*looks through his site to see what he said about the Swerve that's getting summarily replaced*  Huh.  Apparently my verdict was "he's red."  Well!  

This new one's red, too, in addition to being (almost) perfect.  Swerve's always been pretty cool!  He's a Transformer who can't drive, despite being a car.  He never really got any good fiction, like, ever, though, so all he's had to go for him all these years has been that Tech Spec write-up.  Until recently, that is!  The "More Than Meets The Eye" ongoing comic book series (which you may have heard me talk about for forever and ever) has thrust him into the spotlight as an insecure loudmouth jokester.  And he's pretty great.  And this Legends Class toy is really really good at looking like that Swerve does.

Sure, the toy transforms into an Earth vehicle instead of the Cybertronian car he does in the comic, but that's details.  What's important is that he's a tiny ball of annoying energy and that perfectly sculpted little always-yackin' face of his.  Even his toy can't keep his mouth shut.  

He transforms pretty simply, as you'd expect.  Unfold his legs, pull out his arms, and collapse his hood back over his roof.  Remember to push forward his head from his shoulders so he's not staring at the sky.  I mean, you can have him do that, if you want -- he's pretty short, and so up articulation on his head comes in handy sometimes.  This articulation means his head can't turn left and right, though.  That's no big deal.

Up there, I put (almost) in parenthesis in front of "perfect."  The only thing that keeps him from being so, really, is that I really wish he were sculpted with fingerguns.  You know, index fingers out, both of 'em.  That woulda made him perfect.  Dude needs some third-party forearms.  

Swerve comes with a little Micromaster dude who's basically Sky High but named "Flanker" for trademark reasons.  Sky High transforms from robot to weapon to jet and back.  I know less about Sky High as a character (there's not much to know) so I'm less excited about him.  Here's a gallery on Tumblr if you wanna look at him and more of Swerve.

I got mine from RobotKingdom.com.  He's not in the United States yet.  I'm sorry, but you have to wait.

If I had a time machine, I would probably use it to go back to like 1999 or so and tell myself that this toy would exist.  Look, little dude, you don't have to pull all the parts off your Rhinox and sculpey yourself a more show-accurate one.  Just... wait a while.  You'll lose that thing anyway.  

Also in a few years you're going to stop believing the Earth is 6000 years old, so why not cut that shit out earlier.  You'll be free.  Let it go.  Let it go.  Turn away and slam the door!

The original Rhinox toy was designed to be kinda like a samurai guy.  He's got his samurai skirt and he gets a sword and a mace weapon and his mutant face splits out and kinda looks like the sides of a samurai helmet.  The cartoon model was all "hell naw" and removed a bunch of that and ignored his sword and just made him this huge unstoppable bruiser who's also super-smart and really good at being a leader and settling disputes and... okay, Rhinox was kind of on the edge of being annoyingly perfect.  But he was humble and kind of a homebody, so that kept that from happening.  Rhinox was never "i have to go now my home planet needs me," and other folks mostly ignored that he was clearly the most awesomely competent dude in that show.  

The original Rhinox toy was also a mess.  God dang.  Everything hangs everywhere.  He transformed from rhinoceros to a Christmas tree, I'm pretty sure.  Just cascading panels everywhere.  Thank goodness the newer, bigger Rhinox toy emulates the cleaner look of the television show.  The back end of the rhinoceros does split into quite a few parts, but they all compact neatly around him and usually lock down.  A hanging crotch skirt piece remains as the single remaining callback to his original samurai look.  (You can fold it up under his jaw-chest if you want to erase that motif completely.)  

In rhino mode, he's a very satisfying rhino, if immobile.  His butt and tail and horns and ears are all made of soft plastic.  There are no gimmicks in this mode.  He will look pretty and that is basically it.  Don't even open his jaw.  It's not supposed to be opened.  The jaw is for transformation and there's rows of very very not-rhinoceros-like sharp teeth in there for robot mode and the whole thing is hinged too far back in the jaw anyway to look good.  Don't do it!  Enjoy your static rhinoceros, dammit.

