Hasbro Fan First Tuesday - April 2022 - Post-Mortem

While I'd received some sort of notification about the 'Fan First Tuesday' event this month, I'd honestly forgotten all about it till I saw a reminder (possibly on Reddit) on the 12th. After quickly calculating what the BST equivalent of 11 AM ET would be, I dutifully tuned in with low expectations...

...And was not especially impressed. So unimpressed, in fact, that I've put off writing about it at all for a little over two weeks. I considered not bothering... but only after I'd started writing something, and then wasn't inclined to simply delete the work in progress.

Didn't stop me finding all kinds of ways to distract myself as I finally completed this post today, though.

So... Here we go...

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2017/Combiner Wars Shattered Glass Starscream

It was quite rare for the TransFormers Collectors' club to release exactly the same character twice, in two different molds (Kreo figures not included). The only other one I can think of was Toxitron, who appeared in TransFormers Animated form at BotCon 2011, then in Combiner Wars form in the final set of the Club's Subscription Service in 2017. Technically, though, even they are from different continuities... While this is simply a Combiner Wars version of Shattered Glass Starscream... and, unless Shattered Glass has its own multiverse (which, admittedly, is not inconceivable) this thing is a development of the BotCon version rather than a whole new character.

I never picked up the original Shattered Glass Starscream, since I already have a couple of iterations of the Galaxy Force Starscream mold, and I didn't really think the G1 Jetfire homage paint job suited it that well. This one had the advantage of being both smaller and - at the time - substantially cheaper, since the BotCon figure rarely appears outside of the BotCon 2008 boxed set.

Of course, this being a Combiner Wars mold, it was intended as part of one of the Club's swan-song gestalts but, by this point, it seems as though the Club didn't really care: Starscream was never officially assigned to any particular combiner beyond the vague suggestion that he could be use to create something called "Modulus", which was described as being formed with two other BotCon figures (Medix and Ratchet from the 2016 show's customisation class) and two mainline Combiner Wars figures (Protectobot Rook and Technobot leader Scattershot). Personally, I've had him as part of a custom Sky Reign along with other, similarly teamless 'bots.

Hasbro Pulse/Shattered Glass: OK, I Honestly Didn't See THAT Coming...

The final figure in the Hasbro Pulse Shattered Glass 'Capsule Programme' has been revealed (by leaked images) as Jetfire... This presents two genuine surprises.

Neither should be surprises, all things considered, but I have to admit that I didn't see either coming and, even if I'd expected the first, the second would still have been unexpected.

The first surprise, then, was that they'd repainted a Commander class figure. The reason it was a surprise is that these figure are pretty huge, and the idea that they'd turn one into what's ostensibly a limited edition figure seems like more of a risk than I'd have thought Hasbro would be comfortable with. The reason it shouldn't have been a surprise is that Hasbro tends not to make a mold if they're not planning on releasing at least one repaint, and there aren't exactly abundant options with Jetfire. The Classics Jetfire mold may only have been repainted as the random and nondescript Universe Treadbolt by Hasbro, but it was also used by Takara Tomy to create Dark Skyfire, and for BotCon Dreadwind. 

The second surprise is the colourscheme because, where SG Starscream took on the colourscheme of G1 Jetfire, SG Jetfire has just been giving a bland, mostly black paint job with a few highlights in silver/gunmetal, purple and green. Essentially a colourscheme somewhere between Siege Skywarp and Hotlink, but with a lot more black. This was a surprise because a lot of fans - myself included - would have predicted a Jetfire in Starscream's colourscheme. Shattered Glass wasn't all straight colour-swaps between analogous characters on either side, but it would have made sense in this case. Of course, the reason it shouldn't have been surprise was that it's basically a rip-off of the Takara Tomy Dark Skyfire figure, which had been officially repurposed as SG Jetfire in BotCon 2012's follow-up story, Invasion.

Still, assuming a Commader class figure was always on the cards, a repaint of Rodimus Prime would have been more logical... if a little predictable... making for a bit of a no-win situation for Hasbro, in my opinion. Do the predictable thing and people are disappointed by the lack of originality. Do the unexpected and people are disappointed that it's not unexpected enough.

So... Touché, Hasbro - you've done something somewhat unexpected... I hope you're proud of yourselves for defying my predictions.

...But your whole take on Shattered Glass in its entirety is still a bit rubbish, and you'd have been far better off creating figures of characters not featured in the BotCon comic book... Or featured in the comic book but not appearing as BotCon exclusive toys. Straight remakes - most of which are fundamentally inferior to the originals - are both disappointing and dull and, given the premium prices you've been charging due to their exclusivity (be it real or just perceived), just not worth the money.

Here's hoping your next 'Capsule Progamme' does something a little better.

