Recently, a few of BotCon/Fun Publications' toy offerings have reportedly been suggestions by Hasbro.  Like, "hey, this alternate head exists, and we have no plans, so we'd really like you to do this at your con."  Like customization class Ratchet, allegedly.  BotCon Reflector is one of those guys!

So apparently Combiner Wars Shockwave -- the tiny Shockwave toy that was designed so Combiner Wars Bruticus could hold him as a gun -- had an alternate Reflector head.  Hasbro puts these alternate heads in most of their toy's engineering for a rainy day.  Some we'll probably never know about because why would we?  If it's not eventually used or doesn't accidentally show up on an instruction sheet, there'd be no discovery.  It seems like the alternate Reflector head would have been one of those things, were it not for BotCon.

Besides, Shockwave's already purple and gray.  Would Hasbro put that toy out in purple and gray again?  Probably not.  It was a weird idea to start with.  But it's a perfect idea for a convention exclusive, because nerds like me will totally pay money to buy another purple and gray version (three times) of a toy we already have in purple and gray.  

Honestly, this is the toy I was least excited about this year.  It fills an otherwise vacant spot in my collection.  I don't really have a set of three Reflector guys, and otherwise they're absent from my 1984/85 Decepticon shelf.  And so they're NECESSARY to me, but only for checking off names on a list that's essentially completed already except for them.  This is not to say these aren't swell guys, it's just that my interest in them pales in comparison to the bounty of combining Beast Wars dudes presented me.  

There are many unofficial modes that attempt to combine the three into a camera, like the original Reflector.  They can be pretty or they can stay together well, and no one's found a way to accomplish both yet.  I've included a photo of my buddy Robowang's attempt.  (Robowang is the guy I sent to BotCon in my place to pick up stuff for me.)  His falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and "falling in the middle" is a pretty apt way to describe most attempts to make a camera.  Generally holding this guy in an unofficial camera mode is like trying to pick up and eat a slab of lasanga.  It's gonna buckle and fall apart in layers in your hand.  

Next and finally: TM3 Megatron!

BotCon really likes Tigatron, I guess.  The first year the convention was allowed to do pre-existing characters, back in 2001, they chose him and Arcee.  They did another Tigatron in 2006, in which they decided Tigatron wasn't actually a newborn protoform like all the others, but was actually a police officer who pratfalled himself into one of Axalon's stasis pods and some amnesia.  And here he is again in 2016, where we learn he's actually a really important Autobot from the end of the Great War, known and revered by both sides!  Weird nobody remembered this integral historical icon when he woke up later on prehistoric Earth, still being named Tigatron and wearing his old face on his chest.

But, again, let's not get me started.

2016 Tigatron takes a lot from 2001 Tigatron, in that the former is directly based on the latter.  This makes sense, as 2001 Tigatron was a Beast Wars Ravage redeco, so this one is a redeco of this year's Ravage, who himself is a remake of that old Beast Wars Ravage.  This time around, Tigatron's secondary color is teal instead of the icy blue he had before.  It's a slight color shift, similar to how this year's Ravage has that pretty steel blue instead of the original beige.  Otherwise, this is a color-for-color recreation of that original BotCon toy design, down to the primary blue tummy deco.  He really feels like he belongs later in the timeframe, after that original toy, since this is such a direct upgrade of it.  There's even a bonus Wreckers symbol sticker you can put on his right arm, included in the convention's Magnaboss sticker set.  

Of course, this time he transforms into a car.  And a leg.  And an arm.  

Same as with Ravage, since they're just redecoes of each other, Tigatron has the whole "missing back half of the skull" deal.  Just... try to keep forgetting to look at him from the sides.

Try to forget a lot of things.

Newsflash:  I am, like, super into Combiner Wars.  I want every Transformer already in my collection to be redone as a Combiner Wars limb or torso or accessory, I don't care if it means I would then own six hundred Dead End retools, I am up for it.  

So imagine my interest in Combiner Wars combined (get it?) with my love for Beast Wars, and you've got this Predacus guy.  And then imagine my interest in Ravage combined with both of those two things already, and, yeah, this BotCon 2016 set is in my wheelhouse.  Because Ravage is in it.  Hell, the first thing we saw was Ravage, and I was sold.  Everything else could have been soggy dead puppies and it still would have been a great set, because at least one part of it was a Ravage who could become an arm or a leg.

