Buzzworthy Bumblebee: Creatures Collide 4-pack

By and large, the Buzzworthy Bumblebee line has been filled with products I have been perfectly content to live without: regardless of which line the toys are derived from, they have been mostly superfluous repaints. When it comes to the boxed sets, there have been far more misses than hits. When the Worlds Collide set came along, I ended up buying the Blackarachnia figure purely because she's a Femme-Bot and it was a decent reference to the original Beast Wars toy's box art, while the other figures were reportedly a mess of loose joints.

This second 'Collides' set was, at first, marginally more interesting. I wasn't overly fussed by the scarcity of the Netflix-branded Earthrise Bumblebee toy because, having already bought Cliffjumper, I knew it wouldn't be a patch on the Classics toy from 2006... But Goldbug was another matter, because I'm quite fond of the G1 Throttlebot, and he's sufficiently distinct from Bumblebee. Similarly, I'd passed on the TV show-inspired Kingdom Scorponok figure because I was disappointed by the look of it but, now I own a reissue of the original toy in show-accurate colours, a toy-coloured repaint of the Kingdom figure was potentially a fun comparison. Skywasp was a stupid/amazing pun, and so instantly interesting, in spite of the new mold's obvious inferiority to Generations Waspinator... Which left Ransack: a repaint of the Legacy Kickback figure that's barely an improvement on the G1 original, representing one of the 'Deluxe Insecticons' which, back in the day, had a wholly unique mold that was never made available in the UK.

So, when presented with this set at a RRP of £93, I turned my nose up and avoided it, even though that breaks down as four figures for slightly less than the price of four individual Deluxes. However, seeing it cut down to £45 at GAME, it seemed like a sweeter deal... But let's see how I feel about it with the figures in-hand...

The Other Half 4: On Femme-Bots!

Not long after I posted my write-up of Nicee, and followed it up with my post about Femme-Bots generally and the fandom's reactions to Nicee in particular, I asked my girlfriend if she'd be willing to write an opinion piece of her own. Not that I felt my overtly positive impressions of the figure needed any kind of legitimising, but because I was genuinely interested in what she might have to say.

After all, this is someone who sees my collection - on display in closed, glass-doored cabinets in our lounge - as part of the scenery in our home, to the point where she barely notices it at all. I know she's aware of my appreciation for Femme-Bots, and I get the impression she's neither offended nor threatened by it... but, equally, it's not something that we really talk about in any great depth. I tend to show her any and all new purchases - including Big Firebird's most recent transforming Femme-Bot, Mooka - but I don't exactly expect a detailed and discerning assessment, because I know she's just not really that interested.

However, I did say that I was going to get her to offer her thoughts on the matter and, while they've taken a couple of years to coalesce, they arrived just in time for Valentine's Day, so here we go...

Hasbro, Collecting, and Me...

Long-time readers will surely have noticed that 2022 was a bit of a sparse year as far as the TransForm-A-Blog is concerned. Twenty-nine posts in total, of which just 17 were proper toy write-ups - the lowest number since 2009 - which was the first full year I was posting this blog, when I was still figuring out how I wanted to use the blog, and still only a few years back into the idea of collecting as a genuine hobby.

During this two or three years, with the launch of Hasbro Pulse, Hasbro has really upped its game in terms of its Social Media engagement, hosting semi-regular livestreams catering to fans across their portfolio of brands. Hasbro has launched new toylines, new TV shows, and even started the promotional juggernaut for the first live action TransFormers movie in five years. In theory, there's an awful lot of material to blog about. One could be forgiven for thinking that now is an exciting time for TransFormers fans... But it's really not.

Not for me, at any rate, and I can be fairly sure that I'm not completely alone in all my concerns... Some of them, maybe, but not all of them.

I've written, in other opinion pieces here, about my increasing sense of ennui regarding Hasbro's TransFormers output, the downsizing, the increased costs, etc... but the War For Cybertron Trilogy, Studio Series '86 and now Legacy/Legacy Evolution seem to me to represent the absolute stagnation of the brand shifting swiftly and assuredly into active decay, along with an increasing sense that everything Hasbro does now is about maximising shareholder profits, heedless of any and all fallout, rather than creating worthwhile products... And it's not only evident in TransFormers.

Big Firebird Build EX Series EX-01 Plus Mooka (AKA Mocha)

(Femme-Bot Friday #81)

I know.

I originally said I wasn't going to write about this figure here, but on my oft-neglected, more general toy blog... However, sometime between Mocha/Mooka's announcement and actually receiving the toy in the post last year, I realised that was the wrong decision. While it still doesn't fit here in the sense that it's not a Third Party take on a TransFormers character, it doesn't fit there in that it's clearly an adult collectable rather than a toy. In many ways, posting about the Cyclion there was somewhat mistaken.

However, I've covered Go-Bots and myriad other Third Party figures, so the TransForm-A-Blog is clearly not wholly about TransFormers. Plus, Mooka is derived from a figure that was originally conceived as a stylised take on Arcee, so I've decided to post this here, and henceforth try to keep Toys, HEXcetera... focussed on things that are more general action figure material.

So, prepare yourselves for another controversial and divisive Third Party Femme-Bot, this one seemingly deliberately reworked to play into some of the complaints made about Nicee when she first emerged.

War for Cybertron Trilogy Covert Agent Ravage/Decepticons Forever Ravage

Every so often, even now, a set of TransFormers toys comes along that has the potential to get me excited. Whether it's something new and unique, or simply a repaint into a favourite character, Hasbro sometimes manages transcend the current mediocrity of their products... and this was once such set.

It excited me because I was interested in the Beast Wars Metals Jaguar - the 1999 Japan-only retooling of Transmetals Cheetor into the Tripredacus Agent seen in the three-part Season 2 finale of Mainframe's seminal Beast Wars television series - but the toy, frankly, looks a bit crappy and, these days, tends to be very expensive on the secondary market, with some sellers asking over £350 for the boxed figure.

Hasbro's new version, released in 2021, didn't quite hit all the right notes for me and, at its full asking price of £49, was an easy pass. However, during their Advent Calendar sale, they dropped the price by 50%, and I felt almost obliged to order, just to have a version of such a fantastic reimagining of G1 Ravage, even though the accompanying part of the set would be possibly the fourth copy of the actual G1 Ravage toy that I've owned.

But was it a worthwhile investment, even at half price? Read on, and find out!

2022 Retrospective

I realised this year that, over the course of the last few annual retrospective posts, it has metamorphosed from a set of lists - highlights, disappointments, etc. - with a brief introduction, into a massive wall of text detailing some events from the year and going off on various tangents, followed by the standard lists...

...This has become increasingly difficult - not to say downright depressing - to work on, even when I start early in the year and continually add to it, because there's often an update to specific information that necessitates great swathes of the wall of text to be rewritten, sometimes more than once. It's been enough of a struggle to work on regular blog posts - writing about the toys I've been collecting since the 1980s - which, over the course of most of this year, I just haven't been enjoying as much as I used to. I managed a decent number of posts in September but, overall, this has been the leanest year since I first started this blog!

As a result, this year, I'm going back to basics, and just presenting the lists. Honestly, if you'd seen the original, full version of this post about this dumpster fire of a year, you'd be thanking me right now.

So, without further ado...