So now I have Shattered Glass Blaster and a pair of Recordiguys for him, but neither of them are guys I'm particularly familiar with.  I wanted an old favorite!  And so I got myself a junker Steeljaw and made myself Shattered Glass Steeljaw.  I feel pretty safe making my own SG Steeljaw, free from worry that I'll get a real one.  After all, he's a TakaraTomy guy done up in the colors of a thing owned by their Most Bitterest Arch-Nemesis, plus they've already just recently done that toy in all black.  Either way, SG Steeljaw ain't gonna happen.

If I'd chosen his colors, I probably would have gone with something that's less likely to make TakaraTomy's legal team cringe.  Also something easier to paint.  Dang.  I ain't good at tiny details.

Nobody wants a Deluxe Shockwave!  Shockwave is massive and powerful and awesome.  And so I'm pretty happy to get this new Beast Hunters Shockwave to take the place of my Fall of Cybertron Shockwave on my WFC/FOC/Prime shelf.  He's a Voyager!  He ain't a small Voyager either, considering he makes TFPrime Voyager Megatron look kinda puny.  Not sure what I feel about that, but whatcha gonna do.

Beast Hunters Shockwave is.... most Shockwave toys.  That is,  he's an amazing robot.  A fantastic robot.  And he transforms into... soomethiing.  I think the only Shockwave toy that transformed into an Actual Something was the Alternator.  Everything else has been, like, ray-gun-that-looks-like-a-folded-up-Shockwave or satellite-thing-that-looks-like-a-folded-up-Shockwave or tank-that-looks-like-Shockwave-with-a-turret-pegged-to-it.  BH Shockwave ain't any different.  He's an exceptional robot toy and he transforms into himself doing the splits.

Oh, it's not an overly-simple transformation, by any stretch.  It looks like it is, but there are lots of tiny little twists and turns.  His feet... slide forward at an angle, for example, I think so that they lie flush with the rest of his legs in tank mode, which in tank mode are... legs.  I guess there are tumbler-like wheels in his heels, but they're not terribly visible so it just looks like he has treads in the back and legs in the front.  His handed arm tucks underneath while his gun arm tucks overneath.  And there's some panel-rearranging with his chest and stuff....  Okay, it's kind of simple.

But, dammit, he's a great robot.  One of the rubber treads on his back unfurls and plugs into his cannon.  (The other tread is also rubber, despite not doing anything, which is some nice symmetry.)  What's the most glorious thing about this toy is the cannon.  You know those gimmicks where you push down on a lever and it causes something to spin and spin and spin until friction finally wins, eventually?  The cannon's one of those.  But, wait, there's more.  While it's spinning, the cannon is slowly opening and closing and also extending and retracting.  And while this is going on, you can peek inside the cannon through it's twirling gaps and see the missile launcher, fleetingly.  It's a fascinating contraption, and I can't stop making it do what it does.  I haven't even gotten to where I find out how that missile fires.  Why would I?  This is great.

anyway there's some beast stuff to plug into him so he looks all beast huntery the end

The two Autobot Recordiguys in the eHobby Shattered Glass set are Rewind and Ramhorn, and both borrow their color schemes from Rumbles.  SG Rewind is patterned after the unreleased G2 Go-Bot Rumble and SG Ramhorn is patterned after the comics-only movie universe Rumble (who was a little blue rhino partner for Soundwave).

SG Rewind is stalwart in its attempt to homage G2 Rumble.  In addition to the base colors, there are a trio of stickers which seal the deal.  Two of them go on his legs and mimic the sculpted shapes on G2 Rumble's legs.  The final one says "VINNY'S MOTORS" and goes on Rewind's back.  That's going the extra mile, and I appreciate it.

SG Ramhorn is in blue with some gray accents to make him look more movie-segmentedy, plus he comes with a sticker that gives him more chunks of movie innards striped down his midsection.

Since these are new guys to the set and to everywhere, they get their personalities here.  Rewind is, uh, a hunter/tracker guy who's gathering Cybertronic wildlife so SG Blaster can have a bunch of animal dudefriends like Sir Soundwave.  Ramhorn is one of these Cybertronic wildlives.  I don't think either are particularly very SGy in concept, but whatcha gonna do.  I think SG Rewind should be like the dude from Memento, personally.  It feels like a better twist on who normal Rewind is.  And Ramhorn... I dunno.  I do like that he's given "Chaos Generator cannons" that seriously fire random, unpredictable things.  That could be a source of fun.   Like, *blam* rubber chickens!  *blam* confetti!  *blam* actual bullets!  *blam* Liam Neeson!

Colors- and homage-wise I definitely can't complain.  Getting their appearances from G2 Rumble and Movie Rumble is an interesting choice.