Ravage himself is a Combiner Wars-style recreation of his appearance in the Beast Wars cartoon, crossed with his Alternators toy where he was a robot with a jaguar head who transformed into a black sports car.  You have no idea how much my jam that is.  All of my jam.  Ravage is Breakdown with a new kitty head.  A very flat, as seen from the side, kitty head.  What I'm saying is he has no back of his skull.  It's like the Invisible Man is wearing a Halloween mask of Ravage's face.  

But it's okay.  I don't care.  It's Ravage as a Combiner Wars limb.

I may be somewhat biased.

Ravage's partner leg is Tarantulas, who's Combiner Wars Rook with a new head.  We just got a vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas last year who's essentially perfect, which would in most cases make this new vehicle-mode-style Tarantulas surplus to requirements, but you forget that I want all characters ever to be able to be a limb or a torso, so he's still desired.  He's a Tarantulas who can become an arm or a leg.  He's a want.

The other three, now, these guys are interesting!  They're the Tripredacus Council from "The Agenda (Part 1)," also known as "that time that it was really cool that Beast Wars started connecting itself to G1 a little but then fandom started thinking that connecting BW to G1 was what BW was all about and then we never got anything else out of new Beast Wars fiction ever."  Ahem.  But I digress.  The Tripredacus Council!  We've never got toys of them as they've appeared on the cartoon, as they were essentially three random robot dudes who got randomly assigned names from the components of Tripredacus, the Predacon Beast Wars combiner.  But here they are, and they turn into vehicles, because they aren't beasts right now/yet.  

Ram Horn is the guy on the show who had little wings on his head and whose face was made mostly of Rattrap's, but with a nose.  He's got a new head and that head sits atop Brawl/Nosecone.  Combiner Wars Brawl/Nosecone is not that great of a toy, but I guess it's an appropriate use, nonetheless.  Ram Horn was a rhinoceros beetle, and so using a tank with a drill is kind of evocative of that kinda beasty shape.  

Cicadacon is the guy on the show who had Megatron's face incased inside a DEVO hat with little horns.  Sadly, his Combiner Wars toy does not have his own new head, and he's the only toy in the combiner that doesn't have a new head!  It makes me a little sad.  He's just Skydive with no sculpting alterations, and while he has the same general shape for his helmet, he lacks the little horns and most importantly he lacks the Megatron face.  I need that triangle nose, man!  

Sea Clamp is the guy on the show who had a head that looked like somebody had five minutes to extrude a CGI block into something resembling a face and then somebody else's mouth was pasted onto the chin.  Sea Clamp's original toy was a lobster, hence the name, but Combiner Wars doesn't have much in the way of sea vehicles.  Or any sea vehicles.  But he's Scattershot, who's a spaceship thing, and maybe you can pretend spaceship things are sea vehicles, right?  He has a new head.

He also has another new head in his tummy for the combined mode, Predacus.  Ravage and Tarantulas become the legs and the Tripredacus Council becomes everything above the knees.  You'd think, seeing three red guys and one black guy and one dark blue guy, that he'd look a little mismatched, but honestly he looks pretty great.  There's Tarantulas and Ravage's colors duplicated on the combiner chest, and they want you to swap the red and black fist/foot/weapons with each other so that there's a better scattering of colors, and it basically works.  He's a very attractive combiner.  His new head is based on Tripredacus's, of course.  

My complaints:  Some plastic tolerance issues!  Sometimes their fist/foot/guns don't fit securely into the wrist or ankle pegholes.  You can have hands drop off the arms and it's annoying.  Also, man, Brawl/Nosecone is not a great toy.  He's the weak link in this chain of robots.  And, yeah, Ravage is missing his brain.  Whatevs, I don't look at him from the side anyway, and really the limp wrists and Brawl are more of an annoyance than that.  There's also unfortunately the comic book he comes with but let's keep this a happy place in the wake of a very important day.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first airing of the Beast Wars cartoon pilot on syndication!  I watched it on television that day, like after school or something.  Because of course I did.

The only thing better than giving us pre-beast toys of the rest of the original Beast Wars Predacon crew is giving us those pre-beast toys in Combiner Wars form.  Terrorsaur mostly delivers on this!  For some reason he doesn't come with his hand/foot/gun, so you have to borrow somebody else's.  Or you can end up with a combiner with a limp, I dunno.