Hasbro Pulse/Shattered Glass: I Called It! #1

Just announced today is Hasbro's version of Shattered Glass Goldbug... and, while it follows the pattern by 'borrowing' heavily from the predominantly black paint job of the BotCon figure, they at least chose not to stoop to making him yet another reuse of the Sideswipe mold on homage to the original being Exilion/Hot Shot.

Hasbro Pulse Fan First Friday - May 2021 - New Reveals & Opinions

It's very likely that the fact that I didn't post all this immediately after the half-hour event yesterday tells you all you really need to know about what I thought of the newly revealed merchandise. I know it wasn't intended to be the big, sprawling presentation that the Fan Fest back in April was, but a quick glance at the chat during the show proved that I wasn't alone in expecting a little more from it.

This event opened with a countdown in front of a TransFormers The (animated) Movie poster highlighting this as the 35th Anniversary of the animated movie. Funny thing - and I've thought this occasionally while watching Chris McFeely's 'Basics' videos on YouTube - is that they referred to it as The TransFormers The Movie throughout... I've always subconsciously dropped the 'The' at the start, even though it was part of the G1 branding: the toyline was called 'The TransFormers' not 'TransFormers'... But I digress...

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.

Shattered Expectations

Following the Fan Fest event, earlier this month, and its revelation of Shattered Glass Blurr - the first in a special set of five Shattered Glass-themed repaints, each to be accompanied by one issue of an IDW limited series comic book - I was disappointed on a couple of levels.

First and foremost, they were repainting the new Studio Series mold... which, to me, looks like crap. Yes, the Shattered Glass version has a new, unique head sculpt... but it's based on the one BotCon/Fun Publications put together over ten years ago.

Which leads neatly into the second level of disappointment, in that it's not only a rip-off of the BotCon Shattered Glass concept, but it's a rip-off of the BotCon SG Blurr head sculpt and paint job, lightning bolts and all.

I could understand Hasbro picking up the Shattered Glass continuity, as it allows them to do something vaguely interesting with some existing molds... but to simply re-make a figure that already exists, using that character's latest mold is lazy. I'd wager that anyone interested in the Shattered Glass concept already has the BotCon 2008 boxed set, and probably at least some of the additional figures. Hell, even I have a handful of them - Megatron from the 2008 event, Galvatron from the 2011 event, Turbo Tracks from the 2012 event and the Subscription Service 5.0/Combiner Wars Starscream from 2017 (did have Rodimus and Jazz as well, but sold them last year) - but most of the figures, in terms of both the choice of character and their premium paint jobs, didn't interest me a great deal... And Hasbro's first offering in their Pulse-exclusive 'Collection' didn't either.

Today, they announced the second figure in the set: Shattered Glass Megatron... and I really don't know what to make of it. Let's break it down:

Hasbro Pulse Fan Fest - April 2021 - New Reveals & Opinions

OK, so clearly there's a bit more to be said about War for Cybertron... I guess it's a positive that the line seemingly is not getting prematurely canned like Power of the Primes...

 

While there wasn't anything TransFormers to report after the pre-show 'Party' last night (unless you count a short gig by The Cybertronic Spree), the Fan Fest proper had a whole - quite substantial (half-hour/forty minute) - section devoted to the brand. Interestingly, they acknowledged that a lot of the stuff they were showing off had already been 'leaked', but that's not to suggest they had nothing new...

This being the first time I've had access to one of these events - the last one, I think, was region-locked - I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I'd actually wondered whether it would even be worth my tuning in, considering everything would be online within minutes of the show anyway... but, much like my spur-of-the-moment decision to take advantage of the evening entertainment at the debut TFNation, I figured it'd be daft to skip it, especially considering I signed up for Pulse Premium, and there were suggestions of exclusives available to preorder for members only.

 

I watched the event live but, obviously, this is now a little delayed due to dinner... and watching a movie over dinner... So, let's take a brief look at what was revealed... no pictures, but they're all now live on Hasbro Pulse and will probably be everywhere very shortly:

 

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...

Power of the Primes Evolution Rodimus Unicronus

As previously mentioned, my original intention with the scant Leader class selection from Power of the Primes was to skip Rodimus Prime entirely, instead picking up his blatant Shattered Glass homage repaint, Rodimus Unicronus. Hasbro had come up with a cover story, to the effect that this version of Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime was under the sway of Unicron, via the Matrix of Chaos, but there are too many Shattered Glass references to ignore.

The 'good guy' version of this mold turned out to be far better than I'd expected, so let's take a look at his 'bad guy' repaint, and see if he follows the pattern whereby black repaints of any toy are better than the originals.

