A Brief Outage...

While working on a couple of upcoming posts this morning, I was a little surprised to see an email, purporting to be from Google's Blogger team, telling me this blog had been removed. According to the email, it had been "flagged for review" because my content had "violated our SPAM policy".

Now, I'm no stranger to spam comments, and I've removed and replaced a couple of posts because they started getting increased volumes of traffic well outside what I would consider believable... I've also previously had a couple of posts flagged and suspended due to some sort of false flag caused (if I remember correctly) by Google's own bots... But the idea that the whole blog could be taken down as spam? That seemed a little far-fetched.

And yet, when I then tried to view the blog itself, I was presented with a message to the effect that the blog could not be found... And then I noticed my current drafts weren't saving... And then I couldn't access the back end of this blog at all.

Naturally, I clicked the link to request a review, and even the web page that initiates the process seemed to give me some cause for optimism... Apparently the very fact that I followed the link went some way toward proving this wasn't a spam blog. However, it said that the review would take place some time in the next two working days. This being a Sunday, it's not normally considered 'a working day'...

Yet, lo and behold, precisely 30 minutes later, I had a new email telling me the blog had been reinstated.

And then it occurred to me: the original email said the TransForm-A-Blog had been "flagged to us for review", the implication being that it had been deliberately flagged by a person. I mean... Wow. Nice.

In other news, I got a lot of photography done today, and got quite a way through several drafts, one of which is now scheduled for late this coming week, another might even go live tomorrow...

For the moment, I'll leave you with a hint about one of the upcoming posts...

...Something I would never have bought were it not for a massive price cut...

New Purchases - AKA A Third Not An Unboxing Post

During some recent tidying, my girlfriend uncovered a box containing my old Nintendo Game Boy Color and the 17 game cartridges I bought for it many, many years ago. I'd pretty much forgotten its existence, since it hadn't seen the light of day in the eight years Courtney has been living with me. I remember bringing it to my flat, but I wouldn't have been able to remember where I'd put it... And, since I've not used it in so long, I figured it was time to sell it all on.

What has this to do with TransFormers? Well, I've bought nothing new since January, and the act of selling those 17 games made for a surprising windfall. As a result, I decided to spend a small part of it on acquiring the handful of toys I'd actually been looking forward to from Hasbro, and take the opportunity to have a more serious look at obtaining a couple of Third Party figures I was starting to think I'd have to miss out on (unless their release conveniently coincided with Christmas).

It also seemed like a good opportunity to try out a couple of new e-retailers I've found - Dinobot Island Toys and Star Action Figures - both of whom have been added to my sidebar's 'Cybertronian Datanet' section for a short while now. They seem to have a good range of stock, all of which is a few quid cheaper than the likes of Hasbro Pulse, Smyths, and some of the other online stores I've used in the past. They also, between them, had everything I wanted to buy, where my regular options were out of stock when I was ready to order.

Of course, my orders went through at precisely the time the CWU (Communication Workers Union) were going on strike, which naturally had an effect on postal services. That said, I put my orders through on 27/8 and 31/8, they were despatched on 30/8 and 1/9, respectively, which is quick service on the part of the two stores, in spite of the Summer Bank Holiday Weekend.

Additionally, both packages arrived in this morning's post, so I'd say that's still pretty good service on the part of the Royal Mail, in spite of any backlog caused by the (very necessary) industrial action.

Full writeups will, of course, be coming... but here are a few pics to tide you over.

Studio Series #82 Ratchet

Of all the figures to come from the Bumblebee movie section of the Studio Series toyline, the one for which my expectations were lowest was the Ratchet/Ironhide mold. This was largely because of the absolute travesty of simplistic and outdated engineering that was the Siege version and its hopelessly lazy Earthrise retool.

Because, let's fact it, if Hasbro were going to get lazy about an established vehicle mode, and leave the robot's blocky Cybertronian feet hanging off the back of an ostensibly terrestrial van, what hope was there for a transforming toy of a character that never had a vehicle mode designed for him, as he only appears very briefly in the movie, and then only in his robot mode?

