer - Touch Toys - are creating a whole fleet of transforming robots, with vehicle modes ranging from aircraft, to a surface-to-air missile truck, to a battleship, each with a nigh-flawless vehicle mode because they don't have the encumbrance of making them recognisable as established characters. Another newcomer - MetaGate - have produced more than serviceable triple-changing figures of Bayverse Drift and the Bumblebee movie villain, Shatter, with Dropkick on the way. Then, Unique Toys have produced phenomenal Masterpiece-analogue figures of Megatron from Dark of the Moon, Age of Extinction and The Last Knight, along with a fantastic Dino from Age of Extinction. Companies like Big Firebird and BingoToys are creating their own spins on transforming Femme-Bots, and so many others are pushing the envelope in their respective speciality fields... All while Hasbro stagnates.

On the issue of toy representation, I'm beginning to suspect that part of the problem is in the way Hasbro wants to perceive itself - as "an intellectual properties company that also makes toys". TransFormers, first and foremost, is a toy brand... and yet Hasbro's focus has been on movies and TV series, to the detriment of the toys, since before the first live-action movie. The best thing Hasbro could do for the toy range is develop toys first, and the associated fiction afterward, releasing both as close to simultaneously as possible (as it was with G1). Increasingly, though, the big profits (such as the $1bn made by the execrable Age of Extinction) come from the associated fiction... And however much Hasbro's TransFormers brand team care about the products, their shareholders only care about the profits.

On a semi-related note, one thing I really miss, since the days of Generation 1, is the proper character bios (including explanations of their weapons) packaged with the toys. Up until a few years ago, in the States, toys were sometimes packaged with something like that level of character detail printed on the box/card, but it always seems neutered - the good guys were always nice, the bad guys were always... pretty bland. Back in G1, the character bio often influenced my decision to buy a toy... and there were Autobots who weren't very nice and Decepticons who didn't really believe in their cause. In Europe these days, we're lucky to get a single sentence of character information along with a single sentence of generic blurb. The Collectors' Club included bio cards with all their figures, but many of those were a whole lot of text with next to no information (such as Elita-1). Part of what made the original line of TransFormers toys like catching lightning in a bottle was the work put in by Marvel's Bob Budiansky, so perhaps Hasbro should try consulting another writer on a future toyline? The Legacy line supposedly featured character bios - available online only, accessed via unique QR codes printed on the boxes - but even this seemed to fall by the wayside in later waves.

One of my biggest bugbears in life, generally, is that so few businesses (or their shareholders, at least) understand that money needs to be funnelled into the business so that it can generate money, so their products/services inevitably suffer in the long-term, due to demands for ever increasing profits. This seems to have been quite true of Hasbro and the TransFormers brand for quite a while. I was pleased to see that the first waves of both Combiner Wars and Titans Return were improved upon by the later waves because it seemed to be building to something amazing... Power of the Primes turned out fairly disappointing, with only a few highlights, and the War for Cybertron Trilogy was yet another re-do of toys they made over thirty years ago and the Netflix show felt like an afterthought. I'm very definitely not averse to changing my mind about a toyline that starts out looking a bit crap... Hell, I did it with Armada and Energon... But War for Cybertron turned out to be unimaginative, inconsistent, underdeveloped and a huge wasted opportunity. The majority of Kingdom toys I own are the Beast Wars reboots, all of which are of decidedly variable quality and, while the line clearly didn't fade into obscurity the way Power of the Primes did, it's certainly wasn't mind-blowingly good.

Another problem with the brand is that, increasingly, we have multiple product lines occupying shelf space simultaneously. I suspect that a greater focus on one or two product lines - making them more diverse, extensive and aimed at a wider age range - would serve Hasbro better than its current scattershot approach of lots of series with comparatively few characters in each and a variety of silly gimmicks. Two additional toylines at most should be needed, to ensure movies can be covered without their toys having to be awkwardly shoehorned into the main line, while G1 fans can get their fix without restricting the main line to constant, repetitive reboots.

But, hey, I'm a fan, not a business analyst...

And, please, just don't get me started on the fucking TransFormers Botbots line.

FAQ-type stuff:

Favourite (Official) TransFormers toys: G1 Megatron, Trypticon & Sky Lynx; RiD Team Bullet Train/Rail Racer; RotF Leader class Optimus Prime and Starscream; AoE/Gen Evasion Mode Optimus Prime; TLK Leader class Megatron & Nitro; Studio Series Stinger, Grimlock, Blackout, Thundercracker, Ironhide, Jet Shatter, Shockwave, Offroad Bumblebee & Blitzwing; MPM07 Jazz; MP01 Convoy, MP03 Starscream; Generations Springer and Arcee; Power of the Primes Evolution Optimus Prime, Nemesis Prime and Battletrap; War for Cybertron Trilogy Brunt, Airazor, Blackarachnia and Dinobot; NYCC 2011 First Edition Arcee; TFCC Timelines Airazor

