Galaxy Force (Toy's Dream Project) Fang Wolf Black Version

I mentioned in my write-up to Cybertron Snarl that the figure had been an easy pass - the toy didn't look that great, not least due to a bizarre choice of colourscheme. Even the Takara version looked a bit crap, so the one I bought myself was for the purpose of a custom repaint, and then a friend bought me another for my birthday. However, when the Toy's Dream Project repaint was announced, that caught my attention because the mold itself isn't bad.

Like the TDP Soundblaster and the more sober official repaint Dark Ligerjack, and as the name 'Black Version' would suggest, it's a darker repaint... though mostly grey rather than actually black. I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for a 'black' repaint, but is a darker colourscheme enough to properly demonstrate this mold's merits?

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?

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2010 (Timelines) Sky-Byte

With BotCon tackling Generation 2 for BotCon 2010, Sky-Byte seemed like a rather odd choice for inclusion in the boxed set. G2 had been the short-lived first reboot of the TransFormers brand in the early 1990s, mixing crappy new molds loaded with simplistic gimmicks with frequently eye-searing repaints applied to almost everything from the earliest, Diaclone-derived waves of G1 onewards. Sky-Byte, meanwhile, was a Predacon introduced in the 2001 Car Robots/Robots in Disguise toylines, who was a repaint of a TransMetals 2 Maximal named Cybershark.

He was also a uniquely odd beastformer, in that his shark mode was effectively in a fixed curve, 'leaping out of the water' pose, and his robot mode was one of the most extraordinarily asymmetrical TransFormers toys I'd ever seen. I'm normally a fan of asymmetry, but something about the original toy never appealed to me, though I did end up buying the Thrilling 30 version, back in 2014.

But, back to BotCon 2010 and the Generation 2: Redux set. The inclusion of Sharkticons certainly fits the G1 reboot vibe, but I'm guessing that one of the writers of the BotCon comic must have been a fan of Sky-Byte, and saw an opportunity for an exclusive version of the character using the same mold, but this time with a more extravagant paint job along with a new and unique head sculpt. The question is, does such a toy that originated in the Energon line have what it takes to represent such a bonkers character? Let's have a look...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2010 (Timelines) Sharkticon: Air Shark

The Sharkticon that turned up in the Energon toyline certainly wasn't a traditional Sharkticon. Rather, it was a Decepticon, named Sharkticon, who happened to transform into a spacecraft that resembled a shark. Anecdotally, the craft was intended to resemble the Nemesis, the Decepticons' ship from G1... though it looks nothing like the recent Titan class toy. Just to add to the confusion, the mold was repainted in Takara Tomy's TransFormers United toyline in 2012, to be the Axalon, the Maximals' ship from Beast Wars.

Before that, however, the Collectors' Club repainted him for BotCon... as a G1 Sharkticon. Or, as it turned out, three Sharkticons, in a three-pack of toys identical but for the text on their respective bio cards: Air Shark, Land Shark and Sea Shark.

I knew I'd bought this figure, along with Sky-Byte, at an event... but couldn't remember for the life of me which event it was, and ended up having to search one of my old blogs to identify that it was AutoAssembly 2010, so this fellow is long overdue for a write-up. Let's get on with it, shall we?

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2013 (Timelines) Thundercracker

One interesting byproduct of my acquisition of some BotCon boxed sets is that, once in a while, they introduced me to molds I'd not experienced from the main Hasbro toylines. One such example was Revenge of the Fallen Dirge, in the retooled and repainted form of Skywarp in the Machine Wars: Termination set from BotCon 2013.

While the figure from the extended movie universe didn't appeal - its interpretation of the 'Conehead' style looked pretty ugly to me - FunPub's idea of a Machine Wars Skywarp was very well executed, and showed that the mold itself was actually great... and, as a result, I decided to pick up the Thundercracker repaint. He was originally made available with yet another repaint of the Classics Mirage mold which FunPub had already used for the BotCon 2007 hologram figure - this time with a colourscheme taken from the original Machine Wars toy. Having no interest in that, I ended up buying Thundercracker separately, on the secondary market.