I was out of GIJoe, I swear.  I have a whole giant bin full of them in my basement,  untouched.  I've gotten all of the guys I'd ever really expect I'd want, short RoboJOE, who's never happening again ever.  It's the only stuff I've ever bought where Maggie questions why the hell I care about these things.  She understands robots.  She understands superheroes.  She even  understands a few Marios and Luigis.  But these assorted little army guys and the chrome-headed dudes they fight, not so much.

And I don't think I could answer her satisfactorily until getting this Battle Platform Attack Kre-O set.  I think it does all the things I like about G.I.Joe better than the regular-sized figures.  A huge part of this is the smaller scale.  A giant collection of Joes and Cobras and their respective vehicles takes up a lot of real estate.  Especially vehicles.  But these little brick dudes and their equally-tiny helicopters and tanks?  These are manageable.  You can have an entire world on a shelf, rather than roughly about 10% of a world.

Another plus is that these guys are more play-friendly.  I don't gotta reinsert a rifle into someone's hand every thirty seconds as I hop him around.  Stuff stays together, even though everyone's made out of stuff you take apart.  It's all less fiddly.

The last piece in the satisfaction component is that it doesn't take itself seriously.  G.I.Joe has been trying to take itself super-seriously for years, and it turns me off.  But these Kre-O guys embrace all of the goofiness.  There are Trouble Bubbles and tiny little jails and everyone looks adorable and oh hey there's cans of JOE COLA in the refrigerator downstairs for reals.

(Anyone else thinks it's kind of weird that the Joe component of this set is armed up to shoot-to-kill while the Cobra component exists to take prisoners?   Mmmm, dissonance.)

I knew that the Joe RAM and the Cobra FANG and  Flight Pod were based on real 1980s Cobra vehicles, but I'd forgotten entirely the original Battle Platform that this Kre-O set is based on.   I thought it was just a fun Kre-O-style playset, but no, it's also all vintage-y.  Wacky.  I looked around to see if the Cobra prison thinger was based on anything, but came up empty.

The set comes with Cobra Commander, two Cobra Troopers (one's an airtrooper), Duke, and Roadblock.  Despite all these guys, plus the four blind-bagged guys I already owned, the playset still feels a little empty.  This is extremely clever of Hasbro, because dammit now I need more blindbagged guys.  My battles need to be a little busier.  Foiled again.

Hey, why does Cobra Commander's Kreon have flesh hands?  Shouldn't he have gloves?

Shattered Glass Slugfest is the last of the pre-existing characters in this eHobby set.  The rest of the dudes are all new to the universe.  SG Slugfest was one of the first Recordicons to get the spotlight, as he showed up in the first Shattered Glass text story, "Dungeons & Dinobots."  While regular Slugfest is dumb and really insecure about it, Shattered Glass Slugfest is dumb and pretty self-confident -- not in an arrogant way, but in an adorable way.  I picture SG Slugfest as a Transformers version of Andy from Parks & Rec, though with less talk good.

Slugfest is given two stickers to use if you wanna.  One's just a "Dinocon" label.  The other's a restraining bolt, which was used on him in his first appearance.

The toy itself is one of the more fun Mini-Cassette toys, mostly due to its spring-loaded stegosaurus plates.  Unfold the head and tail and they pop right up.  SG Slugfest's colors are kind of like Grand Slam's, but without seeing if SG Overkill is blue and gray like Raindance, it's hard to say if that was intentional or not.  (I suppose that could be up to me, considering I draw these guys.)   Slugfest's weapons were silver in the prose illustrations, like Grand Slam's, but they're copper chrome on the toy.  It makes him less like Grand Slam, but even if that were the original intention, the copper really makes him look pretty and less monochrome, so I'm totes okay with it.

I've seen some folks express worry that placing the restraining bolt sticker over the hinge joint on his neck means that it would rotate along with the joint when the toy is transformed.  For me, this hasn't been the case.  It's seemingly stayed in place.

When SG Blaster was first introduced in the Shattered Glass text stories, he was based on the original Blaster toy but with colors swapped.  That probably put him outside the jurisdiction of the Transformers Collectors' Club, toy-creation-wise.  Except for those wacky Seacons, they stick with modern toys.  I wanted a toy of SG Blaster to exist, and so that meant hoping e-Hobby would do one.  Ha ha ha, as if that'd ever happen.

WELL HUZZAH.

So while the new SG Soundwave isn't particularly necessary, Blaster was a must have, especially since toys of Soundwave already existed.  He hasta fight somebody!  And with him come some guys to shove in his chest.  So sweet deal, all around.

