In a world where Arcee is basically the only girl Transformer who ever gets toys on the regular, while the powers that be are reluctant to redeco toys that aren't originally female into more females, female Transformers sure always look exactly like Arcee, huh?  Heck, just in the past month or so, Fun Publications has given us three female Transformer toys all based on three different versions of Transformers Prime Arcee.  Whoof!

It's BotCon's 20th year, and so BotCon gave us a bunch of toys that reimagined some of the toys of years past (like Shokaract).  Flareup and Flamewar were from Fun Publications' first BotCon in 2005, and both were toys based on Energon Arcee.  (Though Flareup got a new head.)  So here they are again, now as redecoes of two different versions of Transformers Prime Arcee.  

Of the two, Flareup is my favorite, I think.  But then, she's exactly the colors of my luau shirt I wear to conventions (orange, black, orange, and yellow), so I may be a little biased.  She's a straight redeco of Transformers Prime "Robots in Disguise" Arcee, the second version of Prime Arcee that followed the brief "First Edition" toyline.  I prefer this version of Prime Arcee the most, I think.  It's a little simpler than the First Edition and easier to transform, and so it's a little less unwieldy.  And so I'm happy to get it in orange.  

Flamewar is a straight redeco of "Robots in Disguise" Arcee's heavily-retooled Beast Hunters iteration, with lots of wings and sharp edges.  I don't have the retail version of this Arcee, partially in the hopes that we'd get a redeco of her as a different character later for BotCon, and my hedging has obviously paid off.  The Beast Hunters version of the mold also has a giant crossbow weapon which feels about as large as the rest of the toy.  It's kind of ungainly.  It's the reason I prefer the earlier version of the mold.  I mean, I like the wings and talons and what have you, but that huge-ass weapon is often annoying to deal with.  

If you've been following BotCon news, you've probably heard about these two in the convention comic book.  Yeah, they, uh, get pretty objectified in there.  It's kind of distracting.  The comic pushes forward with the plot, as per normal, with pretty excellent art, because everyone else is all dudes, and then suddenly BAM, boobs and contorted torsos and panty-shots.  Oof.  Well, um.

Yeah.

A G1-redeco of Energon Scorponok was not something I thought I wanted until this thing was presented to me.  The original Energon use of the mold was G1y enough for me already.  It had enough green for me to think of it as passably G1 Scorponok and I didn't figure the-same-thing-but-with-purple would be interestingly different enough for me to care.

WHOOPS.

I guess I didn't count on the unforeseen insanity of giving the guy a new transforming Headmaster head in addition to the tweaked colors.  Honestly, that kind of stuff doesn't happen at this level.  We get a new head occasionally, sure, but the weird extra mile taken here took me aback.  Here's how it works: Encore Fortress Maximus came out recently, a reissue of the original Fortress Maximus.  That means tooling for the little Headmaster guy, Spike Witwicky, is viable.   So what Fun Publications did was retool Spike Witwicky a new Scorponok face to go on his back, then retool a new neck connector piece for the combined robot mode.  That piece just flips down into the chest cavity where the original head used to go in the other two modes.  So in the end you've got two separate toys being combined unnaturally into this new entity, using a multiple of new pieces.  

Energon Scorponok is one of my favorite Transformers toys ever, and so even though I kind of shrug at the idea of doing a G1-style version, I'm happy to have another in general.  There's something delightfully monstrous about him.  Some folks don't like his proportions or the way his torso looks, but for me that's part of the appeal.  He's dwarfed by his own massive claws.  He looks like he could grab planets out of the air.  The whole damn thing projects this feeling of menace.  And, so, sure, I'll take another one of those with a new transforming head, why not.

The retooling does solve a few minor problems with the toy, as well.  It ditches the original head's visor, which in latter releases was getting loose and having trouble staying on.  That's entirely gone, so problem dissolved.  Also the new neck connector piece makes the head sit up higher on the torso, so that looks a little better to me for the character, bridging the monstrous Energon Scorponok's feel with the slightly more housebroken G1 Scorponok.  

The toy is, however, assembled wrong.  The green and orange panels on either side of the purple torso (along with the panels' purple backings) are swapped left-to-right.  This doesn't impede transformation, but it does keep his shoulders from sitting properly in robot mode by a fraction of an inch.  Just unscrew the two screws behind the panels on either side, remove the arms, swap the panels-and-backings, re-attach the arms, and rescrew.  Huzzah.  

