I wasn't super sold on the last MP Rodimus, in general.  I got him strictly because he was a large Hot Rod-type guy who could be more in-scale with my Beast Era Wreckers toys than the original Hot Rod toy.  Nobody who got the toy seemed to like it, and also it kind of liked to break easily.  But I needed that large Hot Rod, and all he really needed to do was stand at the back of the shelf and be a big Hot Rod, so I got him.  

But seriously, he was not great.  I've never successfully transformed him.  I've gotten close, but at best I end up with a convex automobile, with the vehicle mode sort of bent in the middle in a way that keeps both axels of wheels touching the ground.  There was something I was doing wrong, but just transforming the thing was such a chore I couldn't be bothered to investigate.  What a fiddly mess.

The experience left such a bad taste in my mouth I didn't really pay much attention to the NEW Masterpiece Hot Rod for the longest while.  But folks seemed to like him when he came out.  He was relatively simple to transform.  (I mean, he'd have to be.)  And he was play-withable.  And he wasn't a clusterfuck.  But I didn't really see a need for a Masterpiece Hot Rod, so I continued to not really care.

...until I went back and looked at that Beast Era Wreckers groupshot and realized that its Rodimus is shorter than Primal Prime, not taller.  Huh!  I could get the new, smaller toy and chuck the old piece of garbage that I hate.  And so I did.

Yeah, I like this Hot Rod.  Other folks weren't lying, he's much easier to transform.  He's a bit of a shellformer, to be sure, as a large chunk of his altmode folds up and compacts onto his back, which is one step down from the older larger version.  However, he's otherwise a billion steps up.  All that kibble pegs together very securely at every step of compression and the result is not as bad to see in person as you'd think from photography.  

In fact, this new guy tends to be, as a rule, better in person than photographed.  Our first photographs of the test shot caused people to scoff at his flat chest and kibble backpack and skinny legs, but when he's in front of you, the three-dimensionality kind of smooths those flaws over.  

This new Hot Rod comes with almost all the same stuff the older Rodimus did.  He comes with his buzzsaw arm attachment, and his two guns (but they don't combine), and now he comes with a fishing rod.  I wish I could set aside my extreme fatigue with the animated Transformers movie long enough to enjoy how objectively awesome it is that a Transformers toy comes with a fishing rod.  I should be tickled by the goofiness.  But, well, eh.   I'm all TFTM referenced-out.  Hot Rod does not, sadly, come with a transforming Targetmaster Firebolt partner like the American Rodimus did.  This Hot Rod can hold him fine in robot mode, though.  Not, like, properly, with the notches fitting into the sculpted slots or anything, but he can get a good grip around the handle regardless.  Unfortunately there is no way to attach the Targetmaster gun to vehicle mode other than friction and gravity.  

Have I mentioned I like that this guy's pink?  Hot Rod in the animated Transformers movie was pink.  Pink and yellow orange and gray.  But when he become Rodimus Prime, he's red, and his toys are invariably red, even the non-Prime ones.  I appreciate that this toy is the proper hue.  

I also appreciate that it's not fragile, untransformable garbage.

I was satisfied enough with Hasbro's "Armada Starscream" toy.  I mean, I've gushed about it a few times here before, most recently for "Super Mode"/Thundercracker, so it's clearly a toy I like.  Takara came out with their own version which was much prettier (fairly objectively, even), but what mattered to me at the time was that my toy matched how Starscream appeared in the then-current IDW comic books.  Their Starscream looked like the Hasbro toy.  So. 

Fast forward to now, when I've got Super Mode Starscream and that kitbashed Sunstorm and the upcoming Skywarp and Ramjet.  Those are all painted pretty damn well, and suddenly my Hasbro Armada Starscream looks like the odd guy out.  Long story short, I got the Takara one to hang out with my other versions of the mold.

The Hasbro one can continue being the IDW guy.  The Takara one can be the Unicron Trilogy version of Starscream.  He can hang out with Thundercracker and Skywarp, and maybe Ramjet will come visit occasionally when he blows through the vacation days he's built up with Unicron.

The main difference between the two Starscreams is that Hasbro's (left) is mostly red plastic and Takara's (right) is mostly white plastic.  And then Takara puts all this red and black paint on top of that, while Hasbro kinda just let their toy be, relatively.  

I love this thing.

Sky Lynx!  When we were kids, my little brother really really wanted Sky Lynx.  Like, he had an incalculable yearning.  I mean, think about it: Sky Lynx was a shuttle that split into a lynx and a bird, and the lynx and the bird combined into a dragon.  Oh, and it could walk.  You put in batteries and the damned thing walked by itself.  You can see the appeal, right?

