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?

Hybrid Style THS-02 Convoy

This probably should have been posted a little closer to the 40th Anniversary date, or at least to my write-up of Earthrise Optimus Prime - the most recent G1-style Prime toy in my collection to be packaged with a trailer... Then again, I should probably have got to this oddity - and its two mass-released contemporaries - far sooner than I have, since I bought it eighteen years ago. 

Hybrid Style was a very short-lived, utterly Convoy-centric line which aimed to be 'Miniature Masterpiece', but ultimately failed to find much favour among fans. Only two molds were created - a remake of Galaxy Convoy (because Galaxy Force was in full swing at the time) and this G1 version, because there always has to be a G1 version. Subsequent to this 'vanilla' version, two black repaints were released, one of which was only made available in China.

Given that I own G1 Optimus Prime, Takara's MP01 (and, later, the Hasbro version of MP10), it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I'd acquire the Hybrid Style version of the original Autobot leader... Though I confess that I had some reservations from the start, due to its small size and some rather tepid reviews online at the time.

Galaxy Force Backgild

There were very few Galaxy Force toys that I didn't bother buying - even fewer that I didn't eventually buy the Cybertron version of - but the underachieving Scout class half-track vehicle, Backpack (aka Scattorshot) was one of them. This original form was a nice idea, and even followed the G1/Diaclone pattern of being a robot with his vehicle mode's front end as his chest, but the toy was too small and its robot mode wasn't very well articulated.

But when the TV show called for three of the Autobots to get upgraded forms, he was one of the lucky few, becoming Backgild (or Cybertron Defence Scattorshot), a Voyager class toy which, while broadly in the same Military vein, was a huge improvement in just about every way.

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...

Superlink Shadowhawk Cosmo Type

If there's one thing that can be said in favour of Energon/Superlink, it's that it did things very differently from both Armada/Micron Legend, which it followed, and Cybertron/Galaxy Force, which it preceded, albeit with mixed success. A lot of the larger figures were slightly higher-tech looking, but still much the same level of intricacy as the former, while the smaller size classes included an imaginative range of robots and alternate modes, some of which ended up getting reused in the earliest movie toylines.

One of the oddities of the line was that Takara released a few variants that appeared even in the US version of the TV show, but weren't picked up by Hasbro for release in the Western markets. One such figure was the blue repaint of Shadowhawk/Divebomb, and the somewhat limited nature of its release put the so-called 'Cosmo Type' on my radar.

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.

Binaltech BT16 Skids

Here's another fine example of how I've made a mess of things by blogging about later iteration of a figure before the original... Skids was one of the final handful of Binaltech figures, but he came out only very slightly earlier than the last of the Binaltech Asterisk spin-offs, Broadblast, made from the same mold. Nevertheless, I seem to recall I acquired Broadblast much later than Skids, simply because I was following the main Binaltech line with more interest than Asterisk.

Skids was yet another G1 toy that I wasn't able to acquire back in the day, instead picking up the Toys'R'Us exclusive Commemorative Series re-release when it appeared almost 20 years later in 2004. While I was surprised that such a neglected G1 character was chosen to appear in the Binaltech line, the bigger surprise was the choice of vehicle...

Binaltech BT14 Wheeljack

If the choice of the contemporary Ford Mustang for Grimlock seemed strange, using that same bodytype for Binaltech Wheeljack made no sense whatsoever. Going by artwork available online, it seems as though the plan had originally been to make the second usage into Windcharger, but with Hasbro renaming Overdrive as Windcharger for the western market, Takara Tomy dropped the idea. Their Windcharger head sculpt ended up being used for the Alternators-only release Decepticharge and the Binaltech-only Arcee - both made using Overdrive's Honda S2000 mold - and the mismatch between the head sculpt and the way it attached to the body was very apparent.

Wheeljack certainly isn't an obvious candidate for a muscle car vehicle mode, having always been some form of racing car in other toylines, but let's give Takara Tomy the benefit of the doubt, and see what he looks like...

Binaltech BT13 Laserwave

Based on the number of iterations of it I own - five in total - the Mazda RX-8 would seem to the casual observer to be my favourite Binaltech mold. While the first version I wrote about - BT20 Argent Meister, one of the final Binaltech releases - turned out to be a bit of a floppy mess, the original Meister - BT08, released four years prior - was really only a let-down because it was too a pedestrian car to turn into Jazz... Though this was before the movies turned him into a Pontiac Solstice which, in many ways, wasn't much better.

For the third release of the mold (the second being the red 'Zoom-Zoom' repaint of BT08) Takara seemed to have given up on the idea of the Binaltech Decepticons having commandeered bodies intended for Autobots, because this guy is unmistakeably Shockwave.