Scorponok still transforms into three modes -- robot, scorpion, and jet.  The new Headmaster can kind of stand in the small gap remaining inside the cockpit, in between the new neck piece and the wall of the torso, but it looks a little awkward.  The scorpion mode, as always, is great.  It's really just a pile of construction equipment - shovels and hooks and treads - assembled into the shape of a scorpion.  That's always really done it for me.  The jet mode is still that surprisingly awesome thing as well.  You wouldn't think you'd get a great jet out of a scorpion made of construction parts, but you do.  The electronics are gutted, however, as BotCon electronics tend to be. 

The box set sold out, so the only place to get this guy now is on the secondary market.    Good luck with that.

Way back in 2000, my third BotCon, we got two exclusive toys.  The first was Apelinq, Wrecker Commander, and the second was Shokaract, cruel lord of all time and space.  Once a lowly near-nameless Predacon grunt, the Hunter found the Dark Essence of Unicron buried on Earth and was awarded the Matrix of Conquest.  Now he was Shokaract, rule of Cybertron's future, powerful beyond measure, speaker of hilariously over-the-top Simon Furman villain dialog.  But since time travel exists, he guarded the Dark Essence zealously.  Of course, his own paranoia led to his downfall, and Shokaract's reign was erased from existence. 

There's no way there'd ever be a toy of the Hunter!  That'd be just crazy!

Well, sometimes crazy works, and here we are fourteen years later with a danged Hunter toy.   Very recently we got a new toy of Beast Wars Rampage as this year's club membership exclusive toy, which mounted a very very very tiny new head on the body of Deluxe Transformers Prime Megatron.  A great idea with a kind of hilarious noggin.  Don't get me wrong, the thing is beautiful.  Absolutely gorgeous.  But that tiny, tiny head.  (It has to be, to fit in vehicle mode.)  Since Shokaract was originally a redeco of Rampage, folks clamored for a Shokaract redeco of him.  I did not.  I didn't think it'd be what I wanted.  Shokaract should be huge, not a deluxe.  Why would I want a tiny Shokaract?  It's not like they'd designate him his pre-Shokaract Hunter form.  And once we learned Club Rampage had a tiny head, that was another nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned.  Did not want!

Well, old me was dumb.  I love this thing.  It's probably my favorite toy of the whole set.  Somehow, amazingly, in these different, darker colors, Shokaract's head doesn't look so puny.  I'm not sure how.  Maybe it's just the color scheme creating an optical illusion.  But it's surpisingly okay.  And the toy itself is astoundingly pretty.  Shokaract was always pretty, so it shouldn't be that surprising, but still here we are.  And, yes, the goddamned thing is officially the Hunter, pre-finding-the-Dark-Essence.  It's like a toy just for me! 

Plus it comes at a pretty opportune time, since the original Shokaract is covered in blue chrome that does not survive well decades past his production.  The chrome on mine was falling off like autumn leaves just by picking him up and moving around -- and that's without all the dusting I had to do to make him presentable.  I was dabbing lightly with a cloth to keep from scraping his surface off too much.  Oof.  Some day I will just have to bite the bullet and send the thing to Cheetimus to scrape and repaint the blue.  It won't be chrome, but it'll be something I can friggin' transform again.  It sucks when you can't handle one of your favorite toys which is super expensive to replace.  

Anyway, the new one doesn't have chrome and so it's something that can actually be played with.  It's very, very welcome.  As of this writing, he's still available (with his fellow pirate Brimstone) on the Collectors' Club website and on Big Bad Toy Store.  

Slash is a Transformers velociraptor with feathers.  *points to review title*

Yeah, some folks don't like this thing.  It has some faults.  But it's a friggin' feathered dinosaur.  *points to review title again*

I mean, he's not, like, a great feathered velociraptor, by which I mean it's not terribly accurate to what we currently think dinosaurs like that looked like (for example, the totally made-up forelimbs), but it's a damn sight more accurate than those fancied-up lizards from Jurassic Park!  I'm lookin' at you, Beast Wars Dinobot.  

Part of folk's problem with him is his limited articulation. Mind, he techgnically has full articulation, it's just shallow.  He has elbow joints that don't really do anything because of the bulk of his arms, and he has fully-functional legs if the thighs weren't so short or constantly getting in their own way.  He has a lot of stuff going on and it all wants to be going on in the same confined space.  

