Revenge of the Fallen Ransack

It's often said that aircraft don't make for good vehicle modes for TransFormers toys... and with evidence running from G1 Silverbolt to the very latest incarnation of that same character in the Age of the Primes toyline, and even the Masterpiece version of movie Starscream, it's hard to deny. However, there have been rare treats, such as Generations/Reveal the Shield Lugnut, and Third Party companies have worked wonders with movieverse designs, let alone their own unique creations.

So, where goes Ransack fall on this spectrum of achievements? Buckle up, flybots... we're in for a wild ride!

Human Alliance Skids & Arcee

OK, by this point, I am reasonably certain that this is actually the last - the very last - Revenge of the Fallen figure in my collection, at least until Studio Series adds something worthwhile from that film. As with Mudflap, this toy had been languishing, largely forgotten, in a box for years. The photos I had taken have been awaiting upload from my computer for more than ten years.

Skids and Mudflap were referred to in RotF as 'the twins', but their Deluxe Class toys were surprisingly different, given the limitations of the size class. They had broadly similar Mech Alive gimmicks, but the specifics of their operation were quite different. Their transformations had similar aspects, but their weapon features were wholly unique. The craziest thing about the Human Alliance versions is that they're even more similar in terms of their underlying engineering, despite the (marginally) larger size versus the Deluxe class toys.

So, let's take a look at this much-maligned character, and see how he fares in this underutilised format.

Human Alliance Barricade & Frenzy

Here's another fine example of me forgetting about a perfectly good toy for far too long... So long, in fact, that I acquired and wrote about the Masterpiece version of the figure more than three years ago, and that was ten years after this toy was released! Worse still, this blog was already in full swing when this toy came out, so I really have no excuses... I wish I knew why I neglected the last three Human Alliance figures in my collection... But, other than the blog getting off to a very slow start, I can't imagine what stopped me.

But let's not dwell on old mistakes and, instead, enjoy the process of revisiting a toy that had been stuck in storage for far too long. I was a massive fan of the Human Alliance concept... still am, in fact, and it's something I hope Hasbro will eventually revisit at some point in the future. Barricade was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of the first live action movie, being a Decepticon who transformed into a vehicle which, in an ideal world, is intended to reassure people, make them feel safe and protected. Barricade is, of course, the antithesis of that idea... but I don't think they really played into it as much as they could have, and then he disappeared until the third film, then again until his refit in the fifth.

The original Deluxe class toy was very much a product of its time, with all the shortcomings that implies. Let's see how this version of Barricade fares, being not only a product of a different time, but a different and much more advanced toyline.

Universe 'War of the Waves' Air Raid vs. Storm Surge

Hot on the heels of Energon Skyblast, we have a carded pair of vaguely movie-related Unicron Trilogy repaints, one of which is a Skyblast repaint!

War of the Waves was apparently a Black Friday exclusive at Walmart in the US, which would most likely have made it an Asda exclusive here... But I've never been a regular patron of Asda, and didn't exactly scour their toy shelves at the best of times. If it didn't come from Toys'R'Us, it was more likely acquired at Sainsbury's or Tesco, neither of which have consistently stocked any US store exclusives. In fact, the only one I remember even seeing in any supermarket was the Walmart exclusive racing repaint of Sidearm Sideswipe, which was a Sainsbury's exclusive over here.

I'd also assumed, based on the 'digital camouflage' paint job on Air Raid and the Sector 7 insignias stamped onto both toys, that this was a movie-related two-pack, but the instruction leaflet - shared between both figures in the pack - clearly labels it as being part of the Universe line... which both was and wasn't an extension of the movie line...

So, let's take a look at this curious, cross-generational two-pack.

Revenge of the Fallen Bumblebee

You know, it's honestly starting to feel as though the Revenge of the Fallen toyline just isn't going to leave me alone... As I've been sorting through the toys I had in storage, I keep finding more of them... I know it was pretty much the biggest TransFormers toyline in quite a few years, and had myriad spin-offs and sublines, but this is getting a bit silly.

Also, I really, genuinely hate that what now appears to be the final RotF toy in my collection is the first Bumblebee from that line, and techically just a minimally altered re-release of the Camaro Concept toy from the first movie's range. There's almost a poetic irony to it, considering it'd forgotten I even had this thing...

So, let's get it over and done with...

Revenge of the Fallen Mudflap

Intended as comic relief - in a franchise that was overburdened with comic relief from its very first installment - the Twins, Skids and Mudflap, attracted a lot of scorn due to perceived racial stereotyping. Personally, I found it odd that they were seen that way, as their characterisation seemed to be taking aim at Hip Hop-obsessed white trash more than anything else. Maybe my impression - as a middle class, middle-aged white dude in the UK - is flawed, and I'm missing some critical element of their portrayal, but it felt to me like manufactured outrage for the sake of outrage, over a movie that was just poorly made from start to finish.

