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?

Is Generation 1 Stifling The TransFormers Brand?

Just another little opinion piece, since I'm currently both struggling to work on any actual toy posts (the most recent Femme-Bot Friday having been completed about a month ago and scheduled to go live when it did), and a little grumpy due to being unwell. This is something that has been on my mind for quite a while, and which I've touched on obliquely in my complaints about the toys from Siege, the first chapter of the new War for Cybertron trilogy. Specifically:

Is the current laser focus on releasing new and improved versions of toys based on Generation 1 characters ultimately detrimental to the TransFormers brand?

Generations (30th Anniversary) Crosscut

The Generations/30th Anniversary toy of Skids was a surprise on many levels - not least that it happened at all. Along with Generations Springer, it seemed to show, at the time, that Hasbro were paying attention to IDW's output and tailoring their output (to a degree) toward those who appreciated the ongoing comic book narrative. While I hadn't intended to buy Skids for various reasons, he ended up being an impulse buy while on holiday a few years ago and I really liked what Hasbro had done to update and improve what had been a fairly poor G1 toy.

G1 Crosscut, meanwhile, was an e-HOBBY exclusive with a 'new' (that is, derived from one of the alternative Diaclone versions of the mold) head sculpt so, when Hasbro announced a Generations version, with a head styled after the original figure applied to the new Skids mold, the fact that I'd enjoyed Generations Skids so much put Crosscut straight onto my want list.

Generations Sergeant Kup

One of the things I really liked about the Classics line, particularly as it evolved into the earlier stages of the ongoing Generations line, was that it wasn't content to simply re-do each and every character in much the same form as their G1 original - the designers took risks and came up with original concepts for some wholly new takes on the older characters.

Few Generations toys exemplify this better than Generations Kup, which finally gave the old Cybertronian warhorse from the 1986 animated movie a proper, contemporary Earth mode. Naturally it was a pickup truck... but really not the sort of thing I'd have expected. He'd also developed the 'Sergeant' prefix on his name, likely for trademark reasons, which would carry forward to the TF Prime figure (itself a sort of 'pre-paint' of a design intended to represent Ironhide).

There are some characters that shouldn't be altered too far from their original designs, but is Kup one of them?

Titans Return Brawn

I've often mentioned that I'm basically ambivalent about much of the fiction associated with the TransFormers brand. Sure, I watched the G1 TV show (when I could - it wasn't exactly aired consistently in the UK, jumping between various time slots in myriad different early morning TV shows), and I'm a huge fan of Beast Wars, TF Animated and TF Prime... I also read the Marvel comic back in the day, but didn't think much of it once the decree came down to stop using the toys as art reference.

But, to cut a long story short, I'm pretty sure that G1 Brawn was a figure I bought largely because of a story in the UK comics - specifically, The Enemy Within (written by franchise stalwart Simon Furman, and brilliantly illustrated by John Ridgway, Mike Collins and Gina Hart) - in which Brawn gets electrocuted and suffers a psychotic break, while Starscream makes his first proper attempt to usurp Megatron, the net result being that one ends up pitted against the other in a one-on-one battle in the desert. It's not the greatest story ever - Furman is far from being my favourite writer at the best of times - but it showcased the characters far better than the TV show ever did.

Like many G1 Mini Autobots who are not Bumblebee, Brawn has had only a very few reworkings over the years - the most notable probably being the bizarre Deluxe class figure in the N.E.S.T. Global Alliance subline of Revenge of the Fallen. With Titans Return, however, Hasbro are trawling their back catalogue - if not actually scraping the barrel quite yet - for characters ripe for an update... And Brawn just happened to be another of the lucky ones...

HasCon 2017/Titans Return Arcee, Leinad & Ultra Magnus

(Femme-Bot Friday #46)

Hasbro clearly understood that, by ending Fun Publications' license to act as the TransFormers Collectors' Club, they'd have to come up with some sort of replacement for BotCon but, for the inaugural HasCon, at least, TransFormers were only one small facet of the event, given no special consideration.

The absence of BotCon naturally meant the absence of BotCon exclusives, which rubbed a lot of fans up the wrong way (probably those same fans who were regularly rubbed up the wrong way by some aspect - present or lacking - in the BotCon boxed sets, let's face it). That's not to say there weren't any HasCon Exclusives - by the looks of it, there was one for each of Hasbro's major product lines - just that they weren't really 'exclusive' so much as they were 'early access'... And their TransFormers boxed set was contentious for a laundry list of reasons.

But I tend not to let that stop me, particularly when Femme-Bots are involved...

