'Shackwave' (aka ToyCo 'Astro Magnum', aka Tandy/Radio Shack 'Galactic Man')

In celebration of passing the 1,000 pageviews milestone in the month of June, here's a real treat...
This model needs no further introduction, not least because I teased it almost two full years ago. It has a strange history, having been drafted into the ranks for Generation 1 TransFormers from ToyCo, where most of G1 was repurposed from Takara's Microchange/Microman and Diaclone toylines.

I may well be misunderstanding what little I know of its origins, but it seems that Shockwave was originally released only in the US and Korea, with Japan picking him up later... And he never arrived in the UK.

So when, browsing through my father's catalogue from Tandy (being the UK name for Radio Shack), I found this very familar-looking toy, and saw my chance to have one of the coolest characters from the Marvel comics at the time... And I really wasn't fussed about the colourscheme.

Further Image Issues

Following my change of policy regarding the images used within these blog posts, I've been finding that some of the draft posts that are queued up waiting for text have started to go a little bit wrong. Not sure what's causing it (other than, perhaps, the billions of system changes at Photobucket), but some of my thumbnails are broken - not just here, but on Photobucket too.

That wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to manually re-make thumbnails within The Bucket.

It also wouldn't be so bad if the full-size images were undamaged, but some of them are broken, too. I figured I could force it to remake thumbnails by choosing the 'Edit' option, doing something minor, then saving... but some of the images won't even load into the editing system.

The upshot of this is that some of the (approximately 120) drafts that are stacked as of this moment will have to be scrapped. Not entirely, of course, I just have to retake photos where I can't access them on Photobucket and reupload them as embedded Blogspot images. I could retake all of them, and just forget about Photobucket, but that seems like a waste... So I may start harvesting those images that work...

Bit of a bugger to have uploaded thousands of images to an image host, only to find it's a bit rubbish...

TransFormers (Movie) Stockade

I'm not quite sure what it says about either the TransFormers live action movie or the toyline that ran along with it, but one of my favourite toys didn't even appear in the movies. Stockade is from the extended original movie toyline, and transforms - perhaps weirdly, considering he's a Decepticon - into a Sector 7 SUV. All the more fun, when the film-makers had the opportunity to include the character in one of the later movies (Dark of the Moon, specifically) they came up with three entirely new characters instead...

TransFormers: Prime Optimus Prime

TransFormers: Prime caught a lot of flak initially for robot designs that seemed to be the illegitimate offspring of the much-loved, prematurely cancelled TransFormers: Animated series and the much loathed live-action movie designs. Personally, I'm more cheesed off that, as a co-production with a satellite TV company, the only way I could watch the series initially would have been by forking out for a subscription and the necessary hardware.

Or YouTube, of course.

Like any TransFormers series since G1, it has its share of detractors... but few can deny that the stories are more coherent and substantially darker in tone than anything that has come before (surprising, given the involvement of Kurtzman and Orci). Hasbro followed up their confounding decision on the creation of the show by releasing the Prime 'First Edition' line, only to cancel it before most people had a chance to find the toys. What came next was subtitled 'Robots In Disguise'... but was it an improvement?

Galaxy Force Dark Nitro Convoy

The original form of Nitro Convoy (aka Override) didn't interest me much. Vehicle mode looked cool and all, but the colourscheme was completely over the top, tending toward clownish. The gold face of the Japanese version didn't help, but the orange face of the western release just sealed the deal. Plus, there's that much-vaunted 'auto-transform' gimmick, the spring-loaded likes of which frequently ruins an otherwise decent toy...

However, if it wasn't already apparent from this blog that I tend to think a black repaint covers the gravest of sins, it soon will be... possibly. TakaraTomy, in collaboration with Telemaga (TV Magazine), released Dark Nitro Convoy... somehow making an eminently avoidable toy become part of my collection...

FansProject CA-10 Causality: T-Bone

Having bought CA-09, the first component of FansProject's mammoth interpretation of G1 gestalt Menasor, pretty much the first thing I did was look up the other components. While I now have CA-11 and -12 on pre-order, this one was a pleasant surprise, arriving rather earlier than expected.

How does FansProject's take on Wildrider measure up?