BTAS The Riddler is here!  Let's talk about him:

1) He's able to tip his hat.

That's it.  That's all you need to know.  Perfect Riddler toy, the end.

Bye!

Before my Combiner Wars Ultra Magnus shipped, we got word that TakaraTomy over in Japan was doing their own Magnus, and it was going to have a bunch of additional paint applications I probably would have done myself (but badly).  In fact, it basically looked perfect.  It had the red legs I prefer my Ultra Magnuses have (a detail from the original toy and the first "season" of More Than Meets The Eye), it painted blue across the pelvis and parts of the shins instead of leaving them bare... there was not a lot to argue with.  It would have to be mine, saving me a lot of time painting my own toy.  

But there was one snag.  

It didn't come with Minimus Ambus!  Japan doesn't *really* get IDW comics over there, even though they're still very popular amongst Japanese fans, and so Minimus Ambus is not really a thing for them.  Instead, TakaraTomy decided to deco up Minimus Ambus as... Alpha Trion, the other bearded Autobot guy in the mythos.  And I guess he pilots Ultra Magnus now for some reason!  Who knows!  There's a two-page comic included, but I am monolingual.  

This is a fun contradiction, in that while Japan's Ultra Magnus is specifically detailed like his MTMTE "season one" IDW comic appearances, he does not come with Minimus Ambus, which is definitely a dealbreaker for me.  

Do I get the perfect Magnus or do I get the pretty-good Magnus who comes with Minimus Ambus?  

I decided to mix and match and get the best of both worlds!  My second Magnus is now here, and I've gifted him the first Magnus's Minimus Ambus, plus all the first Magnus's accessories, so that he gets to have his assembled hammer weapon at the same time as his shoulder missiles and rifles.  (one becomes the other, otherwise)  I have my cake, I'm eating it, I'm living the motherfuckin' Magnus dream.

While American Magnus is in the 1986 Ultra Magnus colors (minus the important-to-me red thighs), with a tealer blue and a milkier white, Japanese Magnus is a darker blue and bleachier white that looks more like the colors from the original cartoon.  His rifles are now white instead of black.  In car carrier mode, his trailer is almost entirely blue, which is truer to the original cartoon's model, rather than the patchwork red and blue of the original toy's.  That I'm sort of lukewarm on, but it's a very weak personal preference as to be negligible.  

The important thing are those red thighs.  

And now I have this spare tiny Alpha Trion to hang out with my other tiny toys!  Maybe he can say hello to The Fallen.  "Hey, in some continuities, we're brothers!" he'll say.  And The Fallen will be like "I wish I were on fire, why aren't I on fire anymore."

But I ramble.

Yay, Poison Ivy!  She was held back for a few months when DC Collectibles, an actual professional toy company, learned that, oh, hey, you guys are saying that translucent plastic painted over isn't exactly sturdy and it kind of crumbles and breaks really easily?  It's like NASA learning our Moon isn't a star.  You guys should know this!

But still, they re-engineered her to not have translucent plastic, and here she is, finally!  I was looking forward to her second-most, out of all the BTAS/TNBA toys, because I love me some TNBA Poison Ivy.  The color palette, man.  I don't understand why Poison Ivy isn't always just, y'know, green.  She was in the comics for a while, but the New 52 made her peachy again.  Boo!  GREEN.  GIVE ME GREEN.  And this bright minty green is the best.  

Poison Ivy comes with the same kinda stand everyone else does, with her model sheet printed on the face of it, plus two sets of extra hands and three various beakers and flasks.  She... might be able to hold one of them?  The holdy-hands -- or at least the ones that look holdy -- don't really look large enough to fit around the neck of the bottles, and I'm not gonna force it.  So let's just imagine what that would look like.  In addition to the holdy hands, she has fists and the open-palm hands she comes packaged with.  I wish she had some open-palm hands with her fingers splayed open more.  I want her to be, like, orchestrating planet growth with her mind or whatever she does.  The normal open-palm hands kinda manage a little, but it's not quite there.  