In robot mode, Rhinox has the articulation you expect, though I'm appreciative that his balljointed neck allows him to look up, which facilitates some nice chaingun of doom poses.  Speaking of which, he comes with two of those, as is Proper.  As with the original (single) weapon, pump the lever and the chain spins.  As not with the original, it's an actual chaingun thing, and not a weird rotating mace sawblade thing.  If you don't want your Rhinox to be encumbered with his weapons, you can shove the 5mm handles into the deep screwholes in the backs of his shoulders.  We always wondered where Rhinox was reaching when he'd grab behind himself and pull these outta seemingly nowhere, and now we know.

Rhinox is packaged mistransformed so that his torso is elongated.  Properly transformed, his crotch compacts deeper into his torso.  He's depicted this incorrect way on the packaging as well.  But done correctly, he's rightly stout.  

Two things I don't like about him:  1) His legs are a little loose!  Sometimes he's hard to stand.  2) I wish they'd kept his lips.  This new toy's mouth is more of a simple sculpted line.  Not only can't he be a samurai anymore, but he can't be a black dude, either (who is voiced by a white dude).  Stop this cultural erasure, Hasbro!

you totally need to buy him, for reals

he's so great

Man, Waspinator is the one guy in this wave of Generations Deluxes that is always hard to find!  He was missing when I got the other three in Austin (no worries, he was bought up by the dude who sent me there), he was the lone member of the wave when I found them yesterday, and there was just one lone Waspy remaining when I finally found him this afternoon.  He's not shortpacked or anything -- there's two of everyone in each case, and most places seemed to have multiple cases.  Folks are just buyin' up Waspinators and leaving everyone else.  

In your face, G1!

When folks learn we're getting new toys of old Beast Wars guys, they often wonder why.  It's an understandable viewpoint if thought about in the abstract -- I mean, usually fans want modern reimaginings of characters who are from Before Articulation, and Waspinator is definitely on the After side of that wavefront.  Usually folks want new toys of old dudes just to get those dudes with articulation, and Waspy's original toy doesn't fall short there.  

But once you get the original (well, mine's the Japanese release with bright green shoulders instead of pea green) next to the new one, you realize, oh, hey, Hasbro/Takara's gotten a lot better at things that aren't articulation in these past nigh-20 years.  Next to the new Waspinator, old Waspinator looks like someone blindly put him together out of mud.  Increased show-accuracy aside, new Waspy is just much more crisp and solid and visually interesting.  He's got a lot more going on.

Waspinator's lost his spring-loaded missile launching (he still has the stinger gun though) while picking up a wing-flap gimmick.  Pull on the lever on his back and they either swing forward or clap together, depending on how you have your wings placed into the balljoints.    He's also lost the head-swapping "mutant head" gimmick, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "robot" head exists in the tooling somewhere so they can pump out a Buzz Saw redeco in the future.  

Waspinator also transforms a little differently.  Instead of transforming Waspinator's robot legs into some amazingly oversized wasp legs, the legs instead try to hide themselves underneath the insect mode.  Well, "try."  They're pretty obvious under there, because they're actual robot legs, but they do run along the contour of the body.  It's also better, I think, than trying to do it the old way.  I prefer the insect legs to look like insect legs, even if they're sprouting out of robot parts.  

He's basically a perfect Waspinator toy, if what you're looking for is a toy of Waspinator-the-character, not toy-that-will-become-Waspinator-the-character.  But if you'd rather the latter, then you probably already have that one.  

Like the other Deluxes from this wave, Waspy comes with a comic book issue that features him.  It's not a great issue, but hey it's a comic book, and I'm sort of happy that Waspinator has been inserted into this continuity.  It's fun to see guys like Jhiaxus and Optimus Prime interact with him.  And since Wheelie's in there, too, it's not like Waspinator's the guy with the most annoying speech gimmick.  

Well that's the last of the Autobot Cars subgroup to be remade in Classics/Universe/Generations!  Skids finishes 'em all up.  It makes a perverse kind of sense that it works out this way.  Dude got two lines in two different episodes in the original cartoon, was heavily shortpacked back in the day, and made real appearances only in the old Marvel stuff.  He's the guy you're bound to forget.  