But other than that?  This dude is beautiful.  The dark teal and lime green are together one of my favorite color schemes to come out of Age of Extinction's toyline so far.  Part of my brain keeps suggesting that maybe he'd make a great Beast Wars Dinobot redeco, and then the rest of my brain reminds me that, dude, that'd be going from this glorious color scheme to friggin' brown.  BROWN.  That is a serious step down.  

And, again, feathered dinosaur. 

Can't understate that.

Tankor's wavemate is Rattrap, who's a Deluxe Classed version of his original 1995 Basic Class toy.  Back in 1995, all of the Basic Beast Wars figures had autotransformations -- in Rattrap's case, you move his rat mode tail and he springloads roughly into robot mode.  Most of these worked by cramming robot limbs up inside the altmode, resulting in a standard "robot guy with huge altmode backpack and a chest made from the head or ass or something" look across the size class.  Rattrap made it onto the Beast Wars television show, so it was established that Rattrap is that guy with a rat head on his chest and everything else from his rat mode piled up on his back.  

Well, now it's 2014 (ninteen years later!), and it's time to make a larger, non-autotransforming version of that same design.  He definitely still has most of his rat mode on his robot mode back -- if he didn't, he wouldn't look like Rattrap -- but there is an attempt to integrate more rat parts in with his robot mode.  Well, okay, only his hind legs.  Those unfold and pack into the back of his robot mode legs.  His rat hindfeet become his heels.  The rat backpack does collapse in on itself better than the original's does, which is nice.  (The show Rattrap's backpack SHRANK, which isn't exactly an option here.)  

Since new Rattrap doesn't auto-transform, that means all the business of shoving his robot mode limbs into his animal shell is now your job!  And, yikes, is it a job.  It is a quagmire down there, with everything competing for the same spot at certain points.  There's about three separate joints in each knee that need to be bent and compiled in a way Just So in order for everything to fit together as it's supposed to, and until you figure out this correct way, transforming him may take you quite a while.  

That said, his rat mode is wonderful.  It's got a prehensile tail (it's soft plastic with a wire running through it) and he's got somewhat poseable legs and feet.  He's also got an openable jaw.  But what really blows my mind is that he's also designed to stand upright if you want.  There's a patch of fur-textured gray plastic you can rotate up behind his rat head so that when you bend the rat head forward while upright, there's no unsightly gap in the back of his neck.  Of course, there's always going to be those robot arms in place of his rat stomach, but making the rat mode able to get on its hind legs goes a real long way towards making the toy feel like Rattrap the character.  I think this is my preferred mode.  

The robot mode is great, but there are some small limitations.  His elbows can't bend a full 90 degrees, for starters.  This limits the amount of things you can do with his arms.  It'd be nice if his wrists rotated, too, and they look like they do, but it's possible this was something budgeted out at some stage.  His rat ears are also pretty large and tall (as they should be for rat mode) but they get in the way of most of his peripheral vision.  Photos of him need to be head on or from slightly above or you aren't going to see his head.  

On the plus column side, he's got some interesting weaponry in this mode.  He has a rifle that can split up into two separate guns.  Open up his left forearm and you can pull out one of his sticky bombs which he used on the show.  

In summary, this is a Rattrap toy with two great modes, some minor flaws, and an annoying transformation.  The latter deal should be somewhat mitigated once the proper leg transformation order is discovered, but not entirely.  It's a toy full of character and stuff to do. 

(Like Tankor, his comic book pack-in is published with terribly out-of-order pages.)

It's Tankor!  Well, the other Tankor.  The Windblade comic book is currently milking the fact that there's two guys named Tankor hanging around, and their peers have -- without their knowledge -- labeled them "tall Tankor" and "fat Tankor."  Well, let's hope that at some point nobody has to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons to save fat Tankor's life, huh?  

"Squat Tankor" would be a better description, I think.  This is one of those "conservation of toy mass" things that resulted in us getting really short Bulkhead and Lugnut toys back in Animated.   Tankor here was presented as a super-massive large-ass dude in Beast Machines, and so if you want to find some Beast Machines Maximals remotely to scale with this guy, maybe try the McDonald's Happy Meal figures.  