So then I got Sky Lynx for my birthday from our grandparents.  I opened the thing up in front of my poor brother.  Back then, my grandparents liked to get a smaller present for the Other Sibling (our sister was not born yet or was too young to care) on the other's birthday so they wouldn't feel completely left out because that's the kind of spoiling-riffic stuff you can do as a grandparent, and so there is this amazing photo of my brother limply pointing to his also-ran BraveStarr toy he opened up that day, a very visible inner brokenness deepset within his face.

Decades later, I'd buy him the Japanese reissue.  It was the least I could do.

But this Sky Lynx is mine!  His shuttle mode no longer splits up into lynx and bird modes, instead going straight to dino-dragon, and obviously he doesn't self-walk anymore.  He does, however, become a torso for Combiner Wars limbs to connect to and become Sky Reign.  Not a terrible trade-off.  

Space shuttles -- at least the ones we sent up into space for years -- aren't a thing anymore, being all retired and whatnot, and so probably relatedly Sky Lynx is a very liberal interpretation of one.  He's got little forward-swept wings on his back end.  He's got a weird pattern of windows and little tiny wing horns near the cockpit.  The crawler-transporter is still there, and since Sky Lynx is no longer a proper real-life shuttle, I guess it's actually now just a part of his generic space shuttle mode.  As mentioned above, it does not detach.  It's not even all connected down there in the middle, so even if you tried disassembling the toy you'd have a scattering of disjointed blue parts.

Though in dragon mode Sky Lynx no longer walks, he does have a little more articulation than before.  His forelegs (not the back) can splay outwards.  He's got bicep and thigh swivels, and you can move them yourself without breaking the toy, like you were liable to in the 80s.  I swear, that old plastic was made from crusty old cheese.  The original toy had a few joints in his neck (necessary for transformation), but I don't think it could look to and fro, so that's new.  Out the back, just barely, is a tiny version of his original tailfin-ended tail.  It's barely visible from most angles, but I'd say it's vestigial.  Attach the two sword weapons to it, and you get a properly-lengthed tail.  The original tail is probably there just for purists.

The torso mode is where you find this toy's only real deficiency.  Unlike the other torsos in Combiner Wars, Sky Lynx's shoulders do not seem to secure in any way, and so you have to hold them in place while you articulate his arms or else the shoulders move with them.  But this mode is where his lynx head ended up, so you kind of forget this annoyance when you behold his splendor.  

The two swords combine into a longer sword, because of course they do.

Armada Starscream from earlier in the Generations toyline was a pretty damn good Starscream toy.  It was a new version of... well, Armada Starscream, but shorter and with shoulder joints and you didn't need to have a Mini-Con to make his missiles fire.  It was a joy.  I mean it, it's a great little thing.  So much that when Cheetimus painted one up like Sunstorm I was like YOINK and bought that fucker.  

Well, here comes more!

This is Starscream Super Mode, because way back in Armada, when they redecoed everybody, they made them into upgrades of the same guy rather than new characters.  But Starscream's "super mode" was in Thundercracker's colors, and so when he got upgraded in the cartoon the English version dubbed in a little "I look like Thundercracker!" comment and the toy was sold as Thundercracker.  Otherwise, Starscream in this deco is known as the Starscream who goes total Linkin Park angsty and gets himself disintegrated by Unicron to make Megatron so way sorry for the way he's been a stupid jerk, DAD.  I'm serious, there were so many Linkin Park AMVs.  He tried so hard and got so far, yo.  But in the end?  (he came back as a zombie in the next series and then in the series after that he was totally fine, so... no, it didn't really matter)

But hell yeah I'd buy a Starscream Super Mode or Thundercracker or whoever.  I loved the deco on the original toy, which was certainly inspired by Thundercracker, but took a few left turns.  For example, his eyes had to be silver.  They really had to, to keep the rest of his deco silver where it needed to be silver.  And that plastic sprue was nylon, which is unpaintable.  And so instead of having his face be red-eyes-on-silver-face, Armada Thundercracker was red-face-on-silver-eyes.  Which is, you know, striking.  I'm very upset this did not pay forward in later Thundercracker toys.  

I do think the deco loses a little something when his blacks are gunmetal instead of black.  But whatcha gonna do.  It's my only sort of not-really complaint.  I like this toy a lot.  Give me more.

