I'd meant to gab on about Generations Red Alert back on Monday night along with that week's Toy News International strip, but the Mike statues done shown up on my porch and Red got knocked back.

(Only a handful of Mike statues remain!)

As the TNI strip mentions, there's a lotta versions of this mold right now.  I own five, but there are about four more between Japanese versions of three of these guys and an additional (super super rare) G2 version of Sideswipe.  It's not the greatest mold, but it isn't terrible.  How is it that the toys that get redecoed the most are the ones that are actually pretty mediocre?  The original Seeker mold, the Classics Seeker mold, Dinobot... (SHUT UP SHUT UP DINOBOT IS AWESOME)

As I've mentioned previously, no matter how terrible the toy, the more versions of one toy I accumulate, the more desirable extra versions become.  It's absolutely nuts.   Maybe it's like mob mentality, how people get dumber in groups.  Well, these large groups make me dumber!

Red Alert himself isn't a bad version of the mold.  If I had to rank him by prettiness compared to the others, he'd probably rank a distant second after Breakdown.  Breakdown's color scheme has no equal, so that's just not terribly fair, but them's the breaks, Red.  The way the white and gray and sharp red play off each other is striking, just enough to edge him out over his primary color brothers.

As for the tooling itself, he's probably second-to-worst, just ahead of Tiny Head McGee, aka Mr. Punch/Counterpunch.  Why?  Well, because of the light bar on the roof, you can't mount his engine thingy on his back in robot mode anymore.  In addition, the holes on his shoulders are no longer large enough for him to peg his weapon into.  So Red Alert's forced into having to wrap the engine thingy around the gun and peg the whole thing into his wrist... which is an incredibly unstable arrangement even before we realize that this larger gun configuration conflicts with his forearm kibble.

So that's annoying.