(Maybe that's the hidden joke regarding his characterization in the ongoing IDW comics.  Dude's got amnesia.  He's forgotten himself!)  

His original toy was a Honda City Turbo, which was this tiny thing, so his new toy is a similarly-eensy modern hatchback.  The Turbo wasn't sold in America, and was drawn in the comics and cartoons as a much larger mini-van.  Americans know what mini-vans are.  Compact cars, not so much.

Just like the Trailbreaker toy which preceded him, this Skids is based on Alex Milne's design from the More Than Meets The Eye ongoing comic book but with a more Earthy alternate mode rather than a Cybertronian-style one.  His head is the Milne-est thing ever sculpted, with the artist's signature pointy hook nose.  In robot mode, he doesn't look far from having leapt directly out of the comics.  He's just got a few Earth car parts here and there to spoil the illusion.

I like the idea of Transformers being designed after certain artist's styles.  Especially if we're going to get characters repeating.  It'd be nice to have, say, a "Geoff Senior" Nightbeat or a "Guido Guidi" Galvatron.  It interests me artistically.  Usually instead Hasbro tries to skew towards a more neutral presentation.  

(Skids also comes with an issue of MTMTE, as do the rest of the current line of Deluxes.  But that issue isn't drawn by Milne, so you don't really get the one-to-one comparison.)  

Skids also comes with the "nudge gun" that was a focus of his storyline in the MTMTE comic book series.  This smaller gun can plug into the back of his larger gun (based on the toy's original weapon) to make an even longer gun.

He transforms fairly similarly to the original toy.  He's got a hood chest and his legs fold out of the back of the car and the roof and wings fold onto his back and his arms sorta tuck away somewhere inside.  Also like the original Skids toy, he's covered in weapons.  There's two shoulder-mounted weapons, missile racks sculpted into his shoulders, and guns under his forearms.  Each set of forearm guns is geared into itself so that if you raise one side you raise the other.  

The only thing that bugs me about the toy is the lack of non-hand storage for the guns in robot mode.  I kinda wish I could plug them in somewhere on the robot mode to keep his hands free.  However, the only other 5mm pegholes are on the undersides of his feet in robot mode.  

(His hips are misassembled, so you'll have to swap them to get his legs to bend forward.  No tools needed, just chunk those pieces out of their tabs.)

I like Beast Wars a lot, in case you haven't noticed.  So when the six Transformers Collectors' Club Subscription Service guys were announced at last year's BotCon and one of them was a redeco of Big Convoy in Ultra Magnus colored named "Ultra Mammoth," I was abnormally excited.  You know, given the circumstances.  It's a redeco of Big Convoy, after all, who's kind of a pile of mammoth parts loosely attached to a robot.  But it was a new Beast Wars toy, with a new name!  Exciting!

It was the new name that gave me hope.  He was "Ultra Mammoth" and not just plain ol' "Ultra Magnus."  Obviously, he was a new guy like Optimus Primal's a new guy and not Optimus Prime.  Obviously!  But, ha ha, no, eventually we'd discover that he was indeed just Ultra Magnus.  Silly David and your stupid hopes and dreams.  But what really took me for a trip was the eventual reveal that he wasn't even in the friggin' Beast Wars.  Instead, he's native to the Shattered Glass Universe, or is at least "our" Ultra Magnus after crashlanding in the Shattered Glass Earth's past with a bunch of other Generation One guys who fight in a completely different war.  For reals, it was just a bunch of G1 guys fighting, like always happens whenever somebody gets their hands on the Beast Wars franchise.  I mean, it's nice that it's not mucking around with the "real" Beast Wars and doing its own separate thing, but it's still not really something I want to see. 

(I do want to see it DRAWN like that, though.  Matt Frank draws the best beasts, expressive yet ferocious.)

