TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2010 (Timelines) Sky-Byte

With BotCon tackling Generation 2 for BotCon 2010, Sky-Byte seemed like a rather odd choice for inclusion in the boxed set. G2 had been the short-lived first reboot of the TransFormers brand in the early 1990s, mixing crappy new molds loaded with simplistic gimmicks with frequently eye-searing repaints applied to almost everything from the earliest, Diaclone-derived waves of G1 onewards. Sky-Byte, meanwhile, was a Predacon introduced in the 2001 Car Robots/Robots in Disguise toylines, who was a repaint of a TransMetals 2 Maximal named Cybershark.

He was also a uniquely odd beastformer, in that his shark mode was effectively in a fixed curve, 'leaping out of the water' pose, and his robot mode was one of the most extraordinarily asymmetrical TransFormers toys I'd ever seen. I'm normally a fan of asymmetry, but something about the original toy never appealed to me, though I did end up buying the Thrilling 30 version, back in 2014.

But, back to BotCon 2010 and the Generation 2: Redux set. The inclusion of Sharkticons certainly fits the G1 reboot vibe, but I'm guessing that one of the writers of the BotCon comic must have been a fan of Sky-Byte, and saw an opportunity for an exclusive version of the character using the same mold, but this time with a more extravagant paint job along with a new and unique head sculpt. The question is, does such a toy that originated in the Energon line have what it takes to represent such a bonkers character? Let's have a look...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2010 (Timelines) Sharkticon: Air Shark

The Sharkticon that turned up in the Energon toyline certainly wasn't a traditional Sharkticon. Rather, it was a Decepticon, named Sharkticon, who happened to transform into a spacecraft that resembled a shark. Anecdotally, the craft was intended to resemble the Nemesis, the Decepticons' ship from G1... though it looks nothing like the recent Titan class toy. Just to add to the confusion, the mold was repainted in Takara Tomy's TransFormers United toyline in 2012, to be the Axalon, the Maximals' ship from Beast Wars.

Before that, however, the Collectors' Club repainted him for BotCon... as a G1 Sharkticon. Or, as it turned out, three Sharkticons, in a three-pack of toys identical but for the text on their respective bio cards: Air Shark, Land Shark and Sea Shark.

I knew I'd bought this figure, along with Sky-Byte, at an event... but couldn't remember for the life of me which event it was, and ended up having to search one of my old blogs to identify that it was AutoAssembly 2010, so this fellow is long overdue for a write-up. Let's get on with it, shall we?

Human Alliance Mudflap & Chromia

And here we have yet another ancient and long-neglected figure from my collection, this one hailing from the Revenge of the Fallen portion of the short-lived but truly excellent Human Alliance toyline. It sometimes feels as though I'll never run out of toys from that film - not least because, naturally, Studio Series is now chucking out some of the... er... less well-represented characters - but, of those that came out around the time of the film, I thankfully have just two more Human Alliance toys to write about... And Mudflap is one of them.

Human Alliance was essentially as close to Masterpiece as affordable, play-oriented toys will likely ever get, and in some ways could be considered superior to Masterpiece due to their semi-realistic interiors. Kind of a Binaltech/Alternators-lite, and packaged with less creepy human figurines than Kiss Players.

Frankly, it's high time I got round to dealing with the last handful of HA figures in my collection, so let's start here!

Reveal the Shield Fallback

The TransFormers subline entitled 'Reveal the Shield' was as strange as it was shortlived. By and large, it was a callback to that period of G1 toys which featured heat-activated faction insignias. The bulk of them were also just another part of the ongoing Classics line, but a small handful could be interpreted equally as part of the continuing Revenge of the Fallen toyline due to the ambiguity of their packaging.

Fallback - aka Outback, another name Hasbro lost for a few years - was one such figure. Clearly based on the G1 character, going by his colourscheme, yet a repaint of the movie version of Brawn. So... technically, while I thought Legends class Ravage was the final Revenge of the Fallen toy in my collection, it seems it's actually this one!

Revenge of the Fallen Ravage (Legends)

Continuing my recent theme of ten-year-old movie toys and - finally - completing the write-ups for my collection of Revenge of the Fallen toys, here we have the second mold made of Ravage, yet another G1 character who got a bit of a raw deal out of that movie.