And yet, sometimes, just sometimes, Hasbro can surprise a jaded old fan like me, and make me believe that perhaps there is some hope for originality of thinking within the brand. Could it be that the Studio Series figure of Ratchet from the Bumblebee movie is one such surprise? Let's take a look...

Cybertron Crumplezone

Much like Ransack/Gasket, Crumplezone/Landbullet was a toy I decided I didn't want or need - on import, at least - until I experienced the figure as pre-Beast Wars Optimus Primal in the Dawn of Future's Past boxed set from BotCon 2006. As its own figure, This toy looked ugly and poorly-proportioned, with a hideous pairing of muted, military green and eye-searingly bright acidic green, and the vehicle mode wasn't particularly exciting.

However, DoFP Optimus Primal worked really well, and showed me what a fun toy he was, so I ended up buying the Hasbro version on the cheap. Being one of the larger Cybertron/Galaxy Force figures, he features some electronics, but is that enough to redeem such a terrible colourscheme on so ugly a toy?

Studio Series #81 Wheeljack

It is my strongly-held conviction that the War for Cybertron Trilogy was a poorly-conceived, poorly-executed mess of a toyline that nevertheless produced a handful of great toys. Part of its problem was that it didn't keep to its own brief - Siege was supposed to represent the early days of the war, yet each figure came with extensive battle-damage paint apps. The most egregious problems, though, were that there were some critical omissions from the Siege portion, the Earthrise toyline was rendered pointless by it's own Netflix tie-in show, and the best toys in Kingdom were Hasbro's perfunctory acknowledgements that Beast Wars was a popular thing back in the 1990s, though clearly not popular enough to warrant its own, specific branch of the franchise rather than insertion into yet another of their interminable attempts to perpetuate their golden age of G1.

The omissions, while not obvious, became clearly problematic in the opening moments of the Netflix show, which paralleled the pilot of the G1 cartoon, showing Bumblebee and Wheeljack on an Energon scavenger hunt. This would have been a great idea, but for the fact that Bumblebee's Siege toy only got released under the Buzzworthy banner, while Wheeljack did not get a Siege toy at all. That said, neither of them actually transformed in the TV show, so perhaps their absence from the Siege line is not important to some people.

Surprisingly, it fell to the Studio Series line to present a Cybertronian Wheeljack figure - based on the CGI sequence at the start of the Bumblebee movie - and, based on the average quality of War for Cybertron toys, I'd have to concede that this was probably for the best. So, let's take a look at what is - in my opinion - one of the best War for Cybertron toys not to appear in the War for Cybertron lines, and try to get to the bottom of what makes it so good.

Studio Series #80 Brawn

I have to confess a certain favouritism when it comes to Brawn. The original G1 toy was likely my fourth purchase in the TransFormers line, and I've always loved its blocky awkwardness, long legs, short arms, and utilitarian claw/hook 'hands'. To this day, one of my favourite stories in the 1980s Marvel Comics series is The Enemy Within, in which Brawn goes bonkers after an electric shock, and ends up in a trial by combat with Starscream.

To say that I dislike his animation model from the cartoon would be an understatement, since he became too generic among the other blocky, poorly drawn robots. While the approximate shape of his head remained, its simplistic, almost featureless mask was replaced by a more expressive, humanoid face, even though he was never a particularly prominent character in the show.

I wasn't at all surprised that he didn't appear in any of the first five live action movies - if anything, I was surprised that he did appear - albeit briefly - in the Cybertron sequence in the Bumblebee solo movie... There was a toy named Brawn in the extended Revenge of the Fallen toyline (and which was repainted into a rather more mold-appropriate Outback analogue) but, much as I liked it, it wasn't quite the update to the G1 character I was hoping for. I quite liked what I saw in the Bumblebee movie, though, and so was excited when he was announced as being part of the first wave of Hasbro's 2022 selection in the Studio Series line. Was this excitement justified..?