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...

Titans Return Cosmos

Bizarre as he was, G1 Cosmos was one of my favourite figures - as a fan of vintage sci-fi, I really liked that a TransFormer had been based on the UFO from the celebrated hoax photograph by George Adamski, despite being completely incongruous in a line of toys whose terrestrial disguises were still largely based in reality. Trouble is, with such an outlandish - literally - vehicle mode, he became rather difficult to fit into later lines.

Thus, aside from a very basic disc-shaped saucer, very poorly articulated version in the late noughties and an aborted Titaniums version, it had been left up to the Third Parties to produce their usual plethora of versions of the same character, each with their own unique interpretation of the iconic G1 design of both vehicle and robot mode.

Then came the Thrilling 30 line, and a whole new version of Cosmos was released... Or was it? I certainly never saw it in shops, and couldn't easily find it online at a reasonable price. Thankfully, Hasbro deemed it worthy of a more widespread rerelease for Titans Return (since it had already been repainted as Marvel Comics' wheelformer spy, Scrounge, to partner with the Technobots). Needless to say, I snapped him up pretty sharpish... but was he worth the frustrating wait?

Titans Return Overlord & Dreadnaut

While I felt a little deprived over the likes of Fortress Maximus never appearing in UK toy shops (since he actually appeared in the Marvel comics, albeit at the same dubiously variable scale as he seems to have used in the cartoon), I wasn't even aware of the likes of Overlord until I became an adult collector, because I'd stopped collecting by the time he was released over here... and, these days, the lustre of most G1 toys has faded somewhat.

Overlord, being one of the 'playset' TransFormers toys, may yet have had a place in my collection, alongside my original G1 Metroplex, Scorponok and (2015's Platinum Edition) Trypticon as well, because he's unique in that he's a triple-changing dual-Powermaster with a fairly decent, quite sprawling base mode, but the lack of articulation in the robot mode is more of a sticking point for me these days than it would have been only a few years back.

But then Hasbro decided to update him for Titans Return, and a widespread release was more-or-less guaranteed (the 'less' part being dependency on Hasbro's increasingly dodgy distribution). As usual, I umm-ed and ahh-ed about whether or not to get him, more or less deciding against based on a couple of YouTube video reviews... but then caved in and forked out £60 for him at TFNation 2017.

So, was he worth it..?

Titans Return Wolfwire Weirdwolf & Monxo

It could be suggested that I have a strange fascination with Weirdwolf. Perhaps because of the BotCon 2007 repaint of Cybertron Snarl/Galaxy Force Fang Wolf (which I only bought because it was half of a 2-part set with that year's Alpha Trion) but, while the robotic beasts that were the 1987 Decepticon HeadMasters didn't appeal to me, and the third party remakes of Skullcruncher and Mindwipe did nothing to endear me to the incongruous concept, Quadruple-U seemed kinda cute and turned out to be a pretty good update of the old HeadMaster concept which, at the time, was not being explored by Hasbro or Takara Tomy.

But then Titans Return happened and, conspicuously, Hasbro's first order of business seemed to be releasing official products of all the characters the third parties had tackled, including the confused lupine Decepticon, sadly coinciding with a somewhat ridiculous price hike for Deluxes. Granted, they were still far cheaper than the third part efforts, but they were also smaller and vastly less complicated models.

No surprise, then, that after several months of not buying Titans Return Wolfwire (his original name now unavailable, it seems) on any of the few occasions I happened to visit my local branch of The Entertainer, I finally caved in an order him online (at a much lower cost) when he was no longer on their shelves.

Titans Return Scourge & Fracas

G1 Scourge got a bit of a raw deal. As one of the new characters, introduced in the 1986 animated movie as one of Unicron's minions, rebuilt from one of the casualties of the Decepticons' raid on Autobot City, he represented the start of a very new direction in the toyline. No longer would there be realistic vehicle modes - the whole line was going completely Sci-Fi... and adopting all kinds of shortcuts in the process. Scourge, in particular, was one of the earliest - if not the earliest - shellformer, with most of his space-hovercraft vehicle mode ending up as squared-off 'wings' on his back after a minimal transformation.

Since then, Scourge toys have been few and far between and, aside from the Generations remake as a flying wing and the BotCon adaptation of Noisemaze, even his comic book character models tended to stick to the same bizarre look - moreover, the Third Party models have gone for a screen-accurate Masterpiece vibe rather than actually creating an alternate mode that looks like a spacecraft.

