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Rook was originally made available at BotCon Europe 2002 - an event I wasn't even aware had existed until a few years ago, since it preceded my return to TransFormers collecting by a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...

Combiner Wars Rook

OK, time to address the elephant in the room: While I'm sure we all wanted a Deluxe class Groove for the Protectobots (Takara Tomy certainly did - they created one as a new mold for their Unite Warriors boxed set), there is no way a motorcycle can adequately scale with a police car and an ambulance, let alone a helicopter, and transform into a limb of the same size as his team-mates. Whether or not that was Hasbro's reasoning, they've changed the character line-up one way or another for all of the gestalt teams so far, so it was no real surprise to find Groove relegated to Legends class as a supplemental part of the team - as Powerglide was to the Aerialbots and Blackjack to the Stunticons.

Of course, this left a space to be filled as one of Defensor's limbs... and the solution presented by Hasbro is another whole new character invented for Combiner Wars... Rook!