Beast Wars Neo Mach Kick

OK, now for something from the weirder portion of my collection, to celebrate another milestone - TFCC/SS4.0 Windsweeper being my 500th post to this blog - it's kind of a shame I didn't hit the 500th post before starting the new year, considering how close I was... but I've had a hard time with anything creative recently...

I think I've mentioned before how the more ambitious Beast Wars molds came along after Hasbro had gradually started reorienting the brand back towards the mechanical, and Takara picked up the idea and ran with it in some very strange directions. The original set of characters was quite small and, while it certainly covered a wide range of animal types, quite a few others were conspicuous by their absence... For the most part, the animals of Beast Wars Neo were fun, quirky, and beautifully detailed.

Robot modes, however... that's where things went truly bonkers...

TransFormers Collectors' Club 2016/Combiner Wars Windsweeper

And so, we come to the final limb of Thunder Mayhem, the former G1 Triggercon Windsweeper. Before even taking this thing out of its box, there was a sense of disappointment about it, because there are only three Aerialbot jet molds, and two of them - Firefly and Skydive - seem to be getting the used over and over again, while the one figure that was not made available officially in the UK seems notably by its absences in the repaints... even though it has actually been reused just about as many times.

It also seems a bit sad that the Skydive mold was only recently repainted for BotCon 2016 set (as General Cicadacon), furthering the impression that certain molds are getting more attention than others.

Perfect Effect PE-DX05 'Beast Muscle' Leonidas

Every so often, a Third Party release comes along that has my attention from the very first images. There's no real pattern to it, but there's frequently a connection to my earlier collecting habits.

One of the stranger examples is this - Perfect Effect's pre-Beast Wars reimagining of Lio Convoy. Granted, I'm a fan of the original, and I love the Collectors' Club's 2015 Membership Incentive version, but this is a version of the character who transforms into a robotic lion... which basically doesn't make sense in the context of Beast Wars... or, really, any TransFormers continuity.

But when has that stopped me buying something potentially awesome?

NB: This post has been sitting in my drafts for well over a year... Nothing unusual for me, in the grand scheme of things but, in this case, there's a very good reason...

2016 Retrospective

If I can make anniversary posts a proper thing, then hopefully I can continue the tradition of an annual roundup as well. This time, like the anniversary post, I added to each section during the course of the year rather than leaving it all to the last minute, and then scheduled its launch so I could sleep through New Year like the middle-aged grump I am!

So, here we have my roundup of the highs and lows of what turned out to be quite a tumultuous year...

The Compulsion (+ addendum 28/11/16)

Apologies for another rambling, text-only and only barely toy related posting, but I'm still struggling to focus on the toys while in the midst of some big, important real-life stuff. There's nothing quite like expensive property matters to suck all the enjoyment out of life.

But I digress.

Back in my write-up of TFNation (day 2, specifically) I mentioned the Death's Head remix of Mastermind Creations' Reformatted Jaegertron figure, which they have named Anubis. While I didn't add it to my Want List, it certainly stuck in my mind because I rather liked Death's Head, the 'Freelance Peacekeeping Agent' created by Simon Furman and Geoff Senior back in the late 80s (I actually own most of the short-lived solo comics series from Marvel, though currently know the whereabouts of only one issue) and, while the Death's Head I know was never actually a TransFormer (though he did hunt them a couple of times), the idea of a transforming Death's Head tickled me greatly. That, coupled with the fact that Anubis was another TFCon exclusive, like the Feral Queen and Nero Queen set, meant I became quite keen on tracking one down.

#tfytchomework RE: 3P, KO... When did it all become the same thing?

OK, I honestly didn't expect over a month to pass in between updates here, especially since that last post was completed quite some time before it went live, and I've had another draft in progress since before then... I'm having trouble with blogging generally, but today I found the opportunity to try something a bit different.

One of the things I quite like about YouTube is that, while it prioritises the channels I've subscribed to, the parameters for its recommendations are accurate enough to pick up on other material that I might actually be interested in, and one such video was this one from smsno1. It's a valid question, and there's at least one part in there that's worthy of deep consideration.

I know the point of these things is to provide a YouTube response video, but I'm still very much of the mind that I don't want to be a YouTuber, so this 'ere blog post will have to suffice...