So, with the Generations figure already in my collection, I was all set to ignore the Titans Return version until I remembered that I have a newer Cyclonus and (Grand) Galvatron thanks to Unite Warriors, thus allowing my somewhat random OCD to kick in and demand I complete the set with a new Scourge...But is Hasbro's latest take on the leader of the Sweeps worth picking up?

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2017/Generations Lifeline

(Femme-Bot Friday #41)

With Fun Publications' loss of the TransFormers Collectors' Club license at the end of 2016, the fifth and final year of their Subscription Service hit the kinds of delays that members hadn't seen since the first couple of years, back in 2005-6. This didn't really bother me a great deal, as there was only one figure that interested me in the whole set - the almost inevitable green repaint of Generations/Legends Arcee as a Paradron medic, seen briefly in the G1 cartoon - so I hadn't subscribed. It's often a huge risk to not grab a Club exclusive at the earliest opportunity as their prices tend to skyrocket very quickly... but, given the cost of year five of the Subscription Service, it was a gamble I was willing to take.

Of course, the other gamble is, will the figure actually be worth even the first, very slightly inflated secondary market price?

Combiner Wars Sky Lynx

Back in the days of Generation 1, Sky Lynx was yet another of those toys that Hasbro 'appropriated' into the TransFormers line and, like Omega Supreme and Shockwave, he never appeared in the UK (in retrospect, it's rather suprising we got Jetfire!). In fact, Sky Lynx was one of the very strange few who never had an official Japanese release until appearing in the Encore line back in 2008... and he's still never had an official UK release.

I'd been debating whether or not to try to track down the Encore figure - it's still fairly easily available almost ten years after it appeared, albeit pretty expensive on the secondary market - when, all of a sudden, a year or so ago, Hasbro released images of a whole new Sky Lynx for the Combiner Wars line - a Voyager class figure that would become the torso of a wholly original gestalt named Sky Reign. It met with a fairly mixed reception, so I wasn't entirely sure I wanted it after all... and only really made up my mind when I realised that my purchase of the Deluxe class Groove left me with three 'spare' limb-bots (two from the Collectors' Club's Subscription Service year 4), giving me the opportunity to level the playing field between Autobot and Decepticon gestalts with a slightly customised Sky Reign.

But is this new Sky Lynx sufficiently glorious as a homage to be worthwhile in and of himself..?

Titans Return Hot Rod & Firedrive

It should come as no surprise that, when the Classics line came along in 2006, certain characters from TransFormers: The Movie - set in 2005/6 - featured quite prominently. Hot Rod - rebranded as Rodimus, no doubt for complex legal reasons - was one of the very first releases, and the mold was reused about a billion times over the years, twice by the Collectors' Club, and most recently appearing in a Platinum Edition boxed set. It was a decent mold for the time, but certainly not one of the best... and plenty of people have been wanting a proper Deluxe class update of G1 Hot Rod for a good few years, given that we have two Masterpiece versions as well as interpretations for other continuities (though surprisingly not TF Prime where, arguably, Smokescreen took his role).

Cut to Titans Return, where Hasbro is basically reliving their glory days once again by rebooting the entire Classics line, and remaking quite a few characters who received adequate toys ten years ago, but are now considered ripe for updating into the latest part of the continuing Generations line... and, finally, we have a Hot Rod named Hot Rod rather than some variation of Rodimus...

TransFormers Legends (Titans Return) LG25 Blurr

Back in the 80s, the G1 Blurr toy was an easy pass for me: a large, poorly proportioned mess of a robot that transformed into a sci-fi doorstop of a hover car and, in the thirty-plus years since the character's introduction in the animated movie, only one Blurr toy - the TransFormers Animated version - seemed worth picking up thanks to its improved design and articulation.

...And then Titans Return happened, and Blurr's G1 wedge-shaped alternate mode returned, with massive improvements both to the vehicle mode and the robot mode... albeit with the slightly incongruous Titan Master aspect tacked on. Blurr had been one of the G1 Autobot TargetMasters, along with Hot Rod and Kup, so reinventing him as a HeadMaster initially seemed like a poor choice. That, coupled with Hasbro's hideous colourscheme (seemingly based on the G1 toy, but with less colour variety) made him an easy pass all over again.

But then photos of the Takara Tomy version, from their Legends line (continuing from their 30th Anniversary releases), surfaced, and suddenly the HeadMaster aspect didn't seem so bad after all... And it's about time I posted about something properly new... Though, unlike the other TF Legends figures I've picked up, I won't bother writing about the packaging...