Long story short, I wanted to rescue this toy's potential -- in my own mind, even if nobody else cared.  I just wanted a new Beast Wars guy.  And so I decided I'd draw a story about Ultra Mammoth being a new guy.  Nothing about how he has to rescue the universe or anything, and nothing with all of the weird claptraps that modern Beast Wars fiction has fallen into.  My Ultra Mammoth was going to be a newborn protoform, as was originally intended with stasis pods, before the stasis pods became the means for writers to inject more G1 dudes into the Axalon crew.  (When your random Maximal exploration ship somehow includes Grimlock, Soundwave, and one of two distinct-but-simultaneously-existing versions of G1 Prowl while the other G1 Prowl and G1s Silverbolt, Ironhide, Ravage, and Starscream are already involved, there might be a problem here.)  I also wanted a story where a stasis pod landed and its inhabitant actually does what a Maximal protoform is supposed to do -- scan an indigenous life form and do science. 

(Also I threw in Waspinator, because I like stories that involve/advertise toys currently on shelves, plus both had fates of ending up alone on a planet, so that felt like some theme cohesiveness was built into the pairing.)  

I hope everyone liked the story!  I'm sorry it took over Shortpacked! for two and a half weeks -- I knew that if it didn't publish in public where there was a very visible deadline each night, it would be something I'd never finish.  Ultimately, I just wanted something different hammered into my brain when I saw this Ultra Mammoth toy, something that reminded me more of Beast Wars.  You guys kind of got corralled into this like so much colateral damage.

The toy itself is, as mentioned briefly above, the Big Convoy mold, for better or worse.  It's a sizeable thing with many, many parts, and a Beast Wars Neo toy, so you know those many parts are going to annoy you at times.  The new color scheme is very attractive, even if it's just the original Ultra Magnus toy colors mapped onto this thing.  A blue mammoth rides that sweet groove between dorky and beautiful.  

The harpoon missiles which holster in his legs have sadly been remolded.  They're now thicker all around, which means they don't fit inside him any more while in beast mode.  They click into the launchers fine, but there's not enough room inside him in mammoth mode for them to fit.  Other than that, this mold doesn't show much age, even though it's fifteen years old.  My Ultra Mammoth's elbow joints are even strong enough to support his massive trunk gun, which is unheard of.  Usually you gotta rest it over his shoulder.  He still has that wacky third mode where his mammoth mode grotesquely opens up into a cannon, and his tusks still wiggle when you pull back on his ears.  The rubber in his trunk is a little stiffer than in earlier iterations of the mold, so pulling on the lever at the top of his head doesn't cause the trunk to curl as much as it used to.

If you want one, he's still available at the Club store if you're a TCC member or Big Bad Toy Store if you're not. 

Finally Kre-O gave me what I've been wanting all along, a Destro Kreon.  Everything else in the GIJoe Kre-O line exists merely to support this Destro figure.  It's nice that they saw fit to put him with Baroness and a HISS tank, two other things I wouldn't mind having.

It's not nice that these three things came packaged with some giant-ass sprawling ninja dojo or whatever, including Snake-Eyes and some other ninja dudes.  I have assembled my Destro and Baroness and HISS tank.  Those other things remain in the box, perhaps for all eternity.  They are surplus to my requirements.  

Kreon Destro has a chrome head, as one would expect, and he comes with a rifle and a M.A.R.S. briefcase.  The briefcase contains one single $100 bill.  Destro's a high roller.

(Slice and Major Bludd are sold separately.)  

I've bought two Batman-affiliated action figures within the past few weeks, and it wasn't until I opened up the second one and set it down on the coffee table where the first happened to also reside that I realized, oh, okay, yikes, these two guys.  These two guys.

I'd bought Surf's Up Batman earlier from The Laughing Ogre.  I have a growing collection of various six inch scale Batmen that increasingly reflect Batman's history through the years and in various important cornerstone styles, and you really can't not have a 1966 Adam West Batman in a mix like that.  And when there are two possibilities and one of them is Batman in friggin' swim trunks and with a surf board, there isn't really any doubt which of the two is the one you should be going home with.  

A week or so later, again at the Ogre, I picked up Death of the Family Joker, partly because we're getting a handful of Greg Capullo-styled Batman figures early next year which I will probably buy all of, and this Joker seems like he'd complete the set.  