But, yeah, Terrorsaur satisfies me.  We got pre-beast Megatron, Waspinator, and Dinobot way back in 2006, and then pre-beast Tarantulas nine years later in 2015.   With Terrorsaur here, we're just one original Predacon down, and Scorponok is promised from the Figure Subscription Service before the end of the year!   Huzzah.

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is in his cartoon deco, rather than the original toy deco which replaced the silver and other silver with black and purple.  As such, Terry's a little less vibrant than some may remember him, but the silver and charcoal, with the edges here and there of orange, do manage to keep him visually interesting.   

He's got a new headsculpt which is... well, it's goofy-looking, but in a way that Terrorsaur kind of looked all the time.  Those first few Beast Wars CGI models were kind of rudimentary.  This toy gives him a kind of awkward toothy grin, like he's stifling a chuckle after a fart, but honestly that's not too far off-character.  

Combiner Wars Terrorsaur is also essentially perfectly scaled to his fellow pre-beast Predacon pals, as best as he can be, anyway.  Tarantulas is an abberation, being so tall, but otherwise CW Terrorsaur clocks in at just shorter than Dinobot and quite a bit taller than Waspinator and waaaaaaay shorter than Megatron.  These are all correct Nerd Measurements.  If pre-beast Tarantulas weren't done so perfectly I'd be more resentful of his size screwing up the otherwise perfect scale.

When I was a little boy of about ten years old, there came into existence the crazy idea that maybe Hasbro should make new versions of old popular Transformers characters, because maybe kids had grown attached to Transformers as people and not entirely just as a gimmick.  And so we got Optimus Prime as a Powermaster and Jazz and Bumblebee and Starscream and Grimlock as Pretenders.  And I realized... wait, we can get OLD guys as NEW guys???  I can have chances to buy all the guys I didn't manage to get in 1984?  

Strange new possibilities awoke in me, and I designed a combiner (because old guys come back as special features like Powermasters or Pretenders) that was made up of a bunch of 1984 guys I wanted to have toys of.  Ratchet, Ironhide, Wheeljack, and Prowl combined with Optimus Prime (because of course the torso would be Optimus Prime, duh doy) to form a bigger robot.  Ratchet and Ironhide would finally have toys that had heads like they did in the comics, and Wheeljack and Prowl were just other guys I wanted because they were important in the early Marvel stuff I had.  (Essentially, I was recreating the Autobot cast of "DIS-Integrated Circuits!" minus the Jazz I already had a Pretender of, plus Ironhide who I thought needed a toy with a head.)  

WELL HEY GREAT NEWS!  Combiner Wars gave us all those guys, true to my ten-year-old self's designs.  Well, minus Ratchet.  We knew there was a possible Ratchet head for the Combiner Wars First Aid toy hidden somewhere in the tooling, but would Hasbro put out a SECOND nigh-identical white-with-red ambulance guy?  Sometimes Hasbro just puts alternate heads into tooling for a rainy day and then never actually uses them.  Would my childhood fanfic combiner never fully come to be?

Screw y'all, 'cuz it has!  ...by the skin of its teeth!  Hasbro told BotCon, HEY, you guys use our Ratchet tooling for your customization class toy, all right?  And BotCon was all, yes daddy.  And, lo, the childhood was saved.  

But, jeez, is my Ratchet cup runneth over.  Shawn Tessmann, who runs the customization class, came up with FIVE seperate ways to paint up your Ratchet, and four of them are awesome.  There's the red-headed Marvel Ratchet that I was always going to make no matter what, there was the cartoon-style version (no thank you!), there was an amazing-looking neonish G2 Ratchet, there was a Shattered Glass Ratchet, and there was a fifth option where you use the First Aid head that remained on the sprue to make Medix, the Rescue Bots-inspired additional member of the Protectobots.  

I had preordered two Ratchets, one to paint and one to keep around just in case because RATCHET, but now I kind of have a deficit of Ratchets to make into the other possibilities.  In time, I tell myself, in time.  For now, I have this lone Marvel-style Ratchet.  He makes me supremely happy!  Frankly, red-headed Ratchet makes me happy in general, as if it's a load-bearing Jenga piece of my soul.  And thanks to some very good friends and also eBay, I have everything needed to complete him -- stickers, Enigma of Combination, and all.

(is there anything more really required in life than good friends and eBay?)