The Decepticons' master spy, a renowned lurker-in-the-shadows, got turned into a shiny, bare-metallic cyclopean robo-kitty whose contributions to comic relief far outweighed his few awesome moments of action. Rather than sneaking into the N.E.S.T. holding facility to steal their Allspark fragment, he went in all guns blazing and essentially provided a distraction for the weird gestalt known as Reedman, which he had merely deployed by coughing his component ballbearings down a ventilator shaft. His only other significant contributions were delivering Scalpel to the captive Sam Witwicky (anyone else find it odd that Soundwave ejects Ravage, then Ravage ejects both Reeman and Scalpel, without any indication of how either got inside him?), and then getting his spine ripped out by the tail when it went up against Bumblebee during the climactic battle of the movie.

His Deluxe class toy proved to be disappointing, in that it had only a perfunctory alternate mode - dubbed 'Re-entry Mode' and supposedly representing his 'missile' form after Soundwave shot him down to Earth - and a colourscheme that was more G1 than movie. After about a year - and a couple of repaints - Hasbro released a completely new mold, in the smallest current size class. There were two positive signs on this version - first and foremost, his colourscheme was very much movie-style bare metallic. Perhaps more interestingly, its alternate mode was based on the fish/submersible form Ravage was given in his concept art, but which didn't make it into the movie.

Is it possible that a tiny Legends class figure is better than a Deluxe?

Hunt for the Decepticons Tomahawk

I don't know what it was about the live action movies, but they led to a greater variety of attempts at turning helicopters into robots. Where toys that came before (and since) tended to follow a certain pattern that invariably led to large chunks of tail or cockpit just hanging off the robots' backs, the movie lines brought us the likes of Evac and Skyhammer (and, admittedly, the original Blackout, who followed the traditional pattern).

But where those were clearly of the movie aesthetic, Tomahawk occupied a strange middle-ground - sold as part of the extended RotF toyline, but closer to the more fanciful, sci-fi look of Classics/Generations and, like Skyhammer, made to accommodate the c-clip weapon accessories that debuted in that line.

Alternity A-04 Thundercracker (Sonic Blue)

The last of my Alternity purchases was actually in my collection not long after Starscream and Skywarp, and I really don't know why I didn't get to him back then (a little over eight years ago!), not least because Skywarp lacked the immediate, punchy impact of Starscream's stark, pearly white paint job and Thundercrackers icy blue.

There were further entries in the Alternity line after this, but they seemed to be nothing but repaints of a retooled Convoy under the 'Mission GT-R' banner, so I think I've got at least one of all the unique molds and won't be looking to get any more of these... Which means I'm actually closing off one part of my collection right at the start of the year!

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.

Hunt for the Decepticons Hailstorm

While the original TransFormers live action movie introduced new characters based on vehicles seen in the movie, the toyline for Revenge of the Fallen, including the Hunt for the Decepticons and Reveal the Shield offshoots, went even further, and massively increased the number of Autobots and Decepticons using alternate modes derived from real-world vehicles that didn't necessarily feature in the film, and robot modes which conformed (by and large) to the movie aesthetic.

It was a bit of a scattershot approach, and led to several oddities and a bunch of strange G1 homages, but occasional releases, such as Hailstorm, really deserved to appear in one of the movies...

Hunt for the Decepticons Hubcap

One of the few coherent and interesting concepts to come out of Revenge of the Fallen was the idea that TransFormers have been on Earth far longer than Optimus Prime and his team believed. It's an idea that deserved - deserves, even now, in the wake of The Last Knight - a proper and thorough examination in a movie of its own, rather than being shuffled aside as a minor plot point in one of RotF's many silly, ad-libbed scenes.

Perhaps by way of compensation for this oversight, Hasbro decided to release a few smaller Autobots and Decepticons based around the movie's reinterpretation of the 'Seeker' title, more generally applied to the earliest visitors from Cybertron on their quest to find the Allspark. One such visitor was the vaguely G1-referencial Scout class Autobot, Hubcap...

