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.

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...

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?

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.

Hunt for the Decepticons Highbrow

I'm not sure whether it's obvious from this blog yet, but I'm a huge fan of anything oddball in the TransFormers line. Be it the outlandish live-action movie designs (Demolishor, Rampage, and the RotF 'Wheelsnakes' are huge favourites of mine) or the bizarre animal choices from the Beast Wars lines, I always appreciate the effort that goes in to fitting a robot into an unusual disguise, particularly if the results are asymmetrical. Aeroplanes tend to draw the short straw when it comes to TransFormers, with many ending up as planes with boxy robot undercarriages that turn into robots with planes hanging off their back (Silverbolt - G1, Classics/Universe and Combiner Wars - Universe Darkwind and RotF Jetfire, I'm looking at you)... but every once in a while, TransFormers brings the world something truly special - an unusual plane that becomes an excellent robot with minimal wastage...

Hunt for the Decepticons Battle Ops Bumblebee

One thing that cannot fail to strike one about the TransFormers live action movie franchise is how focused it is on Bumblebee, and how he has become the 'Kid Appeal' character. Whereas it used to be that there were several iterations of Optimus Prime in just about every toyline (consider the many reuses of Armada's so-called 'Bendy Prime'), Bumblebee has used the lion's share of the plastic in the movie toy ranges.

The obvious question is "Do we really need another Bumblebee?" The first movie had about half a dozen Deluxe Class Bumblebees alone... Revenge of the Fallen has added several more into the mix. Then there's the two iterations of the so-called Ultimate Bumblebee, and the Human Alliance version (with another of those to come in the repackaged line). There's also the miscellaneous Fast Action Battler versions, the Legends versions, the Limited Edition repaints, the Gravity Bot, RPM, Beatmix Bumblebee... In 2007 alone, including Japan-only releases and fast-food tie-in 'toys', there were 24 interpretations of movie Bumblebee, so you could be forgiven for thinking all the Bumblebee bases have been covered by now...

But, according to Hasbro, you'd be wrong... Because, in the Hunt for the Decepticons part of the yellow-packaged, post RotF, 'TransFormers'-branded toyline, they have given us Battle Ops Bumblebee: a slightly shorter, yet more proportionally accurate, lighter-on-the-electronics, more ultimate than Ultimate figure.

Hunt for the Decepticons Starscream

At long last, movie Starscream gets the figure he deserves... and what an amazing piece of engineering it is. It's not without flaws, but the level of detail in this model is excellent. The design for Starscream in the movies has always been contentious, considering the iconic nature of the Generation 1 Seekers and, while even the most recent comics series' have strived to keep some elements common to the 80's toys and cartoons, the live action movies have taken the view that these are alien robots, so they shouldn't have to look too human.

Personally, I enjoy this and really like all the outlandish appearances of the robots (mainly the Decepticons - the Autobots, by and large, are all humanoid), and was only disappointed by Megatron. Seeing Starscream in action, particularly in the dogfight towards the end of the first movie, I thought they'd created the ideal form for the Decepticons' air commander.

Hunt for the Decepticons Payload

AKA Revenge of the Fallen Generation 2 Long Haul.

There are a couple of reasons I wasn't interested in picking up RotF Long Haul, not least the difficulty I would have had in trying, since he's not now getting a UK release. The main reason, I guess, is the very bland colour scheme. Sure, it's traditional Constructicon Green... but that's pretty much all it is. The few painted details - a touch of metallic paint here, a reference to vehicle mode detail there - don't break up the sea of green at all. Payload, on the other hand, is molded in black and yellow in almost equal proportions and so makes a functional G2-referencing RotF Long Haul.

This toy isn't even part of the RotF line - it's part of the new, yellow-packaged, general purpose, TransFormers-branded line which will cover pretty much all the new releases... at least until the third movie comes along.