Combiner Wars (Custom) Sky Reign

While there is an official team - and configuration thereof - for Combiner Wars Sky Reign, I feel that all the components, even in the Unite Warriors version, turned out very lacklustre. I'd been toying with the idea of picking up CW Wheeljack and sprucing him up with Reprolabels simply because he's was the only CW Stunticon mold reuse that I don't have a version of (well, him and Drag Strip)... but the Breakdown mold he came from wasn't one of the better ones, so I ended up procrastinating.

Then, trawling through eBay one evening, I found the perfect solution, from Fun Publications' now-defunct Collectors' Club's final Subscription Service set. The package containing Toxitron and Counterpunch also contained the somewhat random choice of secret companion, Shattered Glass Starscream, based on the CW Aerialbot Skydive - with the head coming from the same mold's usage as UW Grand Galvatron component Ghost Starscream.

So, now complete, my Sky Reign looks a bit like this:

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

There have been times when the Collectors' Club have produced a figure of a character as yet unavailable in Hasbro's mass-produced output. They generally come in for some flak whenever they do, normally because no-one can understand why a particular figure hadn't been produced by Hasbro (such as Classics Thundercracker, who remained exclusive to 2007's BotCon set, Games of Deception, until 2008, when he appeared in Takara Tomy's Henkei! Henkei! line, and then 2011, when he finally appeared in the Generations line). The only times they tend to get away with it is when the character is in some way not an interpretation of the hallowed G1 original, such as their take on Jazz for 2008's Botcon set, Shattered Glass...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2012 (Timelines) Shattered Glass Turbo Tracks

(Femme-Bot Friday #28)

Because we all know this is actually Timelines Road Rage, right?

Road Rage is also a far more interesting character than Shattered Glass Tracks because, in robot mode, she's a mild-mannered diplomat while, in vehicle mode, she's a foul-mouthed speed freak, contemptuous of anything else on the road. Which must be awkward.

As is often the case, I've now written up a couple of variants of this mold without first dealing with either the original Classics Tracks or the slightly remolded Wheeljack version... so just to compound my heinous error, here's yet another Exclusive version of this Classics car...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2011 (Timelines) Shattered Glass Galvatron

Shattered Glass was a somewhat predictable idea, but executed surprisingly well... and Fun Publications certainly know how to milk a cash cow. Despite the focus of BotCon 2011 being the extended TF Animated story of The Stunti-Con Job, they saw fit to thrown in a couple of off-theme attendee exclusives. One was a bizarre repaint of the Classics Seeker mold as Action Master Thundercracker, while the other was an utterly glorious addition to the Shattered Glass line-up - Megatron resurrected, once again, as Galvatron!

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2013 (Timelines) Ultra Mammoth

OK, people, here's the main event of the TransFormers Collectors' Club Subscription Service year one, the model I've been most keenly awaiting. Despite being a straight repaint of a Beast Wars figure, it tickled my fancy in several ways. First and foremost, the name is awesome: not quite a pun, but clever-ish wordplay nonetheless, and that kind of thing always amuses me in the TransFormers line. Next, it's hardly the most common mold - its only official western release was as Nemesis Prime in the much maligned Universe line of random repaints almost ten years ago. The club did well in its selection for this reason alone. Finally, the colourscheme is inspired. OK, it's inspired by the G1 character this model is meant to represent, but the distribution of colours and the extent of the paint job, going by the publicity mock-ups alone, was excellent.

And I'm not the only one waxing lyrical about this model, David Willis - creator of Shortpacked! and other webcomics - created a 13-page fan-fic Comic in honour of the club's latest exclusive.

But after a full year of waiting since he was announced and all the hype, does Ultra Mammoth live up to all the expectations?

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2013 Members Incentive (Timelines) Depth Charge

(Members Incentive Monday #9)

I have developed a nasty habit with this blog of writing up repaints/remolds before the original iteration of any mold... I'd aimed to break that trend over the weekend with Terradive, but just couldn't seem to keep myself interested, knowing full well that he was just the preamble to this Beast Wars homage.

Little has been seen of Depth Charge so far in the 'Beast Wars: Shattered Glass' storyline currently running in the club magazine, but I was intrigued from the moment he was announced. Naturally, all the Beast Wars characters had pre-Beast Wars forms (as investigated by Botcon's 'Dawn of Futures Past' set and Club exclusive Airazor), but the story suggests this is set after Beast Wars, and possibly on a different planet... so what form could Depth Charge take after spending time as a large robotic ray?

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2009 Members Incentive (Timelines) Heatwave

(Members Incentive Monday #7)

I have to confess that, after a rather disappointing first few years of Members Incentive figures, Heatwave actually managed to be an exciting final component for the Club gestalt. Firstly, it would feature a whole new head sculpt to make the combined form - Nexus Prime/Maximus - a truly unique robot... Secondly, the Energon/Superlink Barricade mold was the only Energon/Superlink torso that I didn't already own in some form at that point.