Meanwhile, it took me five years to get round to writing about the Deluxe class Skids, and he turned out to be a floppy mess of a figure, with a large amount of car shell wrapped around a comparatively small robot. It was a well-designed toy, certainly, but let down by the materials and the manufacturing.

...Which doesn't exactly bode well for his brother...

Revenge of the Fallen Dead End

One interesting feature of Hasbro re-using established names in new franchises is that some fairly high-profile names end up appearing in unexpected places. 'Dead End' was used for two separate figures in the extended Revege of the Fallen toyline - the Scout class figure later repainted into Nightbeat, and this Deluxe class figure, a repaint of the Sideways figure with a new head sculpt.

Notably, neither of them were in any way connected with the Stunticon Dead End, and the name was applied in reference to the character being some kind of robotic vampire. Whether this makes him distantly related to Ratbat, or just the expanded movie universe's resident Goth stereotype, who can say? But I'm a big fan of the mold for its interesting transformation, automorphing features and the unique look of its robot mode, even as a poor second choice for representing Dino from Dark of the Moon, so this Revenge of the Fallen repaint was a no-brainer.

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2009 (Timelines) Skyquake

There are a number of figures in my collection that I can look at and genuinely wonder what ever possessed me to buy them... and there are figures in my collection that are flawed in some small but critical way. Thankfully, either one are rare occurrences particularly since, on the rare occasion I shop in bricks-and-mortar toy shops, I can give any figure I want a quick once over in the box, to see if I can spot any obvious flaws.

I've not always had the best of luck with TransFormers Collectors' Club figures, and particularly BotCon figures bought via the Club shop after the event, but this figure - part of one of the souvenir sets from BotCon 2009 - would certainly fit into both categories were it not for the fact that he was packaged alongside Banzai-Tron, an excellent reimagining of a G1 Action Master using a bonkers Energon mold.

Wings of Honor didn't interest me a great deal, but it was nice to effectively get a bonus figure along with the one souvenir toy I actually wanted. Aside from these, the only figure from 2009's set that's even on my radar is Scourge, made using the Galaxy Force Noisemaze mold.

(And, yes, I know Elita-1 and Razorclaw were available at the 2009 show as well, but they were additions to Games of Deception and Dawn of Futures Past, respectively, not Wings of Honor)

Revenge of the Fallen (Walmart Exclusive) Skywarp

Back when I wrote about the original live action movie toyline's take on Thundercracker, I noted that my Seeker OCD would likely, eventually, lead to me buying the Walmart exclusive Skywarp version despite the fact that just about every other version released since has been a vast improvement in almost every way conceivable.

Cut to earlier this month and, while I've seen this particular Skywarp turn up on eBay quite often in the intervening years, it's either been ridiculously overpriced, or missing parts (most frequently one or both of the rear stabiliser wings). It's only been in the last couple of months that the prices of a MISB version have returned to a 'normal' price (being in the region of about £30), but one caught my eye - unboxed, but complete - for about half that... and then the seller offered an extra couple of quid off, so I felt obliged to pick it up.

But this mold is now about twelve years old... Was it really worth even the reduced price?

Revenge of the Fallen Back Road Brawl (Toys'R'Us Exclusive) Hoist

Wow... That guilty feeling when, going through a list of draft blog posts, you find the second half of a two pack from 2009, the first part of which you covered during your second most prolific blogging month ever, way back in 2012... Deary me.

In my defense, most of my remaining drafts (now reduced to about 40) were created using the web browser Flock, back when it communicated nicely with Blogger and Photobucket, so actually getting a new post started and images uploaded was a hell of a lot smoother than it is even now...

But I digress...

While the TransFormers movies directed by Michael Bay played fast and loose with character interpretations, and invented new characters when existing characters could easily have sufficed with a bit more planning (or better scriptwriters), Hasbro's toyline has been fairly scrupulous in delivering repaints that better fit the G1-centric portion of the fanbase. At worst, you get boring repaints like Red Concept Camaro Cliffjumper... at best, you get boxed sets like RotF's 'Back Road Brawl', featuring two awesome G1 repaints, one of which being this repaint of Longarm, from the 2007 movie toy range, as Hoist.

Revenge of the Fallen Nightbeat

One of my favourite Generation 1 characters was Nightbeat, the Cybertronian detective forged in the image of the traditional Film Noir gumshoe, with the exception of his ostentatious choice to 'disguise' himself as a blue and yellow Porsche 959 with red flame patterns on his doors.

The former Collectors' Club released their exclusive version - based on the Energon Hot Shot mold, which had a fairly similar vehicle mode - which just happens to be the first proper post I ever made to this blog. A few photos of the G1 version were included there, in lieu of a proper write-up of that (which I will get to... eventually... I do feel like doing some G1 stuff soon...), but Nightbeat is one of those fringe characters who has gone unrepresented in the mainstream toyline ever since...

