Sometimes my faith is rewarded!  Takara's Smokescreen toy was a Knock Out redeco with a new head, and Hasbro's Smokescreen toy was nonexistent.  But I decided, naw, there's no way Hasbro's not going to release a car Autobot guy.  They didn't do a large Breakdown either, but Breakdown is a Voyager Decepticon.  Deluxe Car Autobot guys are Hasbro's bread and butter.  And so I passed on the Known Smokescreen for in the hopes I would be rewarded with a real one that's his own mold.

And, yea, God helps those who sit on their ass, I guess!

Sure 'nuff, the second wave of Beast Hunters gives us a new mold Smokescreen toy.  Unlike the Autobots from the first wave, Smokescreen isn't an older toy with spikes retooled all over him.  Instead,  he's a "plain" Smokescreen with add-on spikey accessories.  You can throw those bonus parts in the trash and have a normal ol' Smokescreen toy, or you can go all Mad Max.  I kind of expect that this Smokescreen was already in the planning stages before he got Beast Hunterized.  Maybe it's the way the rubber trap net stuff just slides over his otherwise unremarkable missile launcher weapon.  It all seems like an afterthought.

Anyway, Smokescreen toy -- how is he? Well, as you can probably tell from looking at him, he's got a fake kibble chest.  Those headlights and hood don't become the real headlights and hood at all.  The real hood (and roof) hang off the back of his forearms.  I can sort of see their line of thinking here -- Smokescreen's chest on his cartoon model kind of has a lot of stuff going on.  It splits up into a bunch of angles.  Plus, well, the real car hood is kind of a lot bigger than the fake one, nearly twice as wide.  I guess the designers preferred leaving all that stuff hanging off his arm to a robot mode  that was 50% chest.

Despite all that, the kibble junk is kept largely out of the way during posing, so he's a good robot mode overall.  I also like his big sturdy feet.  The only annoying part of his robot mode are the many, many hinges built into his shoulders which are part of his transformation.  They can come undone if you're rough with him.

Unfortunately, those many, many hinges are part of his super-frustrating transformation.  He's another of those guys who went to the Side Burn School of Transformation.  He comes along fairly okay-ish until you get to the arms and all that junk hanging off of there.  Trying to fit the arms in (and their 50 billion hinges) and close in all the gaps in the vehicle mode is an ordeal I haven't really smoothed out yet.  Once you get one side all pegged together, that forces out the pegs on the other symmetrical side.  You wanna punch somebody.  Unless you're a wizard, you're gonna end up with gaps.

The Beast Hunters stuff fits over him in either mode.  In car mode, it fits snugly over the hood and under the side mirrors.  In robot mode, it sort of wraps up over his torso and behind his head.  There's tabs just below his ribcage and two more tabs at the tops of his shoulders; you'll have to use the stuff's rubbery quality to your advantage on this last bit.  You literally wrap it around him and peg it in.  There also seem to be some extra missile storage places on the sides of it.

Smokescreen's colors aren't quite accurate to his screen portrayal.  I can understand why they'd want to include more red and blue accents instead of leaving Smokescreen almost entirely white and silver, but I do find it weird that they painted stuff on his head blue instead of red.  I'll probably have to do some paint adjustments of my own.

Just in time for Wednesday's strip about How Strika Should Be, Like, More Wankable Or Something, I have received Ripclaw (and Smokescreen from BigBadToyStore.  They're Wave 2 Beast Hunters Deluxes.  They'll be in stores soon, probably?)  You see, the connection is Ripclaw is a lady!  She is a Transformer who ostensibly has girl parts.  She shares a body design with Ser-Ket, who at the time had begun to appear in the "Rage of the Dinobots" comic book miniseries, but we had no idea she was female until samples of Ripclaw's toy showed up with pronouns and everything and we realized, oh, hey.  They're both probably ladies.  And sure enough, Ser-Ket got some gendered pronouns in her subsequent appearance.  They are shes.

So she's not Thunderblast is what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that this toy is great.  I knew I was going to like it just from the stock photography, and the stock photography didn't lie.  Just like Lazerback, Ripclaw's card bubble is relatively deep.  She's a hunk of toy.  Unlike Lazerback, she has wings and a neck and a jointed tail.  Now, here's the super awesome did-not-see-this-coming thing about Ripclaw's tail.  It's not just simply segmented.  There's a rubber tube running through the middle.  The tail can hang lax, or you can tighten the whole contraption by hooking it up more securely onto the back of the torso.  It is an amazing tail.  The grabby-claw tip can be removed, leaving a simple nub at the end of the tail, while the grabby-claw  can be held by one of the robot arms.  (The claw attaches deeply enough through the hand-hole that it appears that the claw is an extension of the arm itself.)

Ripclaw's dragon jaw opens, and the top of her head is rubber plastic like the center of her tail.  Like many beastformers, she transforms roughly by standing up, though the limbs each go through a step or two so they don't look identical in both modes.  The robot head looks kind of cowl-y, like an eyed hat sitting on a neck, but she does have a jaw down there.  It's just mostly obscured by her collar.  I guess the artist who was drawing Ser-Ket in the comic was going off of stock photography or something, since Ser-Ket was pretty jawless in that.