Favourite (KO) TransFormers toys: WeiJiang Deformation Era OP Commander/M01 Commander, Black Mamba Deformation LS-01 Ares Nitrogen, JH-01 Rescue Pioneer

Favourite Third Party models: FansProject Causality Intimidator (and components); Mastermind Creations Reformatted Azalea (and repaints) and Knight Morpher Screecher, Stormer & Warper (AKA the Airborne Squad); iGear Con Air Raptor Squadron Star-Burst Thunder-Wrath & Sky-Wind; Alien Attack STF-01 Firage; Unique Toys R-01 Peru Kill and R-03 Dragoon; Fans Toys FT-24 Rouge; DX9 Kaleidoscope K03 La Hire; BigFirebird EX-01 Nicee & Mooka/Mocha, Perfect Effect PE-DX10 Jetforce Revive Commander, ToyCo (Tandy/Radio Shack) Galactic Man

Favourite TransFormers character: Beast Wars Silverbolt, TF Prime Arcee or Airachnid, Bumblebee movie Shatter

Favourite TransFormers continuities: for story, Beast Machines or Prime. For toys, Classics/Generations or Revenge of the Fallen/Hunt for the Decepticons (though Studio Series is rapidly catching up!)

Least favourite TransFormers toys: Botbots; Movie Leader class Megatron; G1 Pretenders, Action Masters (and, in fact, any non-transforming TransFormers items); TF Prime Airachnid; Masterpiece Road Rage; Cyberverse; gimmicky stuff that serves no real purpose, other than paying lip service to ideas presented in the comics, such as the Prime Masters.

Least favourite Third Party models: toss up between iGear's Bushwacker and Perfect Effect's Leonidas. The former was just a bit rubbish, the latter was ridiculously fragile. I got rid of both.

Least favourite TransFormers character: Optimus Prime from the Bayverse

Collection Count: Upwards of 800 (need to do another proper count now I've started selling some)

G1 Rumble/Frenzy colour preference: I'm with the toys all the way - the TV series got it wrong, and they admitted as much - so RIRFIB

On the question of Scale..?: Honestly, I couldn't give a shit about scale across a whole toyline. While it might be nice for all the robots and vehicles to be true to life (expectation) in both modes, it's just not feasible... The toys are broken up into arbitrary size/price classes, and it's often the (perceived) popularity of the character that will determine which class(es) of toy are made of that character. In practical terms, there's no way to make a toyline where a car scales perfectly with a truck and a fighter jet, let alone the robots derived from those forms. Some collectors will nickel-and-dime over the percentage increase in size offered by different oversized knock-offs, but I'll tend to go with whatever I feel looks best in and of itself. I can't understand where these scale fetishists have come from, considering how wonky G1 was, let alone the movie toys.

Femme-Bots... Why?: Why not? The way I see it, they're all actually genderless, they don't reproduce by mechanical (as opposed to biological) exchange of some DNA-analogue and their appearance is as much a reflection of their function and/or choice of vehicle form/disguise as it is anything else. Just because a robot appears, in my eyes, or sounds, to my ears, 'feminine', doesn't make it so... it's still a robot and any 'gender' characteristics are open to interpretation. The pronoun choice is a narrative convenience in stories written by humans. That said, there are those Femme-Bots who are more overtly anthropomorphised and sexualised than others (such 'controversial' figures as Big Firebird's Nicee, for example), but the same can't quite be said of the 'masculine' kind (see the original live action movie Optimus Prime versus the later, AoE/TLK version for a whole new take on 'Truck Daddy'). For better or worse, it's a very human tendency to anthropomorphise... And if designers want to make their Femme-Bots sexy, I'm not about to complain. However, I would hope those same designers pay similar attention to the 'masculine' figures and, to my eyes, the likes of SXS Hot Flame suggests that some designers are willing to do so. Honestly, it strikes me that a lot of the fuss (read: trolling) is coming from people who (a) presume that every facet of TransFormers is still aimed at kids or (b) are the sort of people who trawl the internet looking for things to get angry about, whether that's the Femme-Bot designs themselves, or people expressing their personal reservations about those designs. Femme-Bots have become a weirdly divisive topic in the fandom in recent years... which makes me glad I tend to keep out of the so-called 'fan communities', forums, Twitter, etc.

Was Hot Rod responsible for Optimus Prime's death in the 1986 Animated movie?: How is this even a question? His actions were well-intentioned, but ill-considered. He overestimated his chances against an injured Megatron, thereby giving him the opportunity to shoot Prime.

Collecting Method (MISB/MOSC vs Open): Open and in cabinets all the way... Packaging of virtually all mainstream releases is thrown away. Japanese packaging (Galaxy Force, Binaltech, Superlink, eHobby, 30th Anniversary/Legends, etc.) used to be an exception but a good chunk of that has now been ditched to save space. All that remains is Third Party packaging, Exclusive packaging (though not always), Masterpiece packaging and anything sufficiently interesting. Personally, I just don't get the MISB/MOSC (and especially the AFA graded-and-sealed) mindset because those collectors aren't really enjoying their collection, they're enjoying the idea of it. It comes across to me as enjoying the idea that their ownership of a mint-in-sealed-packaging toy means someone else isn't getting to enjoy the toy as it was intended to be enjoyed. Some of my stuff has had to go back in the box as I currently have limited display space, but that tends to be things like BotCon sets and boxed TFCC exclusives... but I have now also put my Binaltech collection away to make some space for Prime Wars and some older movie toys have been put away to make more space for Studio Series. Additionally, I have (finally!) started selling off a few of the toys that I'm not absolutely intent on keeping, many of which have been in various storage boxes for a number of years.