Poison Ivy's head is huge!  I mean, this is on model.  Bruce Timm lady heads are huge.  But still.  It's a little more obvious in 3D.  

Anyway, I love her.  Even though her articulation's a little shallow.  She's my problematic fave.

There's not many Transformers like Sideways!  Who could forget that canny servant of Unicron, that crossfactional manipulator who worked both sides against the other in pursuit of his mysterious, personal goals?  The way he'd judge you, piercingly, through that glowing slit of a mouthless face, and laugh.  And so visually distinctive, with his purple and his yellow and his black, all wrapped around his menacing two-wheeled vehicle mode.  And his multiple little helper guys!  Who could forget those dudes?  And just when you think he's dead, he comes back, more powerful than ever, resurrected through seemingly supernatural forces. 

Sideways is definitely one of a kind.

And this is definitely Timelines Sideways, one of this year's Transformers Figure Subscription Service toys!  A year ago, we threw a truckload of money down, and then this year, every month for six months we get a different guy in the mail.  And, man, have I been waiting for Sideways.  A lot of detail has gone into turning the Junkion Scrapheap into our favorite twotiming jerkwad, from flawlessly replicating the iconic yellow-stripes-on-purple decor to including his two Mini-Con friends!  

It's a toy that's just so amazingly striking.  That bright green he has is so piercing it looks like it might be glow-in-the-dark, but though it is sadly not, it's meserizing all the same.  And there's so much paint on him, between the stripes, and the trim, and the little details on his face, and the color choices all just come together so well.  I mean, it's hard to go wrong with these colors.  It's definitely the best use of the Junkion toy so far.  And for what a great character!

The Junkion toy is kind of fiddly, though, so he might not be so fun to put back into vehicle mode.  Since their robot modes are designed to ride another of themselves in vehicle mode, the desire to switch them back and forth and have fun with them riding each other is great, but the toy's a little too complicated to facilitate that easily, and so it can be frustrating.  (But Sideways doesn't need to ride a Junkion, I guess, so I'm not sure why I'm going off on this tangent.) 

He makes me wish I'd picked up the new Combiner Wars (noncombining) Leader Armada Megatron, so I could have Complete Armada Character Reimagining Power!  But, honestly, I'd just want it for a group shot to photograph and then put it away forever, so eh.  The original Armada Megatron is better.  

This Sideways, though, is definitely an improvement.  

I've probably mentioned it in this blog before, but when I was a kid, I designed a Transformers combiner.  Powermaster Optimus Prime and Pretender Classics had just happened, and I noticed that we were starting to get old guys (Bumblebee, Jazz, Grimlock, Starscream) redone as new toys with current gimmicks, and I hatched a plan to get me other new toys of guys I wanted years earlier but never got toys of.  And so, using allll the creativity that a ten-year-old can muster, I designed a Transformers gestalt guy made of Ratchet, Ironhide, Prowl, and Wheejack with Optimus Prime as a torso.  It was very creative.  So wow.

Anyway, twenty-five years later, the dream is nearly being realized.  I've got my Ironhide and Prowl, Wheeljack's coming, and there's some art of a possible Ratchet that leaked, and of course there's Optimus Prime.  I am so into this.  I want everyone to be a combiner.  I want to rebuy my entire Transformers collection as combiner limbs and torsos.  Combiner Wars is the shit.

Anyway, all these new limbs here (Ironhide, Sunstreaker, Prowl, and Mirage) are retools of the Stunticons.  Ironhide was Offroad, Sunstreaker was Breakdown, Prowl was Dead End (well, okay, he's a retool of Streetwise who's a retool of Dead End), and Mirage was Drag Strip.  They all get new heads.  They're officially supposed to combine with "Battle Core Optimus," a white redeco of the first wave Optimus Prime torso with a new also-Optimus-Prime head retool, but I'm cool with the first wave Optimus Prime I already have.  My childhood combiner guy didn't have a white redeco of Prime in it.  Also Legends Class Rodimus forms the chest armor.  Sort of.  He likes to not stay on so well.