(okay, there's also Amazon.com)

Like last year's Covenant of Primus, the Enigma of Combination is a sort-of-not-really-Hasbro-blessed fan-made accessory to go with the customization class toy.  Ratchet can hold it and also it can plug into Optimus Prime's combiner mode chest.  ...way better than Blackjack or Rodimus, I can tell you.  

So, at long last, my childhood combiner is complete.  I will likely keep Ratchet as an arm, because he's special to me and I can see him better that way on a shelf, rather than hiding as a leg behind something else on display.  His translucent combiner fist is supposed to be all Healy Powers anyway, and I imagine it's probably rough to try to kick someone into health.    

I keep wanting to say, "one of the best BotCon toys this year," but honestly, they're all pretty damn great, so unless they all get to tie for second and first place, I dunno.  But this Airazor?  It's a pretty good toy of Airazor!  If you don't mind that she's not a bird!

Combiner Wars Airazor (she doesn't combine) is a redeco of Slipstream who herself was a heavy retool of Windblade.  There's no changes to Slipstream's sculpt, just a different deco, and yet it works pretty damn well as Airazor.  The head is painted up to kind of resemble Airazor's beaky bird hat, the fake sculpted cockpit on her chest is a reasonable vehicleish facsimile of a falcon's head, and the whole brownish-black/tan/yellow/extrayellow thing going on with her, with the dash of translucent green, is pretty fancy.  It's not a group of colors you see together a lot in Transformers, if ever, especially since the retail line has been kinda overwhelmingly White And Red for the past year as Combiner Wars has retreaded 1986.  Whoever designed the deco on this toy, good job.  

I don't reeeeally want to get into the convention comic in which Airazor featured right here, right now, because, again, as I said, there would be swearing.  

So let's instead say this is superfab Airazor bein' all jetty in the years following her enigmatic disappearance following the events of Primeval Dawn!  Let's unfridge her.  Yup, she's returned from the distant past to the less-distant future, maybe to participate in some Universe wars or something.  It could be fun!  Think of all the adventures she could have, y'know not being a super important Autobot from the end of the Great War or anything like that.

That'd be ridiculous.

Anyway, she technically replaces the other Airazor-as-a-jet-instead-of-a-bird exclusive toy we got a decade ago, which is a replacement that is FINE BY ME.  Timelines Airazor is, like, one of the worst things ever, and I own her because I am dumb.  First of all, she's the Energon Slugslinger toy, and Energon Slugslinger is terrible.  Like, it's one of those infamous Toys That Hate You.  There is no love for humanity in its engineering.  It was designed to snuff out your life force.  Now, imagine that toy with an Airazor head and at exclusive limited-run prices and representing a fundamental misunderstanding of the character herself.

But there's a better one now.  You can bury the other in the back yard or maybe set it on fire.

Every year at BotCon, invariably there's an exclusive toy that really feels like somebody was saying, "hey, what's some cracked-out shit that Walky kid would like?" Well, this is this year's.  This is Under-3.

Under-3 was a McDonald's Happy Meal toy way back in the early Beast Wars days.  He wasn't part of the regular assortment, but a very simplified toy with minimal moving parts that was intended for children under the age of three.  Hence the name.  "Under-3" was printed on his baggy in the same space that the names for the other guys went.  He was a lion head that flipped open like a clam to reveal a robot sculpted inside that looked kinda like Optimus Prime/Primal.  That's it.

Bogglingly, a toy based on him is part of this year's BotCon offerings.  He's a strait redeco of Combiner Wars Streetwise, meaning instead of transforming into just a head, now he can transform into just an arm or just a leg.  And a yellow police car, but whatever.  His name is "Unit-3" on his profile card because I don't know.  The point is, that's just a callsign he uses, so his real name could easily be "Under-3."  That's what really matters.  Renaming Under-3 something else puts you on my shit list.  

He's a very striking-looking toy, making him easily one of the best exclusive toys available this year -- and that's in the company of TM3 Megatron.  He loses a little of the charm of the original toy (well, a lot of the original charm) by not transforming into a disembodied lion head, but I think being a new toy of that crazy-ass Happy Meal dude is its own separate charm.  He's Under-3.  For adults.

don't talk to me about the comic he appeared in just yet, there would only be swears

Gonna quickly scrawl this Masterpiece Shockwave review before I head out later today to the airport on my way to Seattle!  It's Emerald City Comicon weekend!  You can find me at booth 112 with Cyanide & Happiness.  It's also BotCon weekend, but I made my choice between the two.  I'm still gettin' the toys (through my buddy who's going), so I'll have them to talk about shortly after I get back... which explains why I gotta get this Shockwave post done first!  It won't happen if I have a bunch of new Beast Wars combiner guys!

