TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2016 Combiner Wars Terrorsaur

The fact that the last handful of releases from the Fun Publications era of the TransFormers Collectors' Club and BotCon were branded as Combiner Wars toys, rather than coming under the Club's own brand, Timelines, was an early sign that changes were afoot.

Hasbro had pushed Combiner Wars hard - one might even say beyond its limits - and, while a custom gestalt made the ideal basis for an exclusive boxed set, they had produced so many retools of their own that, by 2016, there just weren't any surprises to be had with the format. Hasbro themselves had already moved on to Titans Return and, while FunPub's use of an older toyline was essentially par for the course, there just wasn't enough mileage left in Combiner Wars, even with a set related to (or perhaps retconning) Dawn of Futures Past - one of their very best BotCon sets.

Their take on Tripredacus was deeply uninspired, utilising some of the least highly-regarded molds, which were nevertheless among the most frequently retooled. The only real highlights of that year's show were a retooling of the RID2001 Megatron mold as TransMetals Megatron, and 2015's TransFormers Legends Slipstream mold (itself a retool of  the very first Windblade toy) as Airazor.

So... why did I also acquire Terrorsaur? Let's see if I can figure that out, shall we?

Perfect Effect PC-15 Upgrade Kit & PC-16 Jinrai Prime

TransFormers developed along some very strange lines during the Prime Wars trilogy. We were treated to the second ever G1-style Ultra Magnus toy which transformed as a unit rather than being a white Optimus Prime with power armour (the first being the Masterpiece figure), and that led to a reinterpretation of Powermaster Optimus Prime (and Takara Tomy's Super Ginrai remix) in which the 'cab only' Optimus Prime - and the Powermaster feature - was bypassed in favour of keeping with Titans Returns' HeadMaster gimmick and the single-unit transformation.

While I like Super Ginrai and enjoyed him as a single unit, the moment I saw Perfect Effect were producing upgrade sets - the first being essentially supplemental parts for the second, a fully transforming, independent cab - I knew I was going to treat myself to the full Super Ginrai/Powermaster Optimus Prime upgrade, and ordered both PC-15 and PC-16 as soon as they became available.

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.

Titans Return: Titan Masters Apeface & Overboard

One aspect of Titans Return which seemed underdeveloped in the toyline - not to mention completely unexplored in the terrible Machinima animated show - was the packs of Titan Master figures that came with approximately Scout class transforming vehicles and beasts with weapon forms but no robot modes to accompany their head form. The Titan Masters could ride or become part of these, but their role as HeadMasters was to be reserved for the Deluxe class or larger toys... which already had heads of their own.

Since, unlike the G1 interpretation of HeadMasters, the Titan Masters were supposed confer some sort of power boost or upgrade upon the larger figures, but neither the packaging nor the instructions actually detailed any of this (although Hasbro did release a digital mini-comic/bio booklet to fill in the blanks) it was pretty much left up to the imagination of the individual what these replacement heads would do for any of the larger toys.

The triple-changing accessories to provide a bit more play value, as their weapon modes could be wielded by the larger robots but, on the whole, they seemed a bit pointless. The only reason I bought these two was to turn them into Overlord's Powermasters via an upgrade kit made available at TFNation 2017 by the Nottingham Robot Company. Since that didn't pan out, I may as well give them their own little write-up...

Combiner Wars Shockwave

As one of those G1 toys that transformed into a gun - albeit a sci-fi laser blaster rather than a real world handgun, like G1 Megatron - Shockwave has more recently become 'problematic' as a toy. He hasn't had a great number of toys since the 1980s, and they've tended to be tanks of one form or another.

The only version of Shockwave to appear in the Generations line was based on his appearance in the Fall of Cybertron videogame, and looked weirdly spindly in robot mode, with an unimaginative - not to mention largely unidentifiable - alternate mode, so I didn't bother picking it up.

Then came Combiner Wars, which gave us a more G1-styled Shockwave, complete with a built-in reference to the TV show... But is a Legends class Shockwave really worth bothering with?