The robot mode makes me super happy!  It's an amazing Tankor robot mode, both in regards to cartoon accuracy and in fun.  He's just this wide slab of awesome.  I love his stubby back-canted tread legs and his large meaty arms.  (his forearms could stand to be more meaty, but they wouldn't fit during transformation if they were any thicker)  He's got a missile launcher (the pressure-release kind the old Cyberjets had) that operates if you pull back on the cannon barrel.  Or ditch the missile.  It's kind of dopey-looking.

Transformation is pretty easy.  You pile his arms into each other, fold his torso down, and peg his legs into his crotch.  It's not terribly accurate to his Beast Machines cartoon tank mode, but that thing transformed via magic anyway, so it's not very surprising.  The robot mode head ends up on top, and that's really the most important thing.

I very much like him!  Especially since he's showing up in Windblade's comic these days.  I think of the toy as that guy more than the Beast Machines guy.

He comes with a comic.  Its pages are insanely out of order.  Yikes.

Transmutate is a heroic character.  She has trouble reading facial expressions, but that doesn't mean she lacks compassion.   She has a strong sense of right and wrong, and she believes in justice and making things equal for all.  But her lack of empathy makes achieving her goals difficult, and it gets her into trouble.  Yet she perseveres despite all odds.  

And it's unlikely that this time she's going to die at the end of her story so that everyone else learns an Important Lesson.  

Transmutate is a redeco of First Edition Transformers Prime Arcee.  She's in teal and a silvery gold plastic color that really likes to photograph an ugly brown.  (I have done some color nudging in Photoshop.)   The colors look pretty nice in person, especially with the translucent red accents to set off the neutralness of the teal and gold.  The toy's face has a smile sculpted on it, which is pleasant, but Transmutate's face is usually expressionless, so that feels a little odd in context with the character.  She's exclusive to the Transformers' Collectors Club, and so she comes in a medium-sized presentation box with cut-outs in the foam inside for both her and Rampage, who is the club's free-with-subscription figure this year and arrives separately.

I like the toy a lot for what it represents -- a kind of character we don't get much of, in Transformers or otherwise.  At least not the nondisposable kind.  She makes me happy.  

A few years ago, Tailgate was just that guy with the tech spec that was about how he's some wacky dude who believed all machines were sentient beings and talked to them as if it were true.  I mean, it's a fun Budiansky-esque concept, but it's funny how quickly such things are buried under the waves of Actual Longterm Characterization.

In the More Than Meets The Eye ongoing comic book, Tailgate's naivete is taken in another direction.  He is technically about two-weeks old when we first meet him, even though he fell in a hole and slept in it for several million years until the present day.  So he doesn't know about the Autobot/Decepticon war, he doesn't know that he shouldn't go make friends with Cyclonus, he doesn't even know who Optimus Prime is, and he doesn't know not to let Swerve start rambling at him, though he picked up on that one pretty quickly.

All this is why I am overjoyed that Generations Tailgate (like Swerve before him) is based on his Nick Roche (I believe) design from More Than Meets The Eye.  Sure, he's white in places where he should be blue and vice versa, and he transforms into an Earth car instead of a Cybertronian one, but he's definitely that little adorable design.  And so I neeeeeeeeeeeded him.  I especially needed him back in like December when we thought he'd be out already and so I drew him into a Dumbing of Age strip, fully expecting him to have hit retail by the time my buffer got eaten up to that far.  For the longest time, the most unrealistic thing about Amazi-Girl was that she owned a Tailgate toy.  Well, no longer!  He's out, both at online stores and in United States brick-and-mortar stores as of a few days ago.  

Tailgate is more complicated than he looks.  He's definitely still a Legends Class-sized guy, with the lack of a rotating neck joint -- NOPE IT MOVES HOORAY just from lower than you'd think -- and otherwise simplified articulation, but his torso does all sorts of crazy things.  The easist way to lampshade it is by pointing out that his exhaust pipes, which stick out the back of his vehicle mode, are placed in the middle of his robot mode torso.  You pull half of his torso down, pull the rest of his torso up, and then try to wrap stuff together to form a car.  Not bad for a Tailgate toy, considering the original required only that you fold his legs down.  

He comes with Micromaster partner named Groundbuster, based on the original Neutro troy.  He's there.  He makes some sort of weird claw thing.  I suppose a weird claw thing is useful if you're a waste disposal guy like Tailgate, so sure, whatevs.

(This review uses male pronouns, but it's distinctly possible that the jury is still out on that.)