Or rather, Laserwave...

Binaltech BT12 Overdrive

Binaltech initially seemed to be focussed on reasonably prominent members of the cast of the G1 cartoon who were based on Diaclone vehicles (albeit with some strange choices of Decepticon), but BT12 was a decidedly odd choice. G1 Overdrive - along with the other two Omnibots, Camshaft and Downshift - had come from Diaclone stock, but was released in the US and Japan as a mailaway figure, making use of the Robot Points printed on the toys' boxes. Perhaps due to their limited availability, the Omnibots never appeared in the G1 cartoon, or even in the original Marvel comics. They also lacked the usual Tech Specs, making each of them very much an unknown quantity in terms of personality, abilities and armaments.

Typically, while the Omnibots appeared in the pack-in advertising leaflets in UK toys, they weren't actually available in Europe. I wasn't overly fussed at the time, as none of the Omnibots looked particularly special, but I have to admit I'd be quite keen to get my hands on them now, as an adult collector.

But here we have the Binaltech version... which is surely a vast upgrade on the original, even though it's not a Ferrari, right?

Galaxy Force Dark Ligerjack

There's something a little bit sad about Galaxy Force Ligerjack. Obviously the character is one who, having been defeated in battle, obtained an upgraded form - supposedly through the power of the key, according to the cartoon, though that's not a feature reflected in the toys - but also the toy itself is only part of what it should have been. Designed from the start to combine with Galaxy Convoy or Master Megatron/Galvatron as a new arm, his original design included fingers and thumbs for this additional mode, and the key gimmicks were rather more extensive. Evidently too costly for the final toy, these additional features were removed, leaving gaping holes and rendering the arm form a bit useless.

My reason for not buying standard Ligerjack was mainly that I disliked his colourscheme... so, naturally, when the 'Dark' version was announced, it made it onto my want list immediately.

TransFormers Encore 07 Sky Lynx

Generation 1 was a strange old time... For all the Japanese/Asian market exclusives we get these days, Hasbro's approach to the franchise back in the day led to several TransFormers-branded toys that were not, at the time, released anywhere but the USA, and the final waves apparently only surfaced in Europe, long after I'd stopped collecting.

Toys like Shockwave, Omega Supreme and this one were licensed for US distribution from companies other than Takara, and who frequently already had some sort of domestic and non-US distribution in place with other companies (ToyCo's Astro Magnum came to the UK as Tandy/Radio Shack's Galactic Man, while Toybox's Mechbot-1 turned up in Grandstand's Converters line as Omegatron). Takara - quite rightly - declined to distribute toys made by others and, even in those days, Hasbro's distribution in the UK was less than optimal.

As far as I can tell, though, the toy that became Sky Lynx wasn't picked up for distribution by anyone else in any other territories, making him that much rarer and harder to find until Takara Tomy's 2008 Encore-branded re-release. This, naturally, has seen its price increased on the secondary market but, right at the start of the year, I found a second-hand Sky Lynx on eBay, priced at a little over half the current average, once shipping from Australia was taken into account

Naturally, I hit the 'Buy It Now' button as soon as I saw it - opportunities like this don't come along very often!

AM20 Arms Micron (TFPrime) Ironhide

Here's another of those strange situations that sometimes occur within the TransFormers brand. Illustrator Ken Christiansen, in his role as freelance designer/concept artist for Hasbro, submitted an awesome design for a TransFormers Prime version of Ironhide - channelling equal parts Generation 1 and movieverse. Hasbro, in their wisdom, took the design, changed the colour, and released it as Sergeant Kup instead, with Ironhide only appearing in the Cyberverse Commander size class.

...Only for Takara Tomy to later return to the originally intended colourscheme and release it within their Arms Micron spin on the TransFormers Prime toyline, along with a single Mini-Con weapon in place of the twin cannons from Christiansen's original design.

Really makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at both companies, doesn't it?

Binaltech BT10 Grimlock

If Binaltech's pre-movie 'lost years' timeline wasn't weird enough when it repurposed obvious Autobot shells into Decepticons - even if there was a valid in-story explanation - it jumped up a gear with its tenth entry. Early G1 Autobots getting new, contemporary, licensed vehicle modes to replace their old, unlicensed G1 vehicle modes was one thing... but the latest figure, Grimlock, had originally been a Dinobot, with a robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex as his alternate mode.

Yet, while turning the former Dinobot Commander into a car may have seemed strange, they at least chose a fitting vehicle - the latest iteration of one of the most well-known American muscle cars.