(spoilers: we're getting more)

 *finally climbs out of a pile of babies*

Look, I have new toys!  New Combiner Wars toys!  I don't have these guys' torso yet, but let's talk about the limbs.  They're wave six of the Deluxe Class guys, aka The Final Wave.  I mean, there's still a buttload of more box sets coming out through the rest of the year, but these are the last single-packed guys before Combiner Wars gets transitioned into Titans Return (aka Everyone Is A Headmaster).

Wheeljack is the most changed of these four.  Though he used to be Breakdown, he's had his entire car mode replaced and most of his robot mode as well.  He's 90% new toy, though he transforms exactly the same and has all the same functionality.  I'm happy for the vehicle mode reshelling the most, because I just kinda feel like Wheeljack needs to look like a Lancia Stratos, moreso than most other Autobot cars need to be their original car model.  I mean, it's cool that he has new robot parts, too, but that feels like extra on top of a necessity.

In between promo renders and the final product, some of Wheeljack's black plastic is now white, like his crotch and elbows.  This is not helpful, since he was kinda too-white already!  And so now he's really white.  Don't get me wrong, he has a lot of paint -- Wheeljack kind of has to have a lot of paint, since he's got a distinctive rally deco, but all his budget went into creating that, so you don't get a lot of the small stuff like having painted forearms and whatnot.  S'okay, I'll paint a lot of that stuff myself later.

Second, let's just get Smokescreen out of the way.  He's a straight redeco of Prowl.  Like Wheeljack, he uses up all his paint budget in his vehicle mode's rally deco, and so his robot mode's a little plain.  Smokescreen's a little frustrating, because we know there are other unused heads on these guys that might not make it to retail (coughcoughRatchetcoughcough) but I guess Hasbro proooobably wanted a race car instead of a second white-and-red ambulance.  S'okay, Ratchet's likely this year's BotCon customization class guy anyway.

Hound is Swindle with a new Hound head!  Swindle himself was a heavy retool of Rook in the same way that Wheeljack is a retool of Breakdown -- aka, it's all new except for a crotch and a peg and some tiny joints here and there.  In addition to Hound's new head, his smaller weapon now has nubs on the back so that it can be shoved into the rollbar cage on his robot mode back, giving him an over-the-shoulder weapon.  (Some later versions of Swindle reportedly have this as well.)   Over-the-shoulder weapon pleases me!  

Where Hound is frustrating is how they deco him.  He's got, like, two separate vehicle fronts sculpted on his torso.  Up top on his chest is one set of fake vehicle front, and then there's a separate set of fake vehicle front on his stomach.  This is so he can do double duty as both Hound and Swindle provided you illuminate the right parts with paint.  However, the right parts were not illimunated with paint!  Hound has his Swindle parts painted, ignoring completely the Hound bumper across his ribcage, while those Swindle parts were ignored on Swindle.  Grrrr!   Maybe I'll do some painting on Hound as well.

And finally there's Trailbreaker, who even-more-finally has his own original name back.  Hasbro tried to make so many Trailbreakers over the years, realized they didn't have the trademark but weren't willing to find a new one, and so we got a lot of black Ironhides.  And so finally, a year or two ago they were all FINE, dubbed him "Trailcutter," put out a few Trailcutter toys, and even got Trailbreaker to change his name to Trailcutter in the IDW comics.  And then Trailcutter died.  And now they got "Trailbreaker"-the-Trademark back for real and so I guess they can give his proper name to his corpse.  

Poor Trailbreaker.

Trailbreaker has a few retoolings, but not nearly as many as Wheeljack.  He's got a new head, obvs, but he's also got new forearms and new fingers on his combiner mode fist.  One of his new forearms ends in a hand and the other ends in a gun, as Trailbreakers do, but they made the end a 5mm peghole so you can shove his combiner mode fist in there.  Sweet.  His combiner mode fist now has kind of a claw thing going on instead of fingers, which is super neat.  Well, it'd be super neater if this tooling got used a second use (as Hoist?) so you could give a combiner robot double claw hands, but whatcha gonna do.  (Other than buy a second Trailbreaker.)  

Trailbreaker's new claw things give me pause, though.  The fronts of the claw are painted, which is... weird.  Other than dipping the whole damn thing in silver, like with the Optimus Maximus guys, these hand/foot weapons don't really get paint, and they certainly don't get spot paint.  I have this feeling that the silver finger fronts are meaningful in some way, but I can't find any new way for the weapon to interact with the robot mode.  I mean, obviously, the first thing you think of is Trailbreaker's silver forcefield generator which usually goes over his head, but you can't shove this weapon behind Trailbreaker's head any better than any other version of the mold.  (ie, terribly)  I dunno.  It's gonna bug me.  

Hey, it's the first Phantasm toy that doesn't automatically spoil her secret identity!  