My favorite of the four is Sunstreaker, since his toy incorporates the big fist/foot/cannon accessory into the robot mode itself.  Plus Sunstreaker's yellow, and you know me and my yellow.  

One thing I don't like is how the fist/foot/cannon accessory on each of these guys is split up between silver-painted plastic and silver plastic.  Some of the plastic in these toys are nylon for structural integrity reasons, and nylon won't take factory paint, but it still makes the weapon modes of each toy look even less cohesive than before, like a piece of gun with some fingers in it.  It's just more conspicuous.  Which, again, is why I'm happiest with Sunstreaker, who can peg his fist/foot/cannon accessory onto his back.  

I've seem some folks complain that we're getting new toys of these four guys when we already have toys of them.  Well, maybe you do!  Those toys came out in 2008!  That was a while ago!  And, like my childhood self, sometimes you don't get to get everything you want during the first pass, so second chances are nice.  And it's even better if these second chances combine into a larger robot.  

Now where's my Wheeljack and my Ratchet?

Look, there are toys of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.  So of course I bought them.  There was no other rational choice.

Entertainment Earth had an exclusive set of the pair (plus a fold-together version of the Weekend Update set) on sale at SDCC this year, and I'm not really sure there's anything more I could have wanted.  (well, okay, maybe to-scale castmembers from both 30 Rock and Parks & Rec)  Each of them has four points of articulation -- shoulders and hips -- and is ... I'd say probably original GIJoe:Real American Hero scale?  Old Snake there outsizes them by a bit, but modern GIJoes are relatively huge.  Amy Poehler's likeness is uncanny, while Tina Fey's is a little weird.  It's probably the glasses.  It's hard to sculpt glasses on something that small and not have it look off.  

They sit on my VCR/Blu-Ray shelf, and I was dumb and took this photo at night when the light's kinda crummy.  Every day I'm like "I'm gonna photograph these guys before it gets dark!" and then every day it gets dark and then it's a month passed and NO MORE GOD DAMMIT, HERE THEY ARE.

The original version is sold out, but a rerelease with a new backdrop is up for preorder.

FINE i guess i'll talk about some of the new toys i've gotten in the past few weeks

Here's the SDCC-exclusive Combiner Hunters three-pack, which I'll showcase 'cuz the remainder of the stock goes up some time today on HasbroToyShop.com.  (OH HEY!  HERE IT IS!) It comes with redecoes of the three Deluxe Class female Transformers we got last year: Arcee, Windblade, and Chromia, plus a bunch of additional huge-ass weapons and one small bit of retooling.

The retooling is Arcee's hands, which go from slot-holding hands to the usual 5mm peghole hands.  She still comes with her swords, and since the slots are 5mm across, she can still hold her swords.  She doesn't come with either of her original guns, which means technically you can't really complete her transformation.  Her hands grasp either end of her smaller rifle in car mode, and without that rifle, the arms kind of just fold underneath and don't secure.  I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, and it's not like they're visible in car mode, but it still bothers me a little.  She comes with a giant toothed cleaver that originally came with the super-large Beast Hunters Optimus Prime toy from a year or so back.   She doesn't hold the cleaver super well, what with it being twice her size, but you can still get her into some poses, and a huge-ass cleaver is still fuckin' rad.  Her new colors, a dark charcoal with some pink and silver trim, make her the most attractive toy of the set.  Plus, you know, Autobot symbol tattoo on her cheek.  Booyah.