Device Label Broad Blast (aka Blaster)

Music Label and Device Label were two very short-lived offshoots from the TransFormers brand, created by Takara Tomy, which featured functional memory sticks (2Gb - paltry by today's standards) and optical mice which transformed into robots. They were so short-lived, in fact, that they seem in retrospect to have been created to facilitate one particular model in each case (Soundwave, under the Music Label banner, for example).

The last two releases in the Device Label line were a third repaint of the memory stick (as Cheetor, supposedly, Takara Tomy having used the same mold first as Ravage, then as Tigatron) and a the only model never to be repurposed: a functioning 4-port USB hub made to look like a Toshiba laptop. How does Blaster fare with such a strange alternate mode? Let's find out...

Revenge of the Fallen Legends Constructicons set

Much as I despise the way Devastator was wasted in Revenge of the Fallen, turned into a mindless brute apparently made up using duplicates of Demolishor (offed by Optimus Prime in the opening minutes of the movie), Rampage (offed by Bumblebee in a separate fight) and Scrapper (ripped apart for spares at the behest of Scalpel, to resurrect Megatron), amongst others, and unceremoniously wrecked by a terrestrial battleship's high tech weapon, I have to admit I quite like the concept and the look of the result. It was nothing like G1 Devastator, but it looked like a robot that should be called Devastator. It had potential and, perhaps, if production of Revenge of the Fallen hadn't clashed with the writers' strike, it might have been more impressive.

The giant-sized, light-and-sound infused version of Devastator was tempting, but the fact that it was so huge, yet his components had no individual robot modes, made the whole thing pointless. I still kind of wanted a RotF Devastator toy, though, and thankfully Hasbro decided to release a cut down, Legends class set... with a bonus extra character not used in the larger figure, but who did feature in the movie... though not necessarily as a component of Devastator.

Tokyo Toy Show 2010 Dreadwing & Smokescreen

I noted in my write-up for Reveal the Shield Strafe that I would much rather have purchased Mindwipe, but I don't think he was ever available in the UK - lost, perhaps, thanks to another of Hasbro's remarkably short-sighted marketing decisions. The mold itself was great, but Strafe's colourscheme was terrible, and meant I had a Skystalker with no vehicle mode partner.

Enter 2010's Tokyo Toy Show, at which a repainted set of the two molds was available as a boxed set of Generation 2 Dreadwing & Smokescreen (aka RiD Dreadwind & Smokejumper in blue)

Hunt for the Decepticons Terradive

Possibly one of the strangest things about Michael Bay's TransFormers movies is that there are so few flying Decepticons. We've had Starscream, we've had Blackout, we've had Laserbeak... and that's pretty much it. The toylines expanded on this with repaints of the original and multiple versions of Starscream for RotF, plus the odd few additional characters from the associated fiction. Weirdly, though, even in the extended toyline, there still seem to be more airborne Autobots than Decepticons

One of the most enduring kinds of TransFormers toy designs is the Generation 2 Cyberjet. They have been reused and remixed time and time again, with straight repaints and mold upgrades. As one of the few airborne Decepticons in the extended toyline for Revenge of the Fallen, it was surprising to find Terradive so familiar, though he's still very much his own mold.

Hunt for the Decepticons Battle Blade Bumblebee

One would think that, eventually, Hasbro would stop making Bumblebee toys. Sure, he's the 'Kid Appeal' character, but he ended up with dozens of toys in all the size classes for each movie, totalling several billion variations of the yellow Camaro on the shelves and pegs.

OK, maybe a slight exaggeration, but surely they'd eventually be satisfied enough with one particular model in each size class (especially the Deluxe class) be be able to say "that's it, we've done all we can"..? At least until the next movie and the next model of Camaro, right?

TransFormers Animated (Takara Tomy) TA-33 Rodimus

I've not seen any of the episodes that Rodimus appeared in since season three of TransFormers Animated never made it over to the UK... But, then, neither did this toy. As a Toys'R'Us exclusive in the US, 'Rodimus Minor' wasn't even easy to come by over there. Weirdly, Takara Tomy's version became available via Amazon in the UK, though, and thereby made it onto my wish list...

...And, for the second Christmas in a row, my girlfriend's family have enabled by addiction to the plastic crack that is TransFormers very generously added to my TransFormers collection. Last year it was TransFormers Go! Hunter Shockwave, this year they bought me one TransFormers Go! figure and this, the last missing figure in my TransFormers Animated collection.