So you guys have been noticing that I've been super into DC Collectibles' 6-inch Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures toyline, right?  Anyway, there's a Phantasm now.  Unlike most everything else, she doesn't come on her own bubble card, but instead she's in a two-pack box with BTAS Batman.  I knew this was coming out ahead of time, so I skipped the single-carded Batman in favor of this set.  (I think this version comes with fewer parts, though, like not as many alternate hands or something.)  

This Phantasm toy is... almost perfect?  Like, it's amazing until you get down to the ankles.  Most toys in this series, unless they're, like, the Penguin, have ankles that position both to and fro and side to side, so that soles can be planted firmly on the ground regardless of the angle of the legs.  Not Phantasm!  For some reason, they didn't give her side-to-side ankle articulation like nearly everyone else.  It's kind of annoying!  Everything else here is up to par.  I especially like how her head moves around on its neck joint inside the more-rubbery-plastic hood.  But damn, those ankles, why.  Why.

Phantasm's just a smidge shorter than Batman, which I guess is a compromise between her costumed height (huge!) and her height when she's got her mask off (probably 5'7").

She'll be super menacing and supernaturally unstoppable until the very moment you find out she's a girl and then you have to rescue her a bunch and then she'll disappear for like fifteen minutes while you fight the Joker because it's not like this movie is about her or anything.

SUPER BONUS PICTURE OF BABY DOLL, WHO CANNOT STAND UNLESS YOU WRAP KILLER CROC'S DISPLAY-CLAW AROUND HER HEAD->

There's three base toolings for Combiner Wars Voyager Class toys so far (with a fourth, Sky Lynx, on the way), and Hot Spot was by far the best of them.  So I'm similarly happy with Onslaught, who is a reworking of Hot Spot.  Hot Spot was lithe and dynamic and sturdy in all the ways that matter, and Onslaught takes all these fundamentals inherent in the tooling and nudges them in a different direction.

Onslaught keeps a lot of the same parts, like the basic torso framework and most of his arms and legs, but now he transforms backwards from the way Hot Spot did -- his legs now become the back of the vehicle and his arms become the front.  The extended armature with Defensor's combiner robot chest-and-head parts is replaced with something a little more simple.  There's just rotating and unfolding involved in Bruticus's combiner kibble, rather than also wrapping around, but that's fine.  It accomplishes what you want it to.  It looks like Bruticus's chest and head in combiner mode, stashes away behind Onslaught in robot mode, and (in its weakest iteration) becomes the weapon placement in armored truck mode.  If the two cannons aren't enough for you, there're also pegholes to attach Combiner Wars Shockwave, who also becomes Bruticus's handheld weapon.  

It's a pretty perfect Onslaught and pushes all of the Onslaught buttons I can imagine, which is fairly impressive for a toy that's mostly Hot Spot.  After a few new parts and a reversed transformation (and a slightly altered combiner torso formation) and you've got everything you'd want.  He can even peg his cannons into the kibble on his back to complete his original silhouette.

He's just very satisfying.

Way back at BotCon earlier this year, Hasbro said that Onslaught was going to have a running change -- first his combiner parts were going to be tan plastic (to make a better Onslaught) and later they'd be silver (to make a better Bruticus).  It kind of seems like they've skipped the tan plastic version entirely, and maybe it's because everyone in the world said they'd be waiting for the running change with the silver.  Honestly, Onslaught doesn't need the tan parts to look like Onslaught.  Who cares if he has a bunch of silver stuff in the middle of his armored truck mode instead of tan?  It's a worthy compromise to get the better-looking combiner mode.  

This is Nightracer!  Way back in 1995, while BotCon spent a few years rotating through different showrunners, we got our first real-ish Transformers convention exclusive.  At the first BotCon in 1994, the exclusive was just an unreleased figure provided by Hasbro, Generation 2 Breakdown, but in the following year, we got a new toy sort-of designed by the convention itself.  I say sort-of, because Raksha, 1995's person-in-charge, wanted a G2 Go-Bot Bumblebee in black and blue, but Hasbro gave her a G2 Go-BotBumblebee in black and neon yellow/green.  (...which, I recall, is just what you get when you don't give G2 Go-Bot Bumblebee his gold paintjob -- he's just black under there)  

Anyway, I didn't go to that BotCon.  I was still a teenager and I don't think my parents were letting me out of the subdivision on my bike yet, much less Dayton, Ohio.  And so I don't have original Nightracer.