Iron Factory IF EX-16A Alleria (aka The Lady Commander)

(Femme-Bot Friday #67)

There comes a point in my collecting where I realise that my OCD about certain things - particularly Femme-Bots in recent years - has led me to buy essentially the same damned thing over and over again, and I'm hit by a wave of buyers' remorse. It started to happen as I bought Mastermind Creations' original Azalea and several of the repaints (though I do find that I still rather want Eupatorium), so I really should have seen it coming with Iron Factory's Pink Assassin repaints... But when I saw that their take on Elita-1 would be a pack-in with their Ultimate Commander (a sort of combination of a Cybertronian Optimus Prime and the Godbomber accessory minus its own individual robot mode), I found myself mesmerised into ordering it, despite having no interest in the main figure in the box.

So far, I've fought off the urge to buy their Combaticon leader Onslaught-analogue just for its extremely tempting 'Pink Assassin Combiner Hunter' pack-in, so let's have a quick look at this one to see if any buyers' remorse is justified...

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2016/Combiner Wars Bluestreak

Starting in its second year, the Figure Subscription Service offered by the TransFormers Collectors' Club started to include a bonus figure which would only be available to those who bought into that year's full subscription. Any overs of the other six figures might end up in the Club store eventually, but the seventh was the true exclusive, and its nature tended to be kept secret until the final boxes arrived with subscribers and their photos started turning up online. Due to this, the bonus figure attained an almost mythical status which was, unfortunately, responsible for a certain amount of disappointment throughout my experience of the Subscription Service.

Series 4 was largely a disappointment generally... but this - the supposed bonus figure, packaged with Impactor - feels to me like the Club's worst output in all their 12 years. So, as something of a compare-and-contrast with the previous post, about the Binaltech version of the character, let's have a closer look to see what rubbed me up the wrong way...

Iron Factory IF EX-16N Night Assassin

(Femme-Bot Friday #61)

Cleverly taking a leaf out of Takara Tomy's books, Iron Factory took their 'Pink Assassin' small-scale Arcee-analogue mold and very quickly turned it into their very own take on the G1 cartoon character, Nightbird. It seems like a rather niche move, and certainly strange as a standalone release when their Elita-1 analogue was packaged with another figure (irritating as it is to my OCD, their Combiner Hunters Arcee, IF EX-16H, being packaged with IF EX-24 War Giant Commander made much more sense), but it's another Third Party Femme-Bot, so it was on my want list as soon as I became aware of its existance.

RID2015/Clash of the TransFormers Paralon

One would think, given the long history of Autobot/Decepticon conflict within the TransFormers franchise, that subtitling one portion of the newest Robots in Disguise continuity "Clash of the TransFormers" would be unnecessarily excessive tautology... Yet here we are. I know nothing about Clash of the Transformers except that it consisted mainly of repaints and was supposedly exclusive to Toys'R'Us.

Carrying on my habit of randomly purchasing RID2015 figures, I picked up this repaint/retool of Scorponok for a fairly flimsy reason, even by my standards: he's a more overt Beast Wars reference than the original version of the mold. Scorponok hadn't looked particularly impressive, being another one of RID2015's bizarre beast-robot Decepticons, but with a beast mode rather than a vehicle mode... making the toy as much a tautology as the name of the subline.

But does the toy rise above this inauspicious start?

DX9 War In Pocket #14 Leah

(Femme-Bot Friday #59)

My final purchase on the Sunday of the inaugural TFNation was a boxed set containing two of DX9's War In Pocket line of diminutive transforming figures. Toufold wasn't really of any interest to me, being based on Kup from the 1986 animated movie. Leah, on the other hand, was right up my street.

Considering Arcee was supposedly based on Princess Leia, the choice of name makes a fair bit of sense, and it's less flouncy than the names used by some other Third Party Arcee figures.

When I split a boxed set into multiple posts, I normally end up regretting it, but I figured it's worth the risk for this one, since Leah is a Femme-Bot and Toufold is actually a bit dull. No doubt I'll get to him eventually (2023, perhaps?) but, for the moment, let's take a look at Leah...

Mastermind Creations Reformatted R-08Q Feral Queen & Nero Queen

(Femme-Bot Friday #57)

There was me, thinking I'd got all the Mastermind Creations Azalea variants I wanted (apart from Eupatorium... maybe...), only for Kapow Toys to announce that they would be bringing the all-new, TFCon 2016 exclusive boxed set of Feral Queen (a repaint originally intended as an April Fool joke - a Femme-Bot companion to the Feralcons/Feral Rex - which was turned into a real figure with a unique head sculpt) and Nero Queen (a black repaint of same, to accompany Nero Rex) to the inaugural TFNation that same year. Stocks were naturally in short supply, so preordering for collection was advised... but, at that point, I wasn't even sure I would be going.