Anyway, Shockwave.  At first you might think, man, what does a Masterpiece Shockwave bring new to the table?  Because, really, his show model isn't all that different from his original toy, and honestly his Masterpiece is about the same size as his original toy, and that original toy wasn't a complete loss when it came to articulation, and so you're left with a pretty close copy of a toy you might already have had for like 30 years.  

AND YOUR FIRST THOUGHT WOULD BE RIGHT, BUT WHO CARES, MASTERPIECE SHOCKWAVE IS PRETTY DAMN GREAT

I love this guy.  And admittedly a huge part of that is "I love Shockwave," but I swear the toy is objectively cool besides that.  He still transforms into a purple space gun, and he's still a one-eyed one-handed dude (unless you give him his alternate extra hand), and he's still electronic.  It's only lights this time instead of lights and sounds, but I'm pretty cool with just the lights.  I have twin boys.  I'll have enough toys that make noise soon enough.  The lights are real strong, too.  He really glows (and has separate batteries for his gun-mode light and his wrist-gun light).  

Masterpiece Shockwave transforms a little differently this time around.  I mean, it's 80% the same.  He puts his arms over his head and bends over.  You can't really change that if you want a Shockwave that looks like the original Shockwave in both modes.  But now the designers decided his barrel wouldn't be a separate piece you kept aside in robot mode.  Now there's a long die-cast arm that folds up and places the barrel on his back.  Meanwhile, the part of the gun that USED to be the part that USED to fold up on Shockwave's back folds down and bolsters up the bulk of Shockwave's legs so they aren't so half-a-gun-handle thin.  Oh, and there's a weird garage door of abs that slides down and covers up his trigger penis.  Other than these changes, it's the same transformation.

If you're upset that Shockwave's backpack is no longer purple and looks like his old gun barrel, there's a separate piece you can slip over the new backpack to make it look like the old backpack.  Pretty silly, admittedly!  But it also doubles as a stand for Shockwave in gun mode, so at least it has a secondary purpose.  Speaking of silly, Shockwave also comes with a small handheld version of himself in gun mode, because there was once an episode of the cartoon where Shockwave fired a small handheld version of himself.  As you do.  

And finally, Shockwave comes with a large assortment of various hands.  He's a got solid lavender hand and gun-hand.  He's got a solid lavender replacement hand for that gun-hand in case you want to revisit that one time he was drawn in the cartoon with both hands.  He's got a saluting right hand so he can salute.  And he has ALL OF THESE THINGS AGAIN also in translucent plastic to match the original toy and also facilitate the electronic lights.  There are choices, is what I'm saying.  Like how you can choose between stickers of the proper Decepticon logo and the dorky misdrawn one from the cartoon.  

Much ado has been made about Shockwave's purple coloring.  In some photos it's looked kinda pinkish, while some folks pine for the dark purple of the original toy.  I can tell you that in person, his color... well, it's hard to explain.  It's a very deep purple, but not a dark purple.  It's essentially Shockwave's color of purple from his old Action Master toy, but milkier.  I don't mean "milkier" in that it's whiter, but that it absorbs and reflects light in a certain way.  It... really absorbs light.  How the purple looks is drastically altered by the lighting ambience.  It's difficult to photograph.  Sometimes it looks really different just from photo to photo in the same lighting.  Hell, if you want him darker purple, just stand him in front of something black.  But regardless it's a real attractive color in person.  Like I said, it's deep.  It's like he's carved out of purple milk chocolate.  

My one annoyance with the toy is the head.  You need to pull up on it (and the neck/collarbone section) to lock it into place in robot mode, but there's a real good chance you'll take the head off the neck balljoint instead.  And then you spend time trying to get a head to pop back onto a balljoint that's affixed to a swinging hinged piece from which you can't hold in place.  You know how it is.  I recommend grabbing the head from all corners and pulling directly up, keeping the head looking forward, when you try to lock it in place.  That generally keeps the head from popping off first.  