...Until he was referenced (weirdly) in the Real Gear subline from the first movie, only to return in this (slightly) more traditional form in the extended Revenge of the Fallen toyline.

Revenge of the Fallen Dirt Boss

Ever have one of those times when you look at a figure in your collection and wonder why you bothered buying it? I don't often have moments of introspection of that particular kind, but I suspect the extended toylines of the live action movies - that is, the toys made of character not actually featured in the films, but developed as concept art or for the licensed videogames - probably account for the greatest proportion of those few I have.

Probably the finest example of this very specific breed of buyers' remorse would be Dirt Boss - one of the toys based on a drone from the videogame of the first movie. Some of those drones took on cool alternate modes, like jets and cars... Dirt Boss became a small forklift...

Oh well, let's get on with it...

Revenge of the Fallen Swerve

Back when I wrote about the original Deluxe RotF Sideswipe, very nearly eight full years ago and less than a year into this blog, I noted that the Corvette Stingray would look awesome in red, since that would have been a far more fitting colour for Sideswipe. It didn't take too long for Hasbro to release a red repaint, albeit as a difference character... Though, in a lot of ways, it looks more like a cheeky way of producing a more G1-referential version of movie Sideswipe considering Swerve had traditionally been a truck rather than a sports car...

UFO Toys UP-2 Mega Arm & TF Dream Factory PJ-01 Evil-Blood Blade

I originally wrote about the Leader class Megatron figure from the Revenge of the Fallen toyline over six years ago, when I found it to be a rather poor attempt at realising the movie's CGI as a plastic toy. Given it's simplicity and lack of screen accuracy, one could be forgiven for thinking it wasn't even from the same toyline as its counterpart Optimus Prime, which is still one of the best TransFormers toys to come out of the movie line.

The problems with Megatron were mostly due to the CGI design being shit. Megatron in the movies was never recognisably Megatron, and not just because he didn't turn into a gun. After all, Megatron has been a jet/spacecraft thing before (Energon, Animated) and since (Prime, Generations), he's been a tank about a billion times (G2, Armada, Classics, off the top of my head) and since (Generations/War for Cybertron, twice so far in Combiner Wars). The problem was that, while all the other Decepticons and Autobots looked like robots that turned into vehicles, Megatron had been conceived as a character who felt that disguise was beneath him. The inevitable result was that he didn't look like much of anything in either robot or vehicle mode until Dark of the Moon and by that point he was, for the most part, a rusty shell of his former self.

As a result, the toys were terrible until the Dark of the Moon toyline, with the first being a misshapen jet/spacecraft made out of spikes, and the second being a misshapen tank made out of spikes. Both turned into misshapen robots made out of spikes, both had limited or poorly-designed articulation and neither one truly felt like they lived up to the potential of any of the available size classes. One would think, though, that Hasbro would have been able to do a better job of representing the rebuilt Megatron and his 'Murder Arm' considering the fact that his primary claw/blade pretty much disembowels Optimus Prime before his arm cannon finishes him off is quite a major 'plot' point in the movie, such as it was... and yet what we got was this:

"So... disappointing."

A downright shabby, poorly articulated, spring-loaded missile-launching mess, with a limply spring-loaded blade attached to a large, clawed plate... and then there's the other arm, known less than affectionately as 'the gimp arm', which is essentially the animatronic skeleton of a Skeksis spliced to a short, shrivelled arm on which the elbow is evidently also the wrist.

A tank... though almost by default.

Its vehicle mode looks like a robot doing weird alien yoga thanks to not even attempting to disguise the head (accurate to the movie CGI though that may be). Whereas RotF's Leader class Optimus Prime managed to include lights and sounds without sacrificing intricacy, this one - much like its predecessor - faked or bodged its detail to accommodate utterly lacklustre effects, and could have been made just as well in a smaller size class... My RotF Megatron has been stuffed into a box in the bottom of my wardrobe - along with the original movie's Optimus Prime toy, several others which were superseded by better toys, and a whole host of other junk - since I bought the Dark of the Moon Voyager toy.

But RotF Leader class Megatron need no longer suffer these ignominies. Two third party companies have independently developed replacements for both arms of this toy and, while it seemed pretty pointless to upgrade to UFO Toys' left arm and leave the right with its ugly, spring-loaded toy arm, the appearance of TF Dream Factory's take on the 'Murder Arm' suddenly seemed to turn both into must-have upgrades.