So, let's see how this version compares to the toy from the boxed set...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2007 (Timelines) Alpha Trion

Galaxy Force Vector Prime was one of those TransFormers toys that, even for its era, had a simplistic transformation, but which transcended this shortcoming through the sheer detail and the extravagant intricacy of its sculpting. The fact that he was an 'ancient Cybertronian' meant that he was effectively an alternate universe Alpha Trion analogue from the outset, so it seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, he would be repainted as G1 Alpha Trion.

What is perhaps a little strange is that BotCon got there first, releasing Alpha Trion as an accompanying figure to their Games of Deception boxed set from BotCon 2007, despite the character not actually featuring in the included comic...

...Because the whole thing was part of the Collectors' Club's own game of deception: the reveal of Alpha Trion was held over for their ongoing multiversal Timelines story in the bimonthly magazine... and was (spoiler warning!) one of the first Shattered Glass characters introduced! Of course, since then, Hasbro has release Alpha Trion toys with almost monotonous regularity, and in a variety of forms.

So, let's take a look at this primary repaint, and see how well it works as this deceptively familiar character...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2012 (Timelines) Gigatron

Despite hailing from the end of Generation 1, Overlord is not a character I'd been particularly aware of until comparatively recently, since I'd 'grown out' of collecting TransFormers by the time he arrived in the UK. My first experience of him in anything like his original form was via the Titans Return version, which was a little too cut-down in terms of functionality versus the G1 original. Improved articulation only gets you so far, after all.

However, I believe that my first experience of the character was via this strange BotCon exclusive repaint of the Revenge of the Fallen/N.E.S.T. Global Alliance Bludgeon, itself a reimagining of a G1 Pretender. While that character wasn't the best fit for a movie offshoot toyline, the figure was great... and I might have been in the market for some of the other repaints if they weren't all so hard to obtain, to one degree or another.

I missed out on this figure around the time of BotCon 2012, but eventually found one reasonably priced on eBay, and took the plunge, even though a tank-only version of the character is already missing half of what made the original so interesting. How does it compare, though..?

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2014 (Timelines) Rewind

Since I was not a follower of the IDW comics, this was a semi-reluctant purchase for me. I'd picked up the Club's Chromedome from the 2014 Subscription Service selection because the head sculpt was cool and it was made using the TF Prime Wheeljack mold, which had been one of my favourites from that toyline.

But, in the back of my mind, I was dimly aware that an IDW-style Chromedome was somehow incomplete without a corresponding Rewind and, since that was one of the other figures from the same year's selection, I tracked one down just to complete the couple.

I can't remember now whether I bought this before or after I picked up the TransFormers United Rumble & Frenzy set at TFNation in 2016, but one would surely have contributed to my purchase of the other. Thing being, on the surface and aside from the obvious physical similarities in their G1 selves, this is a particularly curious choice for one of Blaster's cassettes... Let's find out why.

War for Cybertron Trilogy Centurion Drone

Something I wasn't aware of when I wrote about Brunt was that his design had been based on the Centurion droids from the IDW comics, as a massive improvement on the crummy, seemingly Fantasy-influenced design of the green, dome-headed droids from the G1 cartoon. It seemed only logical, then, that a repaint should be in the works, since the figure seemed to be very much geared toward those who like to build armies of identical figures, like the Vehicons from TransFormers Prime.

Leave it to Hasbro, then, to re-release the figure only as part of a limited edition boxed set, along with a set of accessories missing from their individual toys. And, typically, it was long sold out by the time Hasbro Pulse reached the UK.

Since Brunt was - for my money - about the best toy in the entire Siege line, I was keen to get hold of the repaint, even if troop-building was out of the question (had been desirable to me in the first place, which it... wasn't... honest). The set was re-released by Takara Tomy earlier this year, but that set was equally hard to find. Thankfully, the repaint figure was the only part of the boxed set that I wanted, so I figured it was only a matter of time before someone put it up on eBay having bought the set for the accessories. Back over the summer, that's exactly what happened, so I snapped him up.

