Human Alliance Mudflap & Chromia

And here we have yet another ancient and long-neglected figure from my collection, this one hailing from the Revenge of the Fallen portion of the short-lived but truly excellent Human Alliance toyline. It sometimes feels as though I'll never run out of toys from that film - not least because, naturally, Studio Series is now chucking out some of the... er... less well-represented characters - but, of those that came out around the time of the film, I thankfully have just two more Human Alliance toys to write about... And Mudflap is one of them.

Human Alliance was essentially as close to Masterpiece as affordable, play-oriented toys will likely ever get, and in some ways could be considered superior to Masterpiece due to their semi-realistic interiors. Kind of a Binaltech/Alternators-lite, and packaged with less creepy human figurines than Kiss Players.

Frankly, it's high time I got round to dealing with the last handful of HA figures in my collection, so let's start here!

Revenge of the Fallen Mudflap

Intended as comic relief - in a franchise that was overburdened with comic relief from its very first installment - the Twins, Skids and Mudflap, attracted a lot of scorn due to perceived racial stereotyping. Personally, I found it odd that they were seen that way, as their characterisation seemed to be taking aim at Hip Hop-obsessed white trash more than anything else. Maybe my impression - as a middle class, middle-aged white dude in the UK - is flawed, and I'm missing some critical element of their portrayal, but it felt to me like manufactured outrage for the sake of outrage, over a movie that was just poorly made from start to finish.

Meanwhile, it took me five years to get round to writing about the Deluxe class Skids, and he turned out to be a floppy mess of a figure, with a large amount of car shell wrapped around a comparatively small robot. It was a well-designed toy, certainly, but let down by the materials and the manufacturing.

...Which doesn't exactly bode well for his brother...

Galaxy Force Demolishor

Construction vehicles are nothing new to the TransFormers toyline - there's a grand tradition, particularly with the Decepticons, of these giant alien robots disguising themselves as machines involved in building. I guess it's a good cover for building all those weapons of mass destruction, but it does seem strange that the faction who are intent on destroying are the most likely ones to turn into machines used to create.

The Galaxy Force/Cybertron line featured a whole planet populated by giant robots, neither Autobot nor Decepticon, who lived to build... but there was one construction vehicle which was a Decepticon from the start...