Anyway, he's excellently articulated, and a waist swivel and an ab crunch is something I never really expected a G1 Shockwave toy to have.  And given how G1 Shockwave tends to appear in his original toy body in basically any G1 story more than any other guy (up until the RID ongoing title in IDW, for example), this toy feels like, more than many other Masterpieces, to be basically any G1 Shockwave.  He can be cartoon, he can be Marvel, he can be Dreamwave, he can be IDW.  

And it makes you wonder if Senator Shockwave also transformed into a flying laser gun.

It's my burfday!  Let's talk about this sweet burfday present I got from my pal Cho.  HI CHO.

anyway, it broke, like, immediately, and had to have it replaced, but that took only like two days because AMAZON PRIME and so no huge bigs

(it's silverbolt's fist, it snapped unfixably when i tried to turn it on its wrist hinge for combined mode, crumbling like so much old cheddar cheese)

BESIDES THAT Combiner Wars G2 Superion is a pretty great recreation of the original Generation 2 Superion.  It doesn't copy its color scheme off a fan work based off another fan work or anything!  As far as we can tell, Hasbro actually did this deco themselves, based on the original toys.  Amazing, I know.   So if you remember G2 Superion, who wasn't canceled like 4/5ths of G2 Menasor was, then you basically know what you're getting here, Air Raid's Spider-Man wing deco and all.

Superion also comes with a redeco of Powerglide in "what-if" Generation 2 colors, since Powerglide wasn't otherwise in Generation 2.  They inverted his colors, basically, just like G2 Sideswipe's were, and there you have it.  

Like Menasor who came with Wildrider instead of Offroad, Superion comes with Slingshot instead of that helicopter guy Alpha Bravo.  So Superion is all jets once again.  I'm of two minds on this.  My first mind's all "oh man but Alpha Bravo is kinda cool and he's a new guy and it's nice that they're not ALL jets, for, like, variety."  My second mind's all "hooray, a new G2 Slingshot that won't crumble to dust!"

You see, G2 Slingshot was made of that notorious "gold plastic" which disintegrates under a light breeze.  Eventually.  It will happen.  It's inevitable.  The chemical composition of the plastic, with its swirly glittery whateverness is what does the deed, I believe.  But this new Slingshot is not made out of that kind of gold plastic.  There's no swirls, it's just kinda a flat gold color.  It should be safe.  Hasbro promised us Slingshot would be safe.

Note they promised absolutely nothing about Silverbolt.

Quickly: So, like, in the Nineties there was almost a Generation 2 Menasor, but he was canceled and BotCon got to have one-fifth of him as an exclusive, the rest being limited to a small handful of samples, causing him to be amazingly valuable.  

But now there's a Combiner Wars giftset that does Menasor in his G2 colors (sort of), so everyone can have one now!  Hooray!  And mine was an early birthday gift!  Yay, thanks, Scott!  

Combiner Wars G2 Menasor is one slick package.  I mean, obviously, you get all these guys at once, rather than having to get them piecemeal in stores or online, and so that's good.  You open up the box and you see everything all arranged there in a plastic tray, and life is good.  Also inside the box is a large paper envelope, which contains your instructions, a collectors card, and a cardstock-quality poster of Menasor.  ....well, G1 Menasor, not G2 Menasor.  But it's still friggin' cardstock paper inside an envelope, so.  None of that floppy thin paper nonsense, this is the fancy stuff.

I have some quibbles though.  From all appearances, the deco on this toy was taken from some guy's DeviantArt digital mockup.  (to the point that the official Transformers Facebook account used his mock-ups exactly in a promotional image, including the yellow Offroad you don't get in the set)  That's kinda shady.  And it also means we get a Breakdown with purple and silver instead of pink and gold, since I guess the DeviantArt mockup guy was working off this fan-painted version of the canceled G2 Stunticons and not the BotCon version people actually know.  

Also, if you're expecting Blackjack to be at all snug when connected to Menasor's chest, don't.

That said, this set is a pretty good deal, especially if you don't have any of these guys yet.  You get six brightly-colored toys for $100 (or less, as Amazon inevitably drops it a few bucks like they did Superion) that combine into a robot and visually emulate a toy 99.999999999999999% of Transformers collectors can't ever own.  Plus, y'know, the poster.  I have no idea why I love that poster so much, but I do.   You may love the poster less.

If you're dead inside.