Naturally, my wacky sense of priorities meant that this announcement - and particularly the preordering advice (I'd asked if I could reserve one to be sent to me after they returned from the show, but they couldn't guarantee they wouldn't run out) - tipped the balance in favour of attending the show... and led me to spend even more money on other items of plastic crack.

The big question, obviously, is whether or not the cause of my attendance was actually worth all the effort and associated expense...

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2016/Combiner Wars Impactor

Marvel's TransFormers comics sometimes introduced characters who were not and, in some cases, still aren't going to be available as toys. Hasbro occasionally paid lip service the fans desires to see these characters in plastic, and created a version of the Wreckers' irascible leader, Impactor, in 2013, using the much-maligned Fall of Cybertron Onslaught mold. He was made to be the torso of Ruination, a combiner formed wholly of Wreckers, each a repaint of the terminally underdeveloped FoC Combaticons. This version of Impactor didn't look anything like the Marvel Comics character, and didn't even have the right colourscheme.

Subsequently, back in 2016, the penultimate Subscription Service from the TransFormers Collectors' Club - amounting mostly to the Decepticons' Mayhem Attack Squad - was concluded with the second ever official figure of Impactor, this time created using the mold originally used for Combiner Wars Rook. Was the Club's attempt any better than Hasbro's?

TransFormers Legends (Titans Return) LG44 Sharkticon & Sweep

I'd have to say that one of the strangest - if not outright daftest - elements of the animated TransFormers movie was the sequence on Quintessa, and the introduction of Sharkticons to the pantheon of beastformers.

Not to say Sharkticons are inherently daft in a franchise that had already introduced Dinobots, and would soon introduce the Terrorcons, the Firecons and all the Decepticon HeadMasters... but the fact that they were seemingly an entire, separate race of non-Cybertronian transforming robots, all looking identical, which would normally indicate that their toys would be intended as troop-builders, yet the Sharkticon released in the toyline was given a unique name - Gnaw - and his tech specs bio appeared to treat him as an individual within the Sharkticons.

Hasbro's release of the Titans Return version followed this trend, albeit without the bio, but Takara Tomy seems to have gone back to the idea of Sharkticons as troopbuilders, not just because the packing names him simple 'Sharkticon', but he's also packaged with a troopbuilding HeadMaster

TransFormers Adventure/Prime of Micron TAV55 Windblade

(Femme-Bot Friday #51)

As a general rule, I'm happy to buy the same mold multiple times if each one represents either a different character or a different version of a character that I'm particularly keen on. What I won't tend to do, except in certain circumstances, is take Hasbro up on its offer of cynical repaints of the same character in the same mold, just because they want more of my money. With very few exceptions, I'd be reluctant to buy repaints that happen for plot reasons... though limited edition repaints tend to get a free pass.

With Hasbro's Robots in Disguise (2015) line, I've not only ended up buying more of the toyrange than I'd imagined at the start, but I've subsequently replaced several of them with Takara Tomy's TransFormers Adventure versions due to their vastly superior paint jobs. One such example is Windblade, whose RID2015 toy was absurdly underpainted and barely resembled her on-screen counterpart. I even concluded that write-up wondering about Takara Tomy's version, which I acquired almost a year later.

Is it as significant an improvement as I'd hoped..?

Robots in Disguise (2015) Thunderhoof

I have to confess that I do rather like the somewhat outlandish designs of the RID2015 Decepticons. The more beast-like appearance of their robot modes may be somewhat implausible, given that the Autobots are so 'normal' looking by comparison, but it has made for some visually striking characters, like Bisk and Fracture.

For the most part, though, the Hasbro versions of the toys have been utterly disappointing, and I've tended to buy the Takara Tomy versions where I know I really want the character, picking up the occasional Hasbro release as a result of random whims, and usually at considerable discount. This is one such example, found for less than a tenner at TK Maxx, while killing time before seeing a movie with my best mate one weekend...

Keith's Fantasy Club Scorpinator

One of my big regrets as a TransFormers fan and collector is never making it over to a BotCon. It never stopped me acquiring any of their boxed sets that I wanted, but there's something to be said for attending the convention and picking it up in person, I think. I did manage to get to a couple of AutoAssemblies, but it wasn't till Roll Out Roll Call 2016 and the first TFNation that the idea of convention exclusive toys really took form in the UK.