Robots in Disguise (2015) Windblade

(Femme-Bot Friday #40)

It comes to something when a toyline includes a homage to a toy/character that only came out one year ago... But then, Windblade isn't just another toy, she's quite a significant entry into TransFormers mythology for several reasons. First and foremost, she was the inaugural Fan-Built Bot, created from a series of online polls (an exercise which seems to have clued Hasbro in to the idea that TransFormers fans have been clamouring for more Femme-Bots, where the myriad Third Party releases did not). Secondly, she was introduced with a 4-part miniseries of comics from IDW, - written by Mairghread Scott and illustrated by Sarah Stone - in which her pivotal role in the upcoming stories (and, by extension, the toyline) was introduced.

I'm still not intending to collect the new Robots in Disguise range - I'm not a great fan of the angular aesthetic, most of the toys seem terribly simplistic and I've read reports of light and flimsy construction on some toys - but there are a few which are just no-brainers... or, at least, which should be...

Generations (30th Anniversary) Doubledealer

As far as I can recall (and without popping back to my parents' house to raid the cupboard in which most of my G1 toys remain to this day) I only ever bought two Powermasters: Optimus Prime and Doubledealer. The former was a no-brainer (albeit quite disappointing in-hand, as it turned out) simply because it was the latest incarnation of Optimus Prime (and was accompanied, in the Marvel comics of the day, by a very strange story). The latter was rather more unusual, in that it was a Dual-Powermaster Triple-Changer with an Autobot mode and a Decepticon mode.

Sure, it wasn't unprecedented - Punch/Counterpunch came out the year before - but this was the first time a faction-switching Triple-Changer made it over to this sceptred isle. The idea of an effectively neutral character, willing to work for either side, tickled me, as did the fact that the humanoid robot was an Autobot and the bird-like robot was a Decepticon, with the vehicle mode bearing no visible insignia. This 'Thrilling 30' update, based on the Blitzwing mold, plays things a little differently...

Generations Laserbeak

Every so often, Hasbro seems to have read my mind in a particularly bizarre and sadly incomplete way. I noted when I wrote about Tokyo Toy Show 2010 Dreadwing & Smokescreen that the Mindwipe/Strafe/Dreadwing mold was basically suitable for a custom movie Soundwave, had he not been turned into a car. Since Smokescreen could then have doubled for a Cobalt Sentry Garboil analogue, when images of Hasbro's own Laserbeak repaint (released only in the Asian markets initially) surfaced, the only surprise was how good it actually looked.

Generations (30th Anniversary) Sky-Byte

I have to confess that, never having seen more than a couple of episodes of the early 2000s 'Robots In Disguise' TV show (a friend bought a random DVD - titled "Sideburn's Obsession", after one of the episodes included on the disc - in a charity shop) Sky-Byte is a bit of a random whim purchase, even by my standards. Not only that, but the original mold was used as a Maximal in Beast Wars Transmetals 2, then transferred into Robots In Disguise/Car Robots along with a whole host of pan-generational repaints on the Decepticon/Predacon side. As far as I can tell, while the Autobots were mostly new molds, the Decepticons/Predacons had only one - Megatron/Galvatron.

The original Sky-Byte was one of the weirder-looking molds, with a very awkward and asymmetrical robot mode and an oddly posed cybernetic beast mode. Coming 15 years after the original Transmetals 2 figure, what improvements can the Generations version bring?

Generations Skullgrin

Generation 1's Pretenders were an interesting idea, executed poorly because (a) it hadn't been especially well thought out in terms of how it would fit in with the rest of the line (particularly in terms of scale) and (b) both the robots and shells had to be very simplistic to make the Pretender gimmick work. I ended up getting only two - the Autobot asteroid miner Landmine and the vampiric Decepticon predator Bomb-Burst. It was a system that worked great in the comics, but I was never sure if they were supposed to be giants, like the other Cybertronians, or human-sized, as some of the Pretender shells seemed to imply (possibly making them the immediate ancestors of the smaller, more energon-efficient Maximals and Predacons?). The concept died out mercifully fast, but suddenly popped back into the collective fan consciousness when an apparently human character in Revenge of the Fallen turned out to be - somewhat incongruously - a human-sized Pretender.

Even so, when the Revenge of the Fallen offshoot toyline, N.E.S.T. Global Alliance, released its interpretation of Bludgeon, I doubt that many suspected any other G1 Pretenders would be reimagined within the contemporary toyline. Another was soon revealed, bizarrely, on the instruction sheet for Generations Darkmount/Straxus, which somehow showed Skullgrin's head instead.