Way back in the first live action Transformers film, near/during the climax, the AllSpark started going nuts and bringing life to ordinary machines, making new Transformers life.  (New, expendable Transformers life.)  One of these guys was born from a Mountain Dew pop machine.  He'd later get his name from a fan who shouted out "Dispensor!" at Hasbro panel after they'd asked for suggestions.  (Hi, Susp.)  Anyway, he's got kind of a cult following and even got a little Robot Heroes figure.  

But TakaraTomy was all "Dudes, that is not enough," and for their "Movie Advanced" Age of Extinction toyline, they grabbed Payload, who was an armored money truck from the first filme's toyline, gave him a new head and arm attachment, and dubbed him Dispensor the pop delivery truck.  We first got word of this being a thing that would happen from a really super-fake reading list of toy solicitations.  I mean, why the hell would TakaraTomy make a new Dispensor and spend money retooling an older toy to do so?  It'd be insane!  List must be fake.  

Ha ha ha.

Instead, no, this world's gods are benevolent, and he is real.  Payload, who he's retooled from, is a toy I personally haven't owned, so the toy itself is new to me.  Back in 2007, Payload was one of the generics from the accompanying licensed video game.  His most distinguishing feature in robot mode was his single-lensed camera head, shared with the other kinds of generics, so replacing it with a new head really makes this version of the toy stand out as his own guy.  The new arm attachment is nice, as well, since Dispensor's most distinguishable feature was his arm which fired pop cans.  It pegs over a forearm (if you don't transform out the hand) or pegs into either side of the vehicle mode.  

Same as with Payload, Dispensor's secondary gimmick (after transformation) is the large claw that emerges from his chest.  When not emerging, it sticks about half a foot out the back of him.  This makes his robot mode a little back heavy, and you have to pose him leaning over forwards a little to accommodate this.  

A pop machine is painted on the top of the truck.  You could stand the truck up on end to pretend he's a pop machine, but the thick rear bumper kind of gets in the way of doing this.  Instead of saying "Mountain Dew" like it did in the film, he instead has Mountain Dew-esque logos on him which read "Mood Wiplash," a misspelled name of an alcoholic Transformers drink from the More Than Meets The Eye ongoing comic book series.

Yes, that's right, I said "pop" all those times and not "soda." I'm from the midwest.  Eat it!

Dinobots!  I don't care what your opinions of the Michael Bay movies are, they're giving us Dinobot toys now, and so that means they have now been totally justified forever.   Emotionally shallow?  Dinobots!  Annoyingly jingoistic?  Dinobots!  Frequent racist undertones?  .... Dinobots....?

Well anyway, here's Scorn.  He's a new Dinobot, a spinosaurus, and he has a new name.  And it's a pretty good new name!  It's a one-syllable word that starts with S, so it's off to a great start by fitting the existing pattern, but the actual name is, y'know, Scorn, which is pretty awesome in itself.  

Presuming he's in the film, he likely won't be this bright red and orange the toy is, which is too bad.  I mean, I understand why the toy is bright colors -- Hasbro has a job to do, and that job is to sell attractive-looking toys to children.  And, well, a span of like seven solid gray dinosaurs doesn't seem all that exciting on pegs.  Or in the movie, really, but oh well.  I've stopped caring about movie accuracy.  Give me a red and orange guy.  

Hasbro reps said at Toy Fair that the Dinobots transform in the movie, but to be honest, Scorn's robot mode doesn't really feel like it.  Other than the vestigial teeth on his hips, he doesn't feel like he's got the fake altmode kibble on him that most movie designs do.  He transforms more like someone designed from the ground up by Hasbro than an ILM design.  You know, kinda Beast Wars traditional-style, with the head hand and the tail hand.  His head is also kind of simple -- all of the non-Grimlock Dinobots have pretty simple helmeted heads, none of which feel particularly movie-y.  But this is a new trilogy with a new artistic direction (everyone else has pretty humanoid faces now rather than being all monstery) so who knows.

All this said, Scorn is pretty awesome.  He's easily the best Dinobot of the three that came out at launch.  He also feels more massive than his wavemate Slug (the Triceratops).  Though they're both roughly the same height in robot mode, Scorn is way larger in beast mode.  He's also got a pretty well-articulated head and neck, with desired joints in the dino legs and shoulders as well.  He's a great spinosaurus.  He's probably the best toy of the first wave.