Collecting habits: Protesting repeatedly that I'm not going to buy something until, all of a sudden, and usually on a whim, I buy it. Seeker OCD. Black repaint junkie. Femme-Bot Fanatic. Despiser of the Dinobots. Part-time exclusive hunter. Occasional, underachieving customiser.

Strangest TransFormers collecting experience: bought a G1 Doubledealer on eBay because I needed the two PowerMasters and the blue mounting plate for a custom Alternator Soundwave (and didn't want to mess up my own), and it arrived with a home-made 'certificate of authenticity' for having been part of the seller's collection. Is that really a thing?

Most expensive collecting fail: a toss-up between the time I bought Binaltech BT-17 Black Convoy, even though I already had Alternators Nemesis Prime, only to find it had a glue spillage inside, which prevents proper transformation of the bonnet (and for which I did get a partial refund) and the time, many years ago, that I thought I was ordering an actual G1 Reflector on eBay, and ended up with a terrible knock-off... which taught me that all-important lesson of buying on eBay, "caveat emptor". I'll also throw in Perfect Effect's Leonidas, which was a massive and fragile disappointment.

Most reasonable collecting win: that would be a close-run thing between Encore Sky Lynx, which I was able to acquire for about £70 - basically half its going rate - including shipping from overseas, and the limited edition Mastermind Creations' Reformatted Azalea Stealth Assassin, which I got for less than £30 - between a third and a sixth of its usual cost around that time.

Other interests: Cooking, sketching, pixel art and game design, reading, writing, watching anime, playing (mostly retro) videogames, astronomy (sort of), learning Ren'Py

Favourite writers: Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Pratchett (RIP, the man who got me interested in reading), Natsume Soseki, Stephen Donaldson, Neil Gaiman, Anne Bishop, Maurice LeBlanc (even if his version of Sherlock Holmes was a bit of a dick, and his Watson probably the one who likes jam), Christopher Priest, Michael Talbot, Richard Morgan

Favourite (non-TransFormers) TV shows: Doctor Who (apart from the David Tennant, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker eras, and I'm not overly fond of the new reboot, with RTD back at the helm), Being Human (UK - series 1-3 only, 5 at a push), The Fades, Twin Peaks, Chuck, The X-Files, Castle, Sleepy Hollow, Penny Dreadful, Lost In Space, Pretty much all of the Marvel and DC Comics TV shows that I've seen, Better Call Saul, Fringe, Ash vs. The Evil Dead, Altered Carbon (even though it bears little relation to the books), Disenchanted, Lucifer, Mindhunter, The Alienist, Elementary, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Killing Eve, Impastor

Favourite (non-TransFormers) movies: Alien series, Star Wars series (except the prequels and recent sequels), Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, just about everything Marvel Studios have created so far, Cabin in the Woods, Dog Soldiers, Dredd, The Fall, Grosse Pointe Blank, Out Of Sight, Sunset Boulevard, Brief Encounter, The Usual Suspects, Kiki's Delivery Service, Lady in the Water, Sucker Punch, Unbreakable, Paprika, The Thing (1982), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Shape of Water, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, Condorman, Brick, Knives Out, Poor Things

Favourite anime series: Ergo Proxy, Eden of the East, Panty & Stocking, Chevalier D'Eon, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Paranoia Agent, Macross Zero (though possibly only because of the - at the time - jaw-dropping transformation sequence in the first episode), High School of the Dead, Serial Experiments Lain

Favourite anime movies: Pretty much anything by Makoto Shinkai, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Steamboy, Kiki's Delivery Service

Favourite videogames: Policenauts, Grandia, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Xenoblade Chronicles, Elite/Oolite, Akumajo Dracula X ~Gekka no Yasoukyoku~ (Sega Saturn version), Capcom's beat-'em-ups

Favourite bands/music: Nine Inch Nails, How to Destroy Angels, Queens of the Stone Age, Jane's Addiction, Fields of the Nephilim, Mediaeval Baebes, Queen Adreena, Barenaked Ladies

Favourite podcasts: Lore, Girl In Space, My Favourite Murder, LeVar Burton Reads, The Smartest Man in the World, The Unseen Hour, It Could Happen Here, Stuff They Don't Want You To Know, Inside Of You with Michael Rosenbaum, Criminal, Phoebe Reads a Mystery, Abroad in Japan, The Magnus Archives, Spirit Box Radio, WOE.BEGONE, Wolf 359, Lost Terminal, Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature, The Happiness Lab