Windblade and Chromia have fewer changes to them, with no weapon absences or retooling, and their colors kind of feel a little more shuffled-around rather than changed.  Chromia is improved, I think, with the facepaint around her eyes, which makes her look pretty fierce and a little terrifying.  Which fits Chromia well, hmm?  She's still blue and gray, though now she's more gray than blue, while Windblade is now mostly red rather than only a little red.  They both come with weapons from those 12-inch "Titan Heroes" figures that collectors hate but kids snatch up like crack.  You know, the nontransformable five points of articulation guys?  Windblade's weapon is the "Decepticon Hunter" from the Robots in Disguise cartoon, while Chromia's sword is Bumblebee's sword version of the Decepticon Hunter from the same cartoon.  But, you know, packed with a Deluxe Class toy, they're huge.

A purchase of either this Combiner Hunters set or the SDCC-exclusive Devastator at Comic-Con got you a bonus Combiner Hunters one-shot comic.  That comic's being released to comic book stores on Wednesdays!  I read that comic like thirty times at my booth, and so I'm very glad it was a good comic.  (It introduces Victorion, the fan-voted lady combiner.)

If you like transforming robot ladies in facepaint and tattoos wielding weapons larger than themselves which they use to cut down giant Transformer combiners, then this set is probably up your alley.  

BotCon's been over for a week, but I've been pretty lax in getting some talk up on my site about the stuff I picked up.  But hey, here's Galva Convoy!  He built him myself, separating all his plastic parts from the sprues, pushing in pins and screwing in screws, and painting/stickering him.  I really enjoy the process of putting the BotCon Customization Class toy together, which is why I keep going back every year.  It's just calming to sit there and assemble a guy.  

Galva Convoy is a redeco of Nova Prime (the super racist) and Lio Convoy (the ... lion.... guy...) who were both offered from the Transformers Collectors' Club this year.  He's in homage to the original Galva Lio Convoy, who was an extremely limited (like, 50 of him) version of Beast Wars II Lio Convoy in Beast Wars II Galvatron's colors.  

He comes with a fan-made Covenant of Primus book, designed after its appearance in Beast Wars.  They were given to you in the class upon completed assembly of your Galva Convoy, as part of an incentive to actually put it together, since a handful of folks take the class just to take their Galva Convoys home unassembled still on the sprues.  And, y'know, probably sell it.  That's not in the spirit of the class!  And also Hasbro's like "dude, we only safety-tested these things assembled, so that kinda leaves us wide open legally" so, yeah, the class gave us this small gift for assembly.  It was "handcrafted by Japanese fan Myu" according to the written materals.  It opens up to a 90 degree angle and has a 5mm peg at the bottom.  The written materials also say the accessory is "neither manufactured by nor endorsed by Hasbro."  Does that last bit mean this little thing can even go on TFWiki?  I dunno.

Since the toy was mostly black plastic, there was more steps to painting areas of the toy than usual, since some of the colors required a base coat.  This is true of the stuff painted lavendar, red, and gold.  The black and blue violet got away without needing a base coat.  The end result is very pretty, though.  Not enough pink guys in Transformers.

There was a lotta stuff at Toy Fair this year, from the giant-ass Devastator to the Combiner Wars guys to a buttload of Kre-O stuff that'll never come out, but this friggin' Ultra Magnus was at the top of my list.  This friggin'  Ultra Magnus!

When we first got store listings that hinted at a Leader Class Ultra Magnus, there were a lot of different ways the toy could have panned out, and there were even a "he tell me" folks around who were insistant that this Magnus would go those ways.  But naw, dudes, this guy ended up being everything I personally wanted.  He's no strictly 1984/5ish redesign like the Megatron and Jetfire before him, he's a purposeful translation of Ultra Magnus as currently seen in the IDW comics, down to having a little tiny Minimus Ambus friend to go with him.  That last part, especially, I wasn't expecting to see in a toy -- not only because production costs are rising and parts counts falling to match, but also because it's celebrating a very specifically current unorthodox treatment of Ultra Magnus.  Sure, we get a lot of white cab Optimus Primes here and there in lieue of an Ultra Magnus, but actually getting our little mustachioed reimagining of that concept I thought was unlikely.

And so I am amazingly pleased.

