Robots in Disguise Dreadwind & Smokejumper

While overlapping continuities are positively de rigueur now that Hasbro has separated the TransFormers brand into age groups and whole new branches of the toyline open up whenever a movie is released, it was fairly unusual about ten years ago. Nevertheless, around the time Robots in Disguise/Car Robots was phased out in favour of Armada, Hasbro decided to re-release a 1994 Generation 2 set as a swan song for RiD.

This is one of those odd situations where I don't remember exactly how/where I came to buy this... but I'm going to have to assume I picked it up loose because, according to my research, there's something not quite right about the set.

Robots in Disguise Ultra Magnus

It's a very sad fact that, outside of Robots in Disguise, every version of Ultra Magnus has been nothing more than Optimus Prime painted white. OK, fine, G1 set the precedent on that one, but at least it had the super robot armour as standard... most other versions have been literally just a white version of Prime. There was one completely different iteration of Ultra Magnus in the extended Armada line, but he was just a repaint of Overload and, like Overload, attached to Armada's Supermode Prime, rather than really being a proper robot in his own right.

That's one of the reasons I like the RiD version so much: it's a completely different mold from RiD Prime, it's a car-carrier... and the full robot mode is a combination of the cab and the trailer - a far better homage to G1 than any other (official) Ultra Magnus so far...

Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime

It's strange to think that the entire Robots in Disguise line almost completely passed me by when it was in the shops - in fact, the first I saw of any of it was in Computer Exchange in Harrow, not in a toyshop - and that I didn't actually buy any of the toys until the line had pretty much ended. Like Megatron and Galvatron, I picked up RiD Optimus Prime in Forbidden Planet (probably paying a silly premium), without ever having seen the toys in a traditional toy shop. To this day, I don't know if this is an official UK version or a US import... all I know is that it's not the Japanese version.