Wonder Festival 2007 Binaltech BT17 Black Convoy

I had to think long and hard about posting about this figure because, while Perfect Effect's Leonidas is undoubtedly the most disastrous purchase I've made in all my years of collecting, Binaltech Black Convoy comes a very close second. Made available at the winter 2007 Wonder Festival in Tokyo for the very reasonable price of ¥6,500 (a mere £42 in today's money), I acquired this on eBay at some point after the event. Once out of its packaging (a bubble pack, much like contemporary Alternators toys, rather than the traditional Binaltech box), it quickly became apparent that I'd bought a bit of a lemon: one of the joints connecting the bonnet to the car had been subject to a glue spillage and was immobile at an awkward midpoint, useful neither for robot mode nor vehicle mode.

At the time, it felt kind of like the universe's response to my avarice, considering I'd already acquired the Alternators versions of both Optimus and Nemesis Prime, and this figure basically went straight back into its packaging. There it remained until a few months ago, when it fell off the shelf it was on. Naturally, since the packaging was open, the figure slipped out on the way down, leading to one of the wing mirrors breaking off.

Since the box is clearly no longer a safe storage place, and I've been debating what to do about the wing mirror (temporarily on hold, having discovered that every tube of superglue I own has dried up), he's been sat on one of my main display shelves just to keep him reasonably safe and out of the way... Earlier in the week, I had to do a bit of hoovering, and so cleared the space in front of that cabinet, I figured I might as well pull him out and snap a few photos...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2008 (Timelines) Shattered Glass Megatron & Divebomb

Prompted by the recent reveal of a 'new' Shattered Glass Megatron, fanmoded out of the uninspiring Siege tank mold with a few added parts, I realised that my write-up of the original BotCon toy was long past overdue... I mean, it's from an event in 2008, for crying out loud, so it's more than ten years late.

The Shattered Glass concept certainly has its detractors but, for me, the idea of Evil Autobots and Heroic Decepticons was a pretty obvious, just not entirely novel take on the franchise. I've often said that the mottos of the two factions' respective leaders are open to wilful misinterpretation: "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" could be offering the opinion that certain beings should not be considered 'sentient' - a parallel to the real world slave trade of old - while "Peace through tyranny" could be a rueful observation that only a world rigidly controlled can be considered truly 'peaceful', which echoes Beast Machines. Ultimately, Megatron wants peace, while Optimus Prime wants to reserve freedom for those who are deemed worthy of it.

And yet 'Shattered Glass', the comic book accompanying the boxed set, was a largely quite pedestrian tale which continued the adventures of Cliffjumper from the Collectors' Club membership magazine's ongoing story. It also did more with the Attendee Souvenir toys - particularly Megatron and Rodimus, sold at the show as a bagged set - than it did with the boxed set characters, and spent two of its mere 24 pages providing an infodump of the alternate history of the Shattered Glass version of Cybertron. Making matters worse, the Club had released a three page 'preview' of the comic ahead of the event - as an April Fool prank - which ended up being better (not least in terms of giving its characters discernible personalities) than the full comic published for the event.

 

All of which is to say that, if Hasbro are being a bit lazy with the Shattered Glass concept, it's not without precedent, to a degree. It wasn't one of BotCon's crowning achievements, but some of the figures - most notably those not part of the boxed set - were pretty good. So let's take a look at their Heroic Decepticon leader, Megatron.

JustiToys WST Dino(ro)bots

Given that the current vogue in Knockoffs is to oversize everything, it seems strange to look back on what JustiToys decided to do in the mid-2000s, some years after the appearance of Takara's Smallest Transforming TransFormers line of blind-boxed, miniaturised G1 toys. STT ended somewhat prematurely, with only a handful of characters under its belt, but clearly captured the imagination of some of the Third Parties. None were as notable or as ambitious as JustiToys, who released a complete set of their own World's Smallest Dinobots over the course of three years.