Revenge of the Fallen Sideways

One of the most objectively interesting things about the TransFormers movie franchise - for me, that is - is the way it has introduced lots of new characters without ever giving them any characterisation. One fine example of this is Sideways, who appeared in Revenge of the Fallen for less than a minute, largely to introduce a bunch of new Autobots by having them chase him down and murder him horrifically. He's parked near Demolishor for reasons never explored, flees the scene when discovered, and spends his few remaining seconds of screen time trying to escape, never uttering a single line of dialogue. We never learn anything about him, least of all why a Decepticon who never actually tries to defend himself short of running away, actually deserves to be literally cleaved it two by Sideswipe (another newly introduced character who transforms into a silver car, just to make things easy to follow).

And yet Hasbro made a toy of him, meaning some poor bugger had to develop some sort of character for him in the associated comics and the novelisation because, let's face it, who'd actually buy a toy for a character who gets offed in the first few minutes of a story and is only seen in robot mode for a few seconds..?

Revenge of the Fallen Chromia

(Femme-Bot Friday #14)

And here we have the second of the three 'wheelsnakes' from Revenge of the Fallen. These odd creatures were divisive among the fans, due (not even ironically) to their rather inhuman appearance (particularly versus the proposed original live action Arcee), but were all pretty cool in their own way.

While it wasn't clear in the movie whether Chromia and Elita-1 were separate characters or merely extensions of the reimagined Arcee, Hasbro saw fit to grant them individuality as toys, and even coloured the Deluxes as vague G1 homages... Though, curiously, this one almost works as a homage to TF Prime Arcee.

Things get confusing with the three RotF femme-bots...

Revenge of the Fallen Breakaway

In the very beginning, one thing you could count on in the TransFormers toyline was that jets would be Decepticons. In the cartoon, it was even stated that Autobots couldn't fly unaided (though that didn't stop 'em, when the plot required it). That lasted until the Aerialbots turned up and, from that point on, it was a free-for-all in just about every continuity.

Jump forward to Revenge of the Fallen and, while there were still no flying Autobots in the movie (except right at the end, via a throwaway deus ex machina), the toyline was still filling out the character roster with a few additional Cybertronians picked out of the licensed videogame.

Revenge of the Fallen Arcee

(Femme-Bot Friday #6)

I figure it's only fair, having mentioned in several other write-ups that I quite like the Revenge of the Fallen 'wheelsnakes', that I should actually write about them finally. They're a contentious creation in the eyes of the fandom, because a perfectly good-looking Arcee was left out of the first live action TransFormers movie supposedly because the filmmakers felt it would be too difficult to explain an apparently 'female' alien robot, only for Revenge of the Fallen to feature three (or possibly one which operated as three separate units) without any explanation whatsoever. Then again, that was probably the least of RotF's sins.

They were also among the first non-humaniform Cybertronians, along with Demolishor, seen by the audiences, and that opened a whole different can of worms. Sideswipe skating around on his wheel-feet the fans could accept (kinda)... Femme-bot torsos scooting about on one- or two-wheeled tails was something else entirely. Aren't femme-bots meant to be... y'know... sexy, or something?

Revenge of the Fallen Skids

The twins caught a lot of hate in the second live-action TransFormers movie. It began when concept art of their faces started turning up on fan websites and, while any complaints at that point were rather premature, they were understandable. Bumblebee's movie look had had a predominately negative reception, but even he looked pretty in comparison to Skids and Mudflap. To begin with, I thought the concept art was part of a practical joke. Surely such monstrosities could never be placed side by side with the movie designs for Optimus, Ironhide, Ratchet and, yes, even Bumblebee?

Then the movie actually happened and, quite honestly, I feel that they turned out to be among the least crappy things about the film. The allegations of racist stereotyping overshadowed pretty much everything else about the characters, but Hasbro still brought them out as toys... in several size classes... and in several colourschemes. Clearly the concept of striking deceased equidae has never entered their collective consciousness

Revenge of the Fallen Jolt

I have a lot of complaints about the first two TransFormers movies. I mean, the third is far from perfect, but at least it has something approaching a plot. The first movie is a poorly conceived introduction to the transforming robotic lifeforms from Cybertron tacked onto a 'heartwarming' story about a boy's first car, and the second is a ridiculous jumble that jumps around the world without ever really going anywhere. Worse still, it's far too obvious that some of the characters are there only to advertise Chevrolet's latest products.

Jolt is probably the most glaring example of this. Whereas the Twins had plenty of screen time and far too much questionable dialogue (must confess, I don't see them as racist stereotypes because I saw them as hillbillies talking 'street'... nothing about them made me think they were supposed to sound 'black'... but maybe that's just me), Jolt had maybe fifteen seconds of screen time, there was maybe one line of dialogue attributed to him that's equally likely to have come from Sideswipe, and his most significant role in the film was using his electro-whips/sparky arm phalli to magically graft bits of the deceased Jetfire onto the recently resurrected Optimus Prime.

In many ways, it was surprising that Hasbro even bothered to make a toy out of him (licensing deals notwithstanding), so how does he shape up?