Unlike a lot of Shattered Glass color schemes, Blaster's doesn't seem to be based on anybody else's.  He's not Blaster in Soundwave's colors, for example.  No, he seems to be a new color scheme.  Part of his new scheme was some tribal tattoo-y things on his shoulders.  When SG Blaster's toy was first announced, those tribal tattoo-y things were absent, and there were only recolored versions of his original stickers there, like any other reissue.  I was relieved when we learned about the sticker label sheet that comes with the set, which included large stickers to wrap around his shoulders and give him his tribal tats.  I'm especially relieved that they're a perfect fit.  There's also another sticker that belongs to Blaster, a yellow sphere with a stick through it.  According to the eHobby videos, that seems to go on his right shoulder, so that's where I put mine.

He comes with the SG electro-scrambler.  I imagine it's super-lame and not terribly courteous.

Man, I expected to  have this toy last year!  Remember when the second G.I. Joe movie was coming out in 2012?  Good times.  But now the film is finally in 3D and/or has extra Channing Tatum, and unless the movie gets delayed eight months at the last minute to add a dimension AGAIN, maybe we'll actually get to see it at the end of the month.  There's only so many more dimensions you can add!  It already had time!  What's next? Will we be adding Mr. Mxyzptlk?

Anyway, the movie's sudden rescheduling occurred just as the movie's tie-in toys were starting to hit stores.  Awkward.  And so we never got to the later waves with Bruce Willis in them.  I mean, dude, Bruce Willis G.I. Joe toy.  You gotta.  And so I did.

It wasn't until I left the register that I realized, wow, so that's why this thing's so heavy.  Buried in the packaging, basically entirely hidden, is Joe Colton's giant-ass missile launcher that's as big as he is.  I'm not sure why you'd obscure half your product, but there it was.  And what you do is attach this massive man-sized missile launcher to the top of a tommy gun so Joe Colton can sort of hold it, plug four missiles into it, and then pull the ripcord out of it, launching the missiles in turn.  In theory.  The thing that aggravates me about modern Joes is that NO ONE CAN HOLD THEIR WEAPONS, EVER.  Now, couple that inability with a gun that weighs as much as the actual figure.  That ain't happening.  Even if you don't want to stand the thing up while holding its man-sized weapon, getting the thing to actually stay in his hand is a chore.

(The photo I included above is the result of about half an hour of trial and error.  It fell over immediately thereafter.  Retakes, to be safe?  Hell no, I called it quits.)

It's too bad.  I'd really love my Bruce Willis toy to have a hilariously oversized missile launcher, but it's more trouble than it's worth.  So toss that stuff in the bin and resign yourself to only trying to get him to hold his normal-sized weapons.

I also got The Rock, because, hey, Roadblock.  And this one doesn't have a gun handle molded into his palm.  It does have an amazingly weird weapon set thing, though, that I didn't have the patience to figure out.  It's not worth it.  It's never worth it.  Joe weapons will never ever ever ever ever fit into hands, ever.

 

Out of the entire set of SG Soundwave vs SG Blaster and all their new little dudes, Soundwave was the most surplus to my requirements.  I already had two Shattered Glass Soundwave toys, and one of them already sort of looked like this.  I mean, I understand why they're making him, what with this being a purposeful reuse of the Soundblaster/Twincast reissues, plus this being meant partially for Japan, where they don't have BotCon sets with SG Soundwave in them.  But, you know, personally, he wasn't a big draw.

BUT I STILL LOVE THIS GUY A BUNCH.  I'm not entirely sure why.  Maybe it's the attractive colors?  White with shock blue with hints of green just stands out.  Maybe it's that all of the crazy van deco is brought over as sticker detail.  Maybe it's that SG Soundwave's a fun-ass character.  He's got a headband  and says "righteous" all the time.

And so ultimately I suppose I welcome him.  I think BotCon's Soundwave will be my display version of the character since it remains my favorite; it's an SUV, so it doesn't transform into a simple box representing obsolete technology.  I do lose the interaction with the Recordicons, but I plan on keeping them all displayed outside his chest compartment anyway.  Chest storage is for tape guys you lost the weapons to.

In addition to the stickers which recreate Soundwave's van deco (and it still works, because us old timers remember plugging stickers all over our Walkmans as kids) there's also a sticker provided to give Soundwave his trademark headband.  You fold it over lengthwise, which is kind of tough to do precisely, and then there are perforated slots at strategic points along the headband so that you can loop the whole thing around his head and attach the ends over each other.  It works pretty well.

The only snafu is one localized to my toy.  Apparently some Chinese factory worker got some black paint on his fingers while painting the die cast feet and got his identifying marks all over Soundwave's inner thigh.  It's completely obscured in robot mode, but it was a fun surprise in cassette recorder mode.  I'll probably take some turpentine or something to it later.  Or, more likely, I'll never bother, because, as mentioned, you can't see it in robot mode, and that's how he's stored in the box once he gets put away in storage.