But rather than being simplified versions of the original toys with even more limited articulation, these were downsized duplicates, scaled to fit alongside STT figures according to the G1 cartoon so that each of them towered over the official toys' robot modes.

I've never made any secret of my disdain for the very concept of the G1 Dinobots, but I was fascinated by the STT line, and these were just interesting enough to get my attention, not least because I'd never owned any of the original Dinobots myself, but had handled a couple of those owned by schoolfriends back in the day.

Since I don't want to prolong the agony of writing about more Dinobots, I'm going to deal with all five of them as a complete set, even though their releases were staggered and each was individually boxed.

Superlink Black Rodimus Convoy (TV Magazine Exclusive)

Proof positive, as if any were needed, that giving a toy a black repaint will entice me to acquire it, however terrible that toy may be, this is the disappointing and clumsy Energon Rodimus mold, with a swanky new colorscheme...

Seriously, sometimes I curse my compulsion for black repaints.

TransFormers (Movie) Strongarm (Target Exclusive)

Based on an Energon/Superlink Omnicon mold which I declined to purchase when it first emerged, something about movie Strongarm nevertheless tickled my fancy, because I can remember having to return the copy I originally bought to the Harrow branch of Woolworths for a replacement, because parts of it had become glued together during its construction. Whether this means it was a Woolies exclusive in the UK, I can't say...

I can also remember being somewhat interested in the BotCon 2005 'Descent into Evil' repaint as Outback (named Fallback in that set for legal reasons), but have never felt like paying the secondary market prices for it... It's possible I bought this to see if it would be worth trying to acquire Fallback, or it may simply have been a substitute.

Either way, this is the first - and, so far, only - iteration of this mold I own, so let's have a look...

3H BotCon (Europe) 2002 Universe Rook

It's interesting to note, in retropect, that my purchasing of older BotCon exclusives - those that preceded Fun Publications' acquisition of the license from Hasbro - has followed a similar trajectory to my earliest collecting. Tap-Out was the first 3H BotCon figure I picked up, and was a repaint of the first TransFormers toy I ever bought, Cliffjumper. It gets less precise after that because, while Glyph - based on Bumblebee - was the next BotCon repaint of a G1 Mini Autobot that I acquired, the second Autobot toy I bought was Windcharger... and it took me several years more to finally get round to buying this BotCon repaint of that mold.

Rook was originally made available at BotCon Europe 2002 - an event I wasn't even aware had existed until a few years ago, since it preceded my return to TransFormers collecting by a year or two - and is based on the slightly remodelled version, released as a novelty key fob in the early 2000s, but is otherwise just a repaint... and the only reason I really thought about picking him up is that Rook appeared in Fun Publications' TF Collectors' Club magazine a few times. He's not even that hard to track down, or expensive to buy, so it eventually became a bit of a no-brainer...

TransFormers (Movie) Hardtop (Target Exclusive)

There are times when I really don't understand Hasbro. Their strategy with the TransFormers brand generally seems pretty haphazard, their strategy with specific toylines often seems not to be fully thought through... but their strategy for store exclusives can be utterly baffling. The only consistent thing is their inconsistency.

When the first TransFormers live action movie came out, the new toys featured novel and impressive engineering, the likes of which had genuinely never been seen before. It may not have been perfectly accurate to the on-screen CGI, but the movie toylines were the first step in a quantum leap in toy engineering than continued over the next few years.

And yet, for a set of Target Exclusive, movie branded Scout class figures, Hasbro mined their back catalogue for repaints. The selection was, somehow, very Energon-centric despite the clear disparity in aesthetic. Then again, the other line selected was Cybertron, which generally wasn't much better. Hardtop - a repaint of the Cybertron figure of the same name - turned out to be the best match, at least as far as his vehicle mode was concerned, since it's not a million miles away from Landmine.

TransFormers Cloud Starscream

I don't know a great deal about TransFormers Cloud, not least because the toys - by and large - didn't interest me. Most were pretty dull repaints, with the occasional new head sculpt, but only two tickled my fancy: Hellwarp - a repaint of the Generations Sky-Byte mold in Skywarp colours - and this one, Starscream.

