Revenge of the Fallen Legends Constructicons set

Much as I despise the way Devastator was wasted in Revenge of the Fallen, turned into a mindless brute apparently made up using duplicates of Demolishor (offed by Optimus Prime in the opening minutes of the movie), Rampage (offed by Bumblebee in a separate fight) and Scrapper (ripped apart for spares at the behest of Scalpel, to resurrect Megatron), amongst others, and unceremoniously wrecked by a terrestrial battleship's high tech weapon, I have to admit I quite like the concept and the look of the result. It was nothing like G1 Devastator, but it looked like a robot that should be called Devastator. It had potential and, perhaps, if production of Revenge of the Fallen hadn't clashed with the writers' strike, it might have been more impressive.

The giant-sized, light-and-sound infused version of Devastator was tempting, but the fact that it was so huge, yet his components had no individual robot modes, made the whole thing pointless. I still kind of wanted a RotF Devastator toy, though, and thankfully Hasbro decided to release a cut down, Legends class set... with a bonus extra character not used in the larger figure, but who did feature in the movie... though not necessarily as a component of Devastator.

Tokyo Toy Show 2010 Dreadwing & Smokescreen

I noted in my write-up for Reveal the Shield Strafe that I would much rather have purchased Mindwipe, but I don't think he was ever available in the UK - lost, perhaps, thanks to another of Hasbro's remarkably short-sighted marketing decisions. The mold itself was great, but Strafe's colourscheme was terrible, and meant I had a Skystalker with no vehicle mode partner.

Enter 2010's Tokyo Toy Show, at which a repainted set of the two molds was available as a boxed set of Generation 2 Dreadwing & Smokescreen (aka RiD Dreadwind & Smokejumper in blue)

Generations (30th Anniversary) Sky-Byte

I have to confess that, never having seen more than a couple of episodes of the early 2000s 'Robots In Disguise' TV show (a friend bought a random DVD - titled "Sideburn's Obsession", after one of the episodes included on the disc - in a charity shop) Sky-Byte is a bit of a random whim purchase, even by my standards. Not only that, but the original mold was used as a Maximal in Beast Wars Transmetals 2, then transferred into Robots In Disguise/Car Robots along with a whole host of pan-generational repaints on the Decepticon/Predacon side. As far as I can tell, while the Autobots were mostly new molds, the Decepticons/Predacons had only one - Megatron/Galvatron.

The original Sky-Byte was one of the weirder-looking molds, with a very awkward and asymmetrical robot mode and an oddly posed cybernetic beast mode. Coming 15 years after the original Transmetals 2 figure, what improvements can the Generations version bring?

Galaxy Force Exigeyser

The Galaxy Force TV series pulled some strange moves once in a while. While 'Super Modes' were not uncommon, they had tended to be an upgrade thing among the Decepticons (RID/Car Robots Megatron becoming Galvatron, Armada/Micron Legend Megatron getting upgraded to Galvatron, Energon/Superlink Megatron getting upgraded to Galvatron, Cybertron/Galaxy Force Megatron getting upgrade to - you guessed it - Galvatron). But when a group of three Autobots were thoroughly trounced by Megatron, in the Cybertron/Galaxy Force TV series, they didn't just dust themselves off the way they might have in any other series... They received some pretty heavy-duty upgrades.

Exillion, aesthetically the closest thing the toyline had had to a proper Hot Rod in years (all the Hot Shots being pale imitations), went through one of the more dramatic reformattings... and, while Hasbro's version simply gained the prefix 'Cybertron Defense' on his name, his Galaxy Force counterpart got a whole new name.

Cybertron Cryo Scourge

Hasbro has a habit, when crafting some of its characters, of re-releasing them as their opposite to some degree. Hence we have a Nemesis Prime in as many continuities as possible, and Transmetals 2 Megatron got remade in shades of blue and re-released as RiD (2001) Cryotek.

A similar, yet different path was taken with Cybertron Scourge (aka Galaxy Force Flame Convoy) where he has somehow become "irreversibly mutated" by "long exposure to the freezing waste of deep space" which somehow transforms all his fire-breathing, etc. into ice powers. Because SCIENCE! (with apologies to my Physics student girlfriend who would no doubt facepalm at the mere suggestion).

So, is it time for me to break out the ice puns?

TransFormers (Movie) Jazz (Target Exclusive G1 Repaint)

When Jazz was first revealed as a character in the first live action TransFormers movie, few people would have foreseen that, by the time the credits rolled, the issues with his alternate mode would be the least of our complaints. Sure, the Pontiac Solstice isn't a patch on the Porsche 935 of the original G1 character, and silver was a boring - yet predictable - choice of body colour (later misapplied to Sideswipe as well) but, seriously, movie Jazz was under-characterised and wasted in every sense of the word.

So here's a deep, philosophical question for you: Does a G1 repaint of an underwhelming toy of a wasted character make up for any of that? As the 'bot himself would surely say, "Do it with style, or don't bother doing it".