So what I'm saying is, my coffee table was a battle between Surfing Batman and I-Cut-Off-My-Own-Face-And-Wear-It-As-A-Mask Joker.  There may be no better incidental illustration of the ... spectrum of tones in Batman stories.  

Need I remind you that Surf's Up Batman is based on the episode "Surf's Up, Joker's Down" in which Joker tries to steal the surfing skills of surfers in order to "rule the waves."  And Batman has to stop him because, you know, I guess it's a crime to rule the waves or something, hey, it's the Joker, you should probably stop him if he's doing stuff.

And, again, Death of the Family Joker is wearing his own cut-off face as a mask and killing more people before noon than cancer does in a year.  Because, you know, that's how you measure the awesomeness of a DC villain these days, how many dudes they kill in 22 pages.  I just can't see any reason to be into, say, the Riddler unless he's snapping necks left and right.

Anyway.

I'd largely ignored the various Alternity toys and their cousins.  Man, I've got buttloads of Optimus and Megatron and Bumblebee, and they're all bound to be way less frustrating than these overcomplicated die-casty high-pricey things.  It is not a toyline meant for me.

But when an Alternity spin-off, Transformers GT was announced, my ears perked up at the mention of a possible Fortress Maximus retool of the base Optimus Prime mold.  A Fort Max who transforms into a sweet rally car?  That's an awesome enough idea to take the plunge on one of these things.  Plus it'd give me a Fort Max toy that's small enough to interact with other toys as a regular guy, as he's usually depicted in the comic books.  

And so here he is.  I hadn't realized way back when I preordered him that I'd decide I was also going to get the reissue as well and they'd arrive within a few days of each other.  My Maximus cup spilleth over.  

I didn't expect him to be simple, and he sure isn't.  He's also not quite as frustrating as I was anticipating.  There's been some second-hand horror stories about some of these Alternity-ish molds, but Fort Max's greatest sin really is just being way super complicated for very little gain.  He doesn't transform into the most attractive of robots, and his car mode's back half literally shreds up into pieces to form something that is probably legs because they're on the end of his knees.  He is not elegant.  But nothing about the transformation makes you want to run some designer's face over a cheese grater.  

On the plus side, his car mode is spectacular.  I am a sucker for a logo-covered car, and GT Maximus doesn't disappoint.  He also has opening doors and an opening hood with something that's close enough to looking like an engine under there.  (It's the back of his head, mostly.)   Included is a car jack that is really a sword.  

Like the rest of the Transformers GT line, he comes with a "GT-Sister," a Microman-bodied race queen.  His partner is Hiiro, and according to her only fiction, her gimmick is crying to get what she wants.  She comes with a bunch of alternate hands you can swap out, and I look forward to immediately losing them.  

Because it's just not a Fortress Maximus toy if he doesn't come with a human who has weird ideas about crying.

I was pretty fine skipping MP Sideswipe, because, really, who the hell is Sideswipe?  He's only a popular guy because 1) he's from 1984 and 2) he's red.  He's kind of the Default Autobot.  (Now, put him in G2 colors and we'll talk.)  But I don't think I can pass up on Prowl.  

Like Ravage and Buzzsaw, Prowl is one of those dudes I just like a whole bunch, and feel I should own a "Masterpiece" version of.  Much like Sideswipe, he didn't do much of note for years, but he finally distinguished himself in the very late Generation 1 years in the Marvel comic, where he started appearing again because he had an Action Master toy to sell.  Here, he was strict, by-the-book, and was an amazingly self-righteous prick.  And I gobbled this the hell up, because this was pretty outstanding characterization for an Autobot back in the day.  Other than Grimlock, Autobots tended to be pretty nice.  But Prowl was not.  He was selfish and had an inflated view of his own importance.  He was kind of like Dwight from The Office -- very good at his own actual job, but his inability to connect with others and lack of charisma kept him from rising as far in the ranks as he'd like.  And this really infuriated him.  

