Alien Attack STF-01 Firage

When Hasbro cancelled the Dark of the Moon toyline with at least one wave of toys still to come, Takara Tomy picked up the slack to an extent. Molds like Que/Wheeljack and Soundwave were released in the Asian markets - both under the Movie Advanced banner, with Que also getting released in Hasbro's packaging in certain markets, as well as a repaint as 'true' Wheeljack with a G1 toy-style head. Dino, meanwhile, only got released as a repaint of Revenge of the Fallen Sideways, with a new head and weapons added to the weird-looking robot with a hopelessly wrong Audi-style vehicle mode.

Understandably, lots of fans were upset by this omission - it's hard to describe any of the robots from any of the live action movies as 'key characters' or 'important characters', but Dino at least had several lines of dialogue and a couple of cool action scenes, even if he did end up getting done in offscreen, between Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction - and the Movie Advanced version, while not too difficult to obtain, was rather expensive for what was little more than a repaint, and became positively extortionate on the secondary market.

Enter Spring Thunder (ST) Studio - a customiser based in China - who, back in 2015, took a 1:32 scale Ferrari 458 shell, a Battle Blades Bumblebee figure and some ABS plates, and created a very accurate-looking, super-poseable and fully transformable custom figure, and offered to take orders for a limited run of duplicates. One of the Third Party companies then contacted him, and this offer was cast into doubt. Less than a year after images of the custom were posted online, it was announced that Alien Attack had picked it up for manufacture... but it was over than a year after that before it became available for preorder, and several months more before it was release. Was it worth the wait?