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...

Street Fighter II X TransFormers Hot Rodimus [Ken]

While I wasn't particularly interesting in obtaining a second iteration of the Titans Return Hot Rod mold, I pretty much had no choice, since that's the mold that was chosen to represent Ken in the Street Fighter II X TransFormers Deluxe class 2-pack.

Or, at least, that's what I thought at first. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Takara Tomy had used their slightly modified TF Legends Targetmaster Hot Rodimus mold. While I'd already acquired Hot Rod before Hot Rodimus even appeared, I did - briefly - entertain the possibility of picking up Takara Tomy's version as a replacement, as I have the Targetmaster version of G1 Hot Rod, and the translucent plastic flame pattern on his chest, along with the overall better colourscheme, were quite appealing.

In the end, I decided to get the Reprolabels set and make do with Hasbro's offering, so getting my hands on this mold via the Street Fighter II crossover set seemed like an unexpected bonus. He's packaged along with Arcee/Chun Li, and she turned out pretty cool... So, without further ado, let's see what Takara Tomy made of Ken.

Street Fighter II X TransFormers Arcee [Chun Li]

(Femme-Bot Friday #71)

So, having dealt with the Street Fighter II X TransFormers Convoy/Megatron set in one hit, I find myself having to split the second set to properly accommodate the main reason I was interested in either set: Generations/TF Legends Arcee repainted as Chun Li.

It's a bit puzzling that the two sets were made out of toys in different size classes (Arcee and Hot Rodimus being Deluxes), but I guess they felt either that both Ryu and Vega/M. Bison warranted partnering with the Voyager class leaders of the two Cybertronian factions, or at least that Ryu should be partnered with a robot of the same size class, even though he'd generally depicted as being much smaller than Vega/M. Bison in the games.

Still, is that any more strange than including a figure from an older, entirely unrelated line, when three out of the four crossover figures are from Titans Return?

Street Fighter II X TransFormers Convoy [Ryu] vs Megatron [Vega]

Considering I already have three iterations of the Generations Blitzwing mold, I decided I wouldn't bother with the Titans Return remake, either as Megatron (the form it was first released in) or as Blitzwing. Conversely, while the Optimus Prime version of the Octane mold was of no interest to me, I've ended up with not only TR Octane (in fact the first and only contemporary Octane in my collection!), but the Tokyo Toy Show 2017 Nemesis Prime/Black Convoy version as well.

All of which is to say that, of these two Street Fighter II crossover repaints, only one was entirely new to me... but the idea was certainly bonkers enough to get my attention, and I ordered both of the Street Fighter II X Transformers boxed sets as soon as they became available.

If you've ever wondered how an arcade beat-'em-up would translate into TransFormers toys, read on!

Binaltech BT09 Swindle

If BT05 Dead End seemed like a weird - not to say controversial - choice for the first Decepticon to appear in the Binaltech ranks, the second provoked a reaction no less angry. When the photos emerged, fans expected this variation on the Jeep Wrangler to become Trailbreaker - which made a certain amount of sense - but the finished figure ended up instead as everyone's favourite Combaticon con-man. According to TFWiki, the change of character came as a result of trademark issues, and originated in the Alternators line, rather than being another example of Takara attempting to subvert expectations.

Swindle having originally been a military jeep, this actually works pretty well on the surface... but let's take a closer look.

Binaltech BT08 Meister

This will actually be the second time I've written about this mold, the first being one of my earliest posts (a little under eleven years ago) focused on BT20, AKA the movie-influenced silver repaint, Argent Meister. Admittedly, I didn't go into any great detail there, likely because I expected to get to this version rather more promptly, so I'll try to make up for that here.

A little bit of backstory here... Back in the early 2000s, I was a member of an online writing group and, at some point, happened to mention to another member that I was collecting TransFormers toys again, having grown up with Generation 1 and was surprised to learn that she, too, had got into TransFormers in her youth (my terribly old-fashioned initial assumption having been that she was aware of them via her son). At some point, we got into talking about Binaltech vs. Alternators, and she mentioned that she couldn't understand why Jazz was being released under the ridiculous, nonsense name of 'Meister'.

Of course, it turns out this was because Meister was the name Takara had originally given to the character we, in the West, knew as Jazz, so it made a loopy kind of sense - for whatever reason, most likely trademark-related, Hasbro couldn't call their Alternators version 'Jazz', so they just used the same name Takara gave the Binaltech toy.

What didn't make as much sense was the choice of vehicle... or the super-plain colourscheme... But while neither are necessarily a dealbreaker, does Binaltech Meister really work as a Jazz-analogue?