A few years ago, Shattered Glass Ravage was this new thing and I'd been asked to write a short tech spec bio for him to be published in the Transformers Collectors' Club magazine.  This was before he got a toy.  Until then, he was just a guy I'd made up over New Years Eve and then started a Twitter feed for because it amused me and because I thought it heretical that there was no SG version of Ravage because Ravage is awesome.  In the following issues, the Transformers club folks asked me to write additional bios for SG Ratbat and Steeljaw.

Normal Ratbat, to me, is the stick-up-his-ass fuel auditor who hilariously managed to worm his way into the Decepticon leadership position in the Marvel Comics.  Everyone hated him.  He was an accountant!  And yet, y'know, an accountant is an important job.  And so my idea was to flip that.  What's a charismatic but completely frivolous job?  Why, SG Ratbat was a self-help guru.  A famous one who everyone liked.  He was a celebrity.  He was a secret alcoholic (addiction to low-grade fuel).  I really liked the idea.

But then it kind of got blown away by Jesse Wittenrich's accompanying art for the character, which I hadn't seen prior to getting the issue myself, of SG Ratbat done up in blue and gray and gold, y'know, for funsies.    And I was like, whoa.  Obviously, SG Ratbat is... you know who.  What's this self-help guru crap?   And so once I started drawing Recordicons, I made sure to marry the two portrayals.  During the day, Ratbat was a famous philanthropist and author, but at night he patrolled the city skies as Bat-Bot.  I literally couldn't pass up drawing that stuff.  You know me.

And so here we are, years later, and we have a damn toy of him.  E-Hobby, Japan's outlet for exclusive redecos of Transformers stuffs, likes to come out with new-character redecoes of Generation 1 reissues, and they'd just done a pair of Twincast and Soundblaster.  So who do they do those two guys as?  Apparently, the answer is to partner up with the Transformers Collectors' Club and give us SG Blaster and Soundwave and a smattering of SG Recordicons, including Ratbat in his Bat-Bot colors.

These are toys for me and me alone.

So here's my friggin' Transformers Caped Crusader guy, in plastic, here in front of me, for realsies.  A neat addition to SG Bat-Bot's look are the chest stickers they give you which paste on either side of SG Bat-Bot's chest rubsign, which pushes the homage a little further.  I liked it so much I retooled SG Bat-Bot's design to include the stickers in his next Recordicons appearance.  You do gotta be careful with them, though.  They cover the tape spools in his chest, and the gun accessories you peg through there could poke through them a bit if you're not precise.  Oh, and always put him back in the cassette tray stickers-face-up so you don't puncture them.

Did I mention he appears in a comic illustrated by Hidetsugu Yoshioka?  My character, this guy I helped make, drawn by him?  Oh my lord, man.  This world is nuts.

Kre-O has slowly been branching out into other Hasbro brands.  Last year there was Battleship Kre-O, and let me tell you, that sold just as well as you'd expect it to.  Later this year we're getting Star Trek Kre-O.  And, wow, finally, three years after Kre-O has been a thing, it's reached Hasbro's other big boys toy franchise, G.I. Joe.  That it's taken this long doesn't say inspiring things about the strength of the G.I. Joe franchise.  That they're entirely exclusive to Toys"R"Us doesn't help either.  I think lately G.I. Joe has stopped being so much Hasbro's sugar daddy as it's started being that gross uncle who only calls up when he needs cash or is in jail.

And I see that Hasbro's really trying to milk the nostalgia on this stuff.  I mean, they're just going full-blown Eighties on all this G.I.Joe Kre-O.  There is zero pretense of it trying to be also a visual tie-in to this year's movie.  G.I. Joe Kre-O is seriously a bunch of Real American Hero vehicles done in brick-style with RAH characters.  I don't know if I want to... commit to all that, so I decided to get only a blind-bagged Kreon or few.  For now, at least.  We'll see.

I like Scarlett!  So I figgered I'd get Scarlett.  Plus she hangs around Transformers often enough, so she can join my other human Kreon guys from my Transformers Kre-O stuff.  But there's also, holy hell, a Joe Colton Kreon.  And I say holy hell because his little Kreon hairpiece is friggin' flocked, man.  Like the original Adventure Team figure.  For serious.  So I can't not pick up that guy.  And then I realize I have these two Joes, and they could probably use some Cobra to fight, and so I pick up a Cobra Trooper and a Crimson Guard.

They're exactly what you'd expect, other than some small creativity with the weapons.  Sometimes they find interesting ways to snap other pieces onto the little rifles, like clipping a Starscream armgun to the top of a rifle to make a scope.  Scarlett comes with a missile-launching crossbow.  Joe Colton comes with... himself packaged in an Adventure Team box.  All right!

Man, how the hell is there no friggin' Destro, man.  They better be saving him to come with a Kre-O Dominator later or something. Nevermind, here he is!  BOUGHT ON SIGHT.