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?

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2008 Exclusive (Timelines) Seacons Boxed Set

Funny thing: Back in the day, I bought all the G1 Seacons apart from Snaptrap, who I just never found. The Seacons turned up in the Marvel comics, and seemed pretty cool. Two of them transformed into robot fish (kind of like Sharkticons, in that they had arms and legs), one was a lobster, one was a ray and one... Well, I don't think it's ever been adequately explained what the hell Tentakil is supposed to be...

Somewhere along the lines, the Seacons popularity grew to near mythical proportions, putting them almost alongside the Predacons in the collective consciousness of the fandom. The Seacons were cool. Each one had a weapon mode, effectively making each one a TargetMaster as well as a component in the gestalt. They formed Piranacon. Piranacon was awesome.

And then, as an adult collector, a set like this comes along...