Neither were priority figures when they first appeared, but when the Bumblebee movie turned up, featuring a character named Blitzwing, who transformed into a jet coloured suspiciously like Starscream, the latter figure got bumped up the list since it occurred to me - thanks to my weird way of thinking - that he could function both as Cloud Starscream and a Generations version of Bumblebee movie Blitzwing (even though he never transformed into a tank, or gave any indication of being a triple-changer in his brief appearance).

Of course, I already own both Generations Blitzwing and Generations Doubledealer - the latter's head sculpt being reused here - so let's see what makes Cloud Starcream unique...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2009 (Timelines) Skyquake

There are a number of figures in my collection that I can look at and genuinely wonder what ever possessed me to buy them... and there are figures in my collection that are flawed in some small but critical way. Thankfully, either one are rare occurrences particularly since, on the rare occasion I shop in bricks-and-mortar toy shops, I can give any figure I want a quick once over in the box, to see if I can spot any obvious flaws.

I've not always had the best of luck with TransFormers Collectors' Club figures, and particularly BotCon figures bought via the Club shop after the event, but this figure - part of one of the souvenir sets from BotCon 2009 - would certainly fit into both categories were it not for the fact that he was packaged alongside Banzai-Tron, an excellent reimagining of a G1 Action Master using a bonkers Energon mold.

Wings of Honor didn't interest me a great deal, but it was nice to effectively get a bonus figure along with the one souvenir toy I actually wanted. Aside from these, the only figure from 2009's set that's even on my radar is Scourge, made using the Galaxy Force Noisemaze mold.

(And, yes, I know Elita-1 and Razorclaw were available at the 2009 show as well, but they were additions to Games of Deception and Dawn of Futures Past, respectively, not Wings of Honor)

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2006 (Timelines) Buzzsaw & Laserbeak

The pattern with me and TransFormers toys appears at times to be "the weirder, the better". The Beast Wars figures I picked up tended to be rather strange (Lio Convoy, Mach Kick, Longrack, Break, etc.) and I often appreciate a robot mode more the further it is from standard human proportions.

That said, the Superlink/Energon Shadowhawk/Divebomb mold really ticked my fancy because it managed to do both its avian beast mode and its robot mode in a convincing, innovative way, without wasting the bird's wings as the robot's backpack the way so many other avian TransFormers have.

BotCon 2006's Dawn of Futures Past boxed set was one of the things that got me into the idea of joining the Collectors' Club and possibly, eventually venturing across the pond to a BotCon. While the boxed set was awesome in and of itself, I did also covet a couple of the attendee-exclusive souvenir packs. Since I wrote about the boxed set and one of the attendee figures, Tigatron, almost nine years ago and I still haven't found an affordable Megatron/Waspinator (the former appearing every so often for something in excess of a thousand pounds, while the latter has recently turned up on eBay for over £500), I figure it's about time I wrote about the other bagged pair I currently own...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2008 (Timelines) Shattered Glass Rodimus

I really should have sorted this post out before getting to Power of the Primes Evolution Rodimus Unicronus, not least because Hasbro's homage to this BotCon add-on figure from the 2008 Shattered Glass set appeared a full decade later, and I believe I acquired this not too long after its BotCon debut.

Shattered Glass was FunPub's take on a 'mirror universe' in which the Autobots were the bad guys and the Decepticons were heroic. It's not an original idea (ripped off from Star Trek, if nothing else) and wasn't even especially well-explored in the BotCon comic or the related story in the Collectors' Club comic, just enough to spark the fan community's interest.

Rodimus, if I remember correctly, was presented as a sort of low-level gangster type - very stereotypical Italian-American mob-like - with a black, purple and silver paint job that was one of the oddities of the Shattered Glass concept, in that it wasn't taken from an equivalent traditional Decepticon, it was simply an adaptation of the long-standard 'Nemesis' palette. But let's get into the analysis properly...