I do have this one, though, now!  She was the secret final figure of this year's Transformers Figure Subscription Service, and she's a redeco of Tailgate, finally in the intended black-and-blue instead of the black-and-neon.  She comes with Shakar, a little Micromaster person of undetermined gender (though since the name is an anagram of "Raksha" who is female I like to imagine the little 'Con is also).  Raksha also wrote the filecard bio, which is a nice touch (but didn't name Shakar).  

I am pleased!  Nightracer is one of those super-expensive early BotCon toys I don't have, due to her limited numbers, and now I have a toy of the character, plus a little friend.  And more Decepticon women are always welcome.  There's a shortage!  

Big Bad Toy Store got in the Combaticon wave of Combiner Wars Deluxes, so let's talk about one of them, why not.  I'm glad the Combaticons are in the second half of the line, because we just kind of got them a few years ago, combining and all, in the Fall of Cybertron toyline.  There's a little deja vu involved.  When Hasbro dips into the Combiners well, the Combaticons tend to be what gets pulled up first, because they're one of those rare early teams that were an interesting variety of vehicles, rather than "all jets" or "all sportscars," and so it's kind of nice that they got to sit out the first few rounds this time.

This is Swindle!   I like him.  He's a drastic retool of the Protectobot Rook.  Like, super drastic, to the point that he's really just a guy who transforms in the same pattern but becomes a differently-sculpted robot and vehicle.  He shares, like, a crotch and thighs probably and maybe some other structural stuff, but the rest is all new.  But, as mentioned, he transforms the same.  "Roof" of the car goes on his back, legs form the lower half of the front, the arms fold up into the back.  Rook was a good toy, and so is he.  

And it's just nice that Swindle gets his own danged head, you know?  Of all the "guys who transform into limbs for larger guys" from the original Transformers, he's arguably the one dude who stood on his own, character wise.  And so he's important in a way a lot of the other Combiner Wars dudes are not.  And yet Hasbro, half the time, tends to get his head wrong.  Swindle has these adorably large eyes, right?  He's a con man who's adorable.  That's kind of his thing.  But the Alternators toy was really just Trailbreaker in tan, and then his Fall of Cybertron toy... I guess copied that head instead?  It didn't really look like Swindle at all.  But here's the wide-eyed combining Swindle toy you wanted.  Finally.

You can plug his cannon into his arm like he had it in the original cartoon, if you want.  That's also cool.

Last year, we got three female Autobot toys in rapid succession: Windblade, Arcee, and Chromia.  And it was great!  But it'd be even cooler if we got female Decepticons, too.  As short supply as female Autobots are, female Decepticons are in even more dire straits!

And suddenly, TakaraTomy over in Japan, they saw this deficit, did some retooling, and BAM, gauntlet cast.  And one of these three new bad guy ladies is Blackarachnia.  She's technically a Predacon, not a Decepticon, but she was a Decepticon once, and she's often a bad guy, and so I'm fine including her in that group.  She's also different in that she wasn't retooled from Arcee or Windblade or any other recent mold, naw, Takara went back and grabbed Animated Blackarachnia from 2007 and used her as a retooling base.  I mean, Blackarachnia's a spider, and there aren't really a lot of spider toys to make stuff outta, so.  

Animated Blackarachnia is a pretty great toy to start off from!   It's actually a fairly inventive transformation, especially with how the arms and legs from from the spider limbs and how the torso is created.  The spider head folds down to form the chest and the pedipalps (which are balljointed) rotate and form the contours of the waist.  Seriously, it's pretty great.  

so what takara did was remove the pedipalps and replace them with new pedipalps that instead fold up and become boobs

I mean, I sort of get it.  If you're going to make a Beast Wars style Blackarachnia, her, um, chesty parts are an important part of the visual package.  Kind of, you know, in the same way you'd want your Jazz toy to have a chest made out of a car hood.  That's just what Jazz looks like!  And Beast Wars Blackarachnia puts the "rack" in "arachnid."  And, so, yeah, on that level, I understand.

But, damn, this does not leave her with much of a torso.  In fact, it merely leaves her with the original toy's spine.  She's got these two globes, a skinny stick to connect those to... well, the middle part of her pelvis that wasn't previously created out of pedipalps, and then legs.  She looks like something from the cover of Youngblood.  

That aside, she does make a pretty good Beast Wars Blackarachnia.  The new headsculpt is absolutely perfect, if set a little high on the neck, the paintjob is a good attempt at hiding the fact that she has hands and not claws (and you're supposed to leave her forearms half-transformed to achieve the look), and she's just generally painted meticulously all over.  You don't notice she no longer has a torso if your room's lighting ain't so great.

But it's just, like, what.