I'm very happy the current IDW comics have taken this version of Prowl and ran with it.  If Prowl isn't just a little bit of a jerk, he doesn't feel like Prowl to me.  And while Prowl is indeed a super jerk, it's also nice when he's also right.  He is indeed a by-the-book strategist, a mechanoid run by logic -- kind of a heroic counterpart to Shockwave -- and Prowl's correct when he sees his fellow Autobots championing the more bloodthirsty and reckless amongst their ranks and is disgusted.  But Prowl's just as interested in justifying his means as they are, just from a different angle.

(The cartoon Prowl was basically a non-entity, meanwhile.   It's part of why this Masterpiece toy doesn't COME with anything wacky like much of the other Masterpieces have.  He was not terribly noteable.)

So I'm happy to report that this Masterpiece toy is pretty great!  There are two kinds of Masterpiece toys -- the ones that I want to smash a little with a hammer and the ones that are complicated but not infuriating.  Prowl is thankfully one of the latter!  In fact, I'd say he's less infuriating to transform than both the recentish Universe toy and his more-recent Beast Hunters toy.  He's certainly more involved than either of them, but he doesn't require the harrowing fiddliness they require.  There's no going back and trying to get panels to line up better because you didn't fit something inside the right way.  

And unlike many similar toys which have trouble getting the arm assembly down and out and around the hood during transformation, his arm assembly is pretty no-nonsense.  The whole damn thing just swings down and out of the way first-thing.  Nothing pops off during transformation and nothing ever tries to occupy the same space as the rest of him.  His feet are a much-more complex version of the Universe toy's, but, again, not in a way that will cause frustration.  There's just more steps.  

So, like, major thumbs up.

Prowl's Masterpiece toy is sized based on his robot height relative to Optimus Prime's in the television show.  It's sort of a nonsensical scale beyond that (he'd be much smaller if their vehicle modes were in scale) but I like that it is a purposeful scale of some stripe.  Him being much smaller in general makes me happy.  I don't have Sideswipe, and so most of the Masterpiece toys I have currently are all basically about the same size.  It's nice to have some height variance.  I like height variance.  It makes the Masterpiece line come alive to me. 

Just wish Grimlock were taller.

I got a Fortress Maximus when I was a kid, for Christmas from my grandparents.  He was super huge.  He's still super huge, at just under 2 feet tall.  Until Metroplex came out this year, he was the tallest Transformer toy of all time.  

And during the past 25 years, I may have left him in a window.

It's not super apparent when he's been in dark, yellow basement for a long while, but get him out in the light and oh my lord, this poor thing.  And the plastic worries me.  If you try to turn certain parts, he creaks and you feel stuff want to buckle a bit.  And lord knows how many spiders are inside him.  I've cleaned him many times, but... only as well as a human is able to.  

He's also had a diaper on him since 1997.  I got a diaper as a gag gift at my eighteenth birthday party, and so I put it on Fort Max.  Why not?  And it kind of stayed on there, and I started taking him with me to my first BotCons so my friends could sign the diaper.  And eventually it became a Thing and the diaper never came off, because diapers aren't really re-applyable. This means he hasn't been transformed in sixteen years.  

(One of the of the signatures on the back belongs to Burt "Skyflight" Ward, who is no longer with us.)  

I'd passed on the Fort Max reissue when it was first announced and released, because I had a Fort Max.  I was pretty proud to have a childhood Fort Max.  He was my little pal.  Because of the diaper, he's one of the few toys I have from my childhood which I have attached sentimental value to.  But I think he's going to die soon.  And even if it isn't soon, he looks like a yellow-green mess.  He's heartbreaking to behold.

And so when Big Bad Toy Store knocked $120 off his price for a week a short while back, I decided to get an eventual replacement.  Surprisingly, Maggie thought it was a good idea, but I suppose she has less sentimental value invested in my original Fort Max and the "replace the old toy before it breaks while the reissue is cheap" probably sounded logical.  

I'm going to keep my old Fort Max, with diaper applied, until he crumbles.  When that happens, he has someone 25 years younger to take his place.  In the meantime, hey, it's a Fort Max toy I can transform.  I haven't seen his city mode in sixteen years.