Minimus Ambus himself is very very small.  He's about half the size of a Legends Class figure, so he's amazingly dainty.  Even at this size, though, he's not as simple as he could be.  His car roof and robot backpack is on this hinged arrangement that seems too rich for this toy's size's blood.  In Ultra Magnus's robot mode, he fits inside the chest, all mech pilot like, with his fistholes pegging onto control joysticks.  Because this is where the larger robot's head fits into during car carrier mode, Minimus can't stay here when you transform Ultra Magnus, but Minimus transforms into a car, and so I think there might be a place for him in vehicle mode, if you think about it.  

(Japan is apparently going to do him in white and purple and red and pretend he's Alpha Trion, while painting the larger Magnus robot more like how he is in the IDW comics, because I don't know why.)

The larger Ultra Magnus part of the toy's had a lot of thought put into it as well.  His shoulder missile thingies and his two rifles combine into an axe, which is a callback to his Animated counterpart.  (Which obviously also makes me amazingly pleased.)   Articulation abounds, despite the way Ultra Magnus's design usually being a stumbling block to such.  His head turns, despite it being part of a mask that goes over Minimus Ambus's head.  His arms manage to articulate outward from the torso, despite those tall shoulder pylons.  The shoulder missile launchers are even on hinged tabs so they can move out of the way of his outward bicep articulation.  And Magnus has, like, has actual working thighs, despite that whole area needing to be a flat plane for cars to ride on in vehicle mode. 

A lot of these ideas are shared by the Masterpiece Ultra Magnus that came out earlier this year, but concentrated in this less-expensive form.  The walling of the trailer mode piling up on the back of his legs is another, as is the way his forearm armor accordions around his fists.    The result is a very playable robot figure with a number of weapon configurations, who transforms into a vehicle mode that can carry your other Transformers, who also includes a little pilot guy.  This toy goes down my list and checks everything off.  

Surplus to all this is the little sculpting details all over him that suggest he transforms into a truck cab that's several stories tall.  There's tiny ladders and tiny doors everywhere.  Each of his wheels would be larger than my apartment.  This doesn't distract from the toy at all, and really only creates a conversation starter, but what?

Combiner Wars Cyclonus combines with any four Combiner Wars limbs and Viper to form Galvatronus!  Galvatronus's chest and head are part of the "reshelling" that Cyclonus got when he was retooled from Silverbolt.  And, yeah, this is pretty weird.  But it's a good weird.  I like good weird.  It's just something nobody expected, going into this Combiner Wars subline, that, y'know, we'd get a Cyclonus torso who'd combine with five other guys to form a Galvatron super robot.

According to the packaging bio, Galvatronus's deal is he uses mind control to steal the limbs from other combiners, which is awesome.  It also doesn't stop anyone on message boards from asking if he's going to get "real" dedicated limbs every five minutes.  C'mon, you guys.  He steals other people's limbs.  It's his deal.  Figure this one out.

Cyclonus and Galvatronus are not going to be involved in the Combiner Wars fiction in the IDW comics, which is something that made me sad when we learned it a while ago.  Sure, it'd make no sense -- why would Cyclonus transform into Galvatron?  The two are definitely not friends in IDW, in contrast to the syncophantic Smithers/Burns relationship the two have in the original cartoon which this toy reflects.  Additionally, IDW Galvatron is specifically against combiners, and spent some time in his distant past trying to genocide any iteration of them.

But that'd actually be pretty cool, storywise, don't you think?  You have this Galvatron guy who's super against combining because he thinks they're an ethical contamination of his species, and you also have this Enigma of Combination artifact that basically kablamfs Transformers into being combiners if you shine it at them.  It'd be like that Bloom County storyline with Oliver Wendell Jones and his Electro-Photo Pigment-izer.  And then, you know, it'd involve Cyclonus some how.  Two people who hate each other being kablamfed into being a combiner together, at least one of whom hates combiners.  That's just got story karma written all over it.

Anyway.

Galvatronus is weird and awesome.