Revenge of the Fallen Mudflap

Intended as comic relief - in a franchise that was overburdened with comic relief from its very first installment - the Twins, Skids and Mudflap, attracted a lot of scorn due to perceived racial stereotyping. Personally, I found it odd that they were seen that way, as their characterisation seemed to be taking aim at Hip Hop-obsessed white trash more than anything else. Maybe my impression - as a middle class, middle-aged white dude in the UK - is flawed, and I'm missing some critical element of their portrayal, but it felt to me like manufactured outrage for the sake of outrage, over a movie that was just poorly made from start to finish.

Meanwhile, it took me five years to get round to writing about the Deluxe class Skids, and he turned out to be a floppy mess of a figure, with a large amount of car shell wrapped around a comparatively small robot. It was a well-designed toy, certainly, but let down by the materials and the manufacturing.

...Which doesn't exactly bode well for his brother...

Revenge of the Fallen Dead End

One interesting feature of Hasbro re-using established names in new franchises is that some fairly high-profile names end up appearing in unexpected places. 'Dead End' was used for two separate figures in the extended Revege of the Fallen toyline - the Scout class figure later repainted into Nightbeat, and this Deluxe class figure, a repaint of the Sideways figure with a new head sculpt.

Notably, neither of them were in any way connected with the Stunticon Dead End, and the name was applied in reference to the character being some kind of robotic vampire. Whether this makes him distantly related to Ratbat, or just the expanded movie universe's resident Goth stereotype, who can say? But I'm a big fan of the mold for its interesting transformation, automorphing features and the unique look of its robot mode, even as a poor second choice for representing Dino from Dark of the Moon, so this Revenge of the Fallen repaint was a no-brainer.

TransFormers Animated Bulkhead

In many ways, this should have been posted as a direct follow-on from the KuBianBao upsizing of movie Hound, since TF Animated Bulkhead surely played a part in the Bayverse reimagining of the old G1 favourite. While the mass release of TF Prime Bulkhead was fudged to stop him looking 'fat', the First Edition paid greater attention to the CGI, leading to a vastly superior toy. The toys made of TF Animated Bulkhead - regardless of size class - didn't even try to disguise how chunky the character was, and they all ended up with fairly stumpy legs, as was appropriate to his animation model.

And, like most TransFormers figures at that time, Bulkhead was made available in just about every size class. All of them had their shortcomings, but only one of them - the Leader class version - was anywhere near the right scale for the rest of the toyline. While the line as a whole wasn't overly concerned with scale - Bumblebee being one of the largest Deluxes, despite the character's diminutive stature on the show - I've always like to try to get the characters matching up as well as possible. While the Voyager class version of the toy was more accurate to the character's overall appearance on the show, even this Leader class version was technically undersized in robot mode... but it was the closest available.

Of course, 'best available' doesn't always equate to 'best overall', and it's not as if Leader class figures always made best use of their budgets back when they were all huge and packed with features...

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...

Studio Series #56 Shockwave

While I've not liked all the designs of the robots in the live action movies - particularly the randomly spiky Cybertronian forms of the Bay movies - there's no denying how striking they are, and how imposing they managed to appear in the films. Given that some Decepticons didn't even transform on-screen, they could have been given just about any alternate mode imaginable.

One such character was Dark of the Moon's distinctly non-traditional interpretation of Shockwave. Gone was the logically-minded custodian of the remnants of Decepticon Cybertron and, in his place, we got a fairly generic, virtually mute metal monster with a honkin' great cannon on one arm (and the wrong arm, at that) and an enormous, city-munching robo-phallic tentacle monster for a 'pet'. Pretty much the only things the production artists got right were the head (cyclopean, albeit heavily embellished versus the G1 character) and the power cable for his gun arm.

Not that I'd expect a movie bot to transform into an enormous space gun but, given that Shockwave's appearance in the game of the very first movie had him transform into both a helicopter and a howitzer, there's already precedent for something out of the ordinary... And yet the original toy just had him turn into a spiky tank... Now, about five years later, Shockwave has been granted a Studio Series makeover - packaged as a Leader class figure, no less - so let's see what sort of improvements Hasbro have made...

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2009 (Timelines) Skyquake

There are a number of figures in my collection that I can look at and genuinely wonder what ever possessed me to buy them... and there are figures in my collection that are flawed in some small but critical way. Thankfully, either one are rare occurrences particularly since, on the rare occasion I shop in bricks-and-mortar toy shops, I can give any figure I want a quick once over in the box, to see if I can spot any obvious flaws.

I've not always had the best of luck with TransFormers Collectors' Club figures, and particularly BotCon figures bought via the Club shop after the event, but this figure - part of one of the souvenir sets from BotCon 2009 - would certainly fit into both categories were it not for the fact that he was packaged alongside Banzai-Tron, an excellent reimagining of a G1 Action Master using a bonkers Energon mold.

Wings of Honor didn't interest me a great deal, but it was nice to effectively get a bonus figure along with the one souvenir toy I actually wanted. Aside from these, the only figure from 2009's set that's even on my radar is Scourge, made using the Galaxy Force Noisemaze mold.

(And, yes, I know Elita-1 and Razorclaw were available at the 2009 show as well, but they were additions to Games of Deception and Dawn of Futures Past, respectively, not Wings of Honor)