N.E.S.T. Global Alliance Bludgeon

Bludgeon will always seem to me to be a weird addition to the live action movie toylines. Originally a G1 Pretender, his shell was a ghostly samurai in orange armour (because Pretender technology makes for a perfect disguise!) and he transformed from a dumpy robot into a dumpy tank. The first movie Bludgeon appeared in a two-pack, as a repaint of Wreckage packaged with a repaint/remold of Blackout as Whirl. For the extended Revenge of the Fallen toyline, something entirely new was created, going back to his roots, but in a startling and original way.

Hunt for the Decepticons Elita-1

(Femme-Bot Friday #16)

Revenge of the Fallen introduced the TransFormers fandom to the phenomenon of robots that were absolutely nothing like humanoid in their appearance, perhaps most prominently in the form of the three Autobot 'wheelsnakes' - a team of biker bots, led by Arcee, whose robot modes scooted around on their alternate mode wheels - though they got precious little character development and no explanation whatsoever, even though a more humanoid version of Arcee was cut from the first movie due to the complexity of explaining 'female' robots...

Hasbro insisted that all three would get toys - unique molds, they claimed - and had said all along that the intention was to release the instructions for building the gestalt form (which had been cut from the movie) once all three toys were available. However, when the third member of the team was finally released, she was a straight repaint of Chromia, and the instructions never surfaced. To this day, no-one outside of Hasbro has seen even draft designs of a unique RotF Elita-1, though several fans have come up with options for combining the bikes into something approaching the concept art for the gestalt.

Masterpiece Thundercracker

When Takara Tomy took a second look at the Masterpiece Seeker mold and released a new Starscream only four years after the divisive original, it was only natural for Hasbro to follow suit. MP03 is truly awesome, though not without its problems (many loathed the tail fins hanging off the hips, for example) and the remold seemed, on the surface, to fix all the major issues.

When Hasbro US released the new Seeker mold as Thundercracker, I had to consider carefully whether I wanted to pay secondary market prices for the original MP07 (currently between about £550-£800) or go for the cheaper, more convenient new mold. Toys'R'Us in the UK briefly had the new Masterpiece Thundercracker available to order online, but eventually dropped it in favour of Acid Storm... who isn't even a real G1 character. I could almost understand if Hasbro Europe released Sunstorm... but Acid Storm? Did he do anything other that warm the pegs and shelves as a Deluxe?

From that point on, the secondary market prices on the Hasbro US version started creeping up... so when I saw an eBay auction starting very much at the low end (£40 - amusingly still about double what I paid for Hasbro's MP Skywarp at Argos many years ago) I jumped right on it. Naturally, the price went up quickly, but I managed to win the auction at a price still nicely below the current average for a new, boxed one.

Masterpiece Grimlock

OK, let's get one thing out of the way, straight off the bat: I think the Dinobots were rubbish.

I mean, seriously, robots that transform into robot dinosaurs? And how many different nonsensical 'explanations' for this bizarre phenomenon? The whole idea was ridiculous, and probably one of the worst aspects of TransFormers being a toyline created out of several crossover brands, in this case Takara's Diaclone Dinosaur Robo line. Grimlock was supposedly a robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex, but his proportions were all wrong and the dinosaur legs were poorly positioned and just didn't look anything like those of a T-Rex, the head was too wide and too flat, the arms stuck out from the torso, with a fixed 90degree bend at the elbow... The whole thing was a catalogue of poor design, quite apart from the fact that it was a frikkin' robotic dinosaur. The Dinobots are why I was initially quite sceptical of Beast Wars.

Weirdly, and as mentioned in my write-up of Classics Grimlock, I bought a full set of Justitoys' World's Smallest Dinobots - at no small cost - because the idea of them appealed to me. Other than being scaled to the authentic Takara Tomy World's Smallest line (based on their comparative sizes on the TV show), they were functionally identical to the full-sized version in every detail. They were a curiosity and a massive aberration in my collection, picked up largely because they were made available as a complete set, whereas G1 Swoop was never released in the UK. As it turned out, they're not great quality, and part of me rather regrets buying them.

Still, something must have convinced me to buy this behemoth... Let's see if we can figure out what it was...