Age of Extinction/Generations Lockdown

I'm not sure exactly when I became aware that Lockdown was a character in Age of Extinction, or that he was the robot whose head 'grows' a massive great face-cannon, but he was one of the few interesting elements of the movie. Neither Autobot nor Decepticon, Lockdown, much like his TransFormers Animated progenitor, is a freelance peacekeeping agent bounty hunter who, for reasons revealed only quite late in the film, has come to Earth and allied himself with a group of humans (echoing some aspects of Dark of the Moon).

While I'd originally intended to hold out for the Japanese version of this toy, despite the additional cost, I ended up buying the Hasbro US version in Forbidden Planet while on an evening out with my girlfriend, simply because I'd heard it was terrible enough that even the import version wasn't going to be any good, and this one was convenient... Plus, by the looks of things, Lockdown and other later-wave figures may not appear in UK Toys'R'Us stores...

Masterpiece Thundercracker

When Takara Tomy took a second look at the Masterpiece Seeker mold and released a new Starscream only four years after the divisive original, it was only natural for Hasbro to follow suit. MP03 is truly awesome, though not without its problems (many loathed the tail fins hanging off the hips, for example) and the remold seemed, on the surface, to fix all the major issues.

When Hasbro US released the new Seeker mold as Thundercracker, I had to consider carefully whether I wanted to pay secondary market prices for the original MP07 (currently between about £550-£800) or go for the cheaper, more convenient new mold. Toys'R'Us in the UK briefly had the new Masterpiece Thundercracker available to order online, but eventually dropped it in favour of Acid Storm... who isn't even a real G1 character. I could almost understand if Hasbro Europe released Sunstorm... but Acid Storm? Did he do anything other that warm the pegs and shelves as a Deluxe?

From that point on, the secondary market prices on the Hasbro US version started creeping up... so when I saw an eBay auction starting very much at the low end (£40 - amusingly still about double what I paid for Hasbro's MP Skywarp at Argos many years ago) I jumped right on it. Naturally, the price went up quickly, but I managed to win the auction at a price still nicely below the current average for a new, boxed one.

TransFormers Animated Blackarachnia

(Femme-Bot Friday #5)

TransFormers Animated presented a very strange and varied slice of TransFormers history - it was as much a superhero team show as it was a show about shapeshifting alien robots, and this was reflected in both the character design and the varied roster of characters, including the sort of human villains that might turn up in a piss-take of Batman. The majority robot characters were either straight out of, or adapted from a list that most G1 fans would be familiar with though, even within that, there were a few curveballs.

One such character was Blackarachnia, portrayed in TFA as a somewhat tragic victim of circumstance whose bitterness turned her a little evil. Formerly Elita-1, Blackarachnia was turned techno-organic in a mission that went terribly wrong, leaving her companions - Optimus Prime among them - believing she was lost and/or dead. One of only two beast-formers in the TFA cartoon (unless you include the Dinobots), Blackarachnia wasn't as much a departure from the usual aesthetic as you might expect...

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2012 Exclusive (Timelines) Over-Run Runabout

When I wrote up the Club's 2012 membership incentive figure, Runamuck, almost three years ago, I fully expected that I'd never get my hands on his partner. He sold out almost immediately, prices on the secondary market were ridiculous and my finances were pretty terrible at the time. Thankfully, the secondary market is very variable, with plenty of bargains to be had on eBay and, in 2015, prices are not that far off the original retail price of the exclusive figure (better, if you take shipping into account and buy within Europe, as I did!)

Cybertron Override GTS

(Femme-Bot Friday #4)

Aside from the Revenge of the Fallen 'wheelsnakes', this is probably the most contentious inclusion in the femme-bot feature, because it's only the US version of the character, Override, who was a femme-bot - in Galaxy Force, Nitro Convoy was a dude.

I wasn't really enamoured of this mold, and only bought another version because it was a black repaint, and black repaints are cool. Honestly, I don't remember why I picked up this model when I already had that, other than the slight improvement over the clownish colourscheme of the original.

Cybertron Quickmix

It's difficult to say whether or not Quickmix was originally intended to be a homage to the G1 TargetMaster. In Japan, he was known as Blendar and, while the colourscheme is accurate to the TV show (that is, more G1 TargetMaster Scoop than Quickmix) there was no sense that he was anything but an 'original' character, despite Galaxy Force's long list of G1 homages. He was Megalo Convoy's righthand man on Gigalonia but, other than that, I know next to nothing about him. If I remember correctly, this was one of my final Galaxy Force/Cybertron purchases, and something of an impulse buy...