While RORC obtained a load of that year's BotCon exclusives (though, again, I'd already obtained the only figure I was especially interested in), TFNation 2016 pretty much allowed a couple of their vendors to carry the exclusives, rather than having any of their own in their inaugural year (it didn't take long for them to get proper show exclusives, though).

Since I try to make a point of supporting exclusive merchandise, there were a couple of things I picked up at TFNation, one of which was this G1/Masterpiece Soundwave-compatible cassetticon, originally created by Keith's Fantasy Club as Stinger, packaged with Doubledeck, their homage to G1 Twincast. This exclusive marks the first time it's been made available on its own.

Titans Return Sixshot & Revolver

G1 Sixshot was another of the later G1 toys that was never released in the UK but, even if he had been, I'd probably not have picked him up simply because his arrival would have been toward the end of my original collecting days, if not after.

In the intervening years, I've considered picking him up on eBay - either the original or the 2002 Encore re-release - and also started looking at the third party options, from Mastermind Creations' Terminus Hexatron to Iron Factory's Shadow Tengu, but more-or-less decided not to bother as all I really remember about Sixshot was a single appearance in the G1 cartoon, during which he appeared in the middle of a battle, and attacked something once in each of his modes... then, as far as I can recall, disappeared for the remainder of the episode. Suffice it to say, he didn't make much of an impression at the time.

Then the announcement came that there would be a new, super-articulated Titans Return Sixshot - a Leader class figure, no less - and my interest was somewhat rekindled... But does this remake, 30 years in the making, really improve that much over the original?

FansProject Lost Exo Realm LER-05 Comera

(Femme-Bot Friday #47)

This almost certainly isn't the first time I've made myself look like a bit of a hypocrite, having repeatedly denounced the very concept of Dinobots, only to buy one and find it's actually quite good, objectively speaking.

FansProject started their Lost Exo Realm series of unofficial Masterpiece Dinobots, surprisingly, with their own take on Sludge - where most other Third Parties seemed to start with Grimlock - and only got to the Dinobot commander after their versions of Slag and Swoop... But the bigger surprise was how they followed him - not with their version of the final G1 Dinobot, Snarl, but with a pair of original characters built around the same basic structure... Dino-Femme-Bots, no less.

Naturally, that piqued my interest, so I ordered the first of them, Comera, toward the end of last year, with a view to potentially getting the second, Echara, if it turned out to be good... Because if I'm going to make myself a hypocrite, I want to go full-on about it.

Combiner Wars Groove (Deluxe class)

For whatever reason, Hasbro's take on remaking the G1 gestalts in Combiner Wars invariably ended up with a new and previously unknown member for each team replacing one of the original characters and stealing their colourscheme. Thus, the Aerialbots got Alpha Bravo in Slingshot's colours, the Stunticons got Offroad in Wildrider's colours... the Combaticons got Blast Off as a jet rather than a shuttle... and the Protectobots got Rook (notable mainly for being the first who wasn't an obvious 'pretooling' of another character) instead of Groove as a limb, with the motorcycle 'bot initially turning up as a Legends class breastplate.

Takara Tomy, meanwhile, released boxed sets with the full and original G1 teams, forcing Hasbro to later release the 'missing' members of each team, leading to the Protectobots having two versions of the same character. It's disappointing - though, with me, utterly unsurprising - that it's taken me about two years to get around to this, because I picked up Deluxe class Groove at the earliest opportunity, and yet didn't immediately complete my write-up of the complete, G1 homage Defensor.

So, without further ado, let's get our Groove on... Again...

Robots in Disguise (2015) Bisk

From the start, I was all set to completely ignore the new Robots in Disguise TV show and its toyline. Despite being a follow-on from the amazing TFPrime, it was watered down and kid-friendly, the robot designs looked awful and the first few waves of toys looked poorly designed, shoddily made and generally cheap.

Then I saw photos of the adorable Deluxe class Bisk toy, and the ice around my snobby heart just melted... I still don't know quite what to make of a load of Decepticons who, for no clearly defined reason, all look like weird animal hybrids in robot mode, but a lobster robot is always a win in my books. So, without further ado...