Ripclaw is a super-great toy that looks dynamic by default.  It's hard for her to look bad.  She's a dragon, she has an involved but non-frustrating transformation, and a sweet rubber-enabled segmented tail.  Also, happens to be a chick.  She was the favorite of the Predacons I'd seen so far, judging only by photography, and the toy lived up to my expectations.

Okay, fine, so here's the other Autobot Recordicons who aren't Sunder.  Sunder's definitely the prettiest, but there's all these other guys, too, y'know?  Like Eject and Rewind, who are retools of Frenzy and Rumble and operate exactly like they do.  Drop 'em, then pull out the feet and rotate down the arms.  Getting them back into data disk mode is moderately difficult.  And there's Steeljaw, who comes with Blaster, who's Ravage with a new head.  He's as awful as Ravage is, unsurprisingly.  Drop him, and then do a bunch of other transforming, and then cry trying to get him back into data disk mode, because it's that tedious.

But the real star of every single damn one of these, Decepticons included, is Ramhorn.  He's his own new mold, even, but I would be okay if they made him into a buncha other dudes, because he's great.  So get this:  You drop him, and he not only auto-transforms all the way with no further prodding needed, but he also bounces up off the ground and lands on his feet!  Like a cat, sort of!  So that puts him one up on Laserbeak/Buzzsaw/Ratbat in that he has feet to land on and lands on them.  And he's simple to put back into data disk mode.  He is the champ.  He is perfection.  He's like what all these other guys shoulda been, somehow!

He's not as efficient with his mass as the other guys, and so he's much smaller in rhino mode than everyone else is in their respective modes.  This is another blessing in disguise because since the perimeter of his data disk mode is mostly empty (he's not a good disk), he squeezes out of Blaster a little better.  There's less stuff to get caught.  He still doesn't squeeze out great, but he squeezes out better.

So Ramhorn's the best data disk guy.  Sunder's the best-colored.

Once everyone found out that Grimlock was gonna be in Fall of Cybertron, of course everyone wanted him as a toy.  I mean, hello.  And hopefully not as a stinkin' Deluxe!  Voyager or go home, Hasbro!  Well here he is, guys!  Your Fall of Cybertron Voyager Class Grimlock!

And he is of agreeable size to overwhelm Shockwave and bite his hand off, yes.

He's not quite the Grimlock of the mind's eye, however.  In fact, I think in general folks seem to be kind of disappointed in him.  I think he's all right, but let's go over what some of these stated disappointments are.

First of all, there's the tail.  This I think is kind of unavoidable.  Grimlock's video game model has a long-ass obviously-segmented tail, similar to Transmetal Megatron's.  Now, that has to transform into robot legs somehow.  The video game model got to cheat that tail away and have the legs sort of appear out of nowhere, but this is a $22 toy, so breaking the laws of thermodynamics is kind of out of the budget.   What Hasbro and/or TakaraTomy decided to do was just give Grimlock real robot legs and then sort of sculpt the segmented stuff down the sides.  This results in a better looking robot mode, but his dinosaur mode obviously has two legs shoved up its ass.  It's not elegant-looking.

Another thing that bothers folks is how hollow he is on the underside of the dinosaur mode.  The toy needs a lot of room for the amazingly elaborate shoulder jointing to have room to maneuver, so if you look at the toy's underside, you'll notice a whole lot of empty space.  I was kind of expecting this, especially since Animated Grimlock a few years ago had a similar deal.  I suppose there could be a big clamshell deal going on with the torso, but considering how the dinosaur head and neck collapses into the back of the torso in robot mode, I dunno if that would have worked out well in both modes.

Grimlock is also not painted as much as folks hoped.  He's got gray thighs and hands when they should be black (or gunmetal gray in this case) and so he looks a little sparse.  I'll probably fix that later, myself.  (Not sure if I have gunmetal gray hanging around or if I gotta go buy some.)  He's got plenty of paint everywhere else, though.

That's what other people say about him.  Here's my positives and negatives.  First of all, oy, those complicated shoulder joints count for both.  First of all, they exist so that the dinosaur hind legs can bury themselves inside the torso at an angle instead of being inelegantly bolted to the sides of the torso as they are on most Grimlocks.  I like that!  I don't like how this gets me into trouble.  Since the jointing is so complicated, I once wormed them so far away from how they were supposed to be oriented that it was kind of rough to get them back.  I also wish his sword and shield were bigger.  They're so massive in the video game, and so dinky on the toy.  They're not required to be a certain size to stow in dinosaur mode, so making them a bigger size would have been more satisfying.  One thing that I do very much like are his electronic lights.  They glow up real super bright in both modes.  It might be a function of the LED light being red.  I think I recall those glow the best.  You gotta yank back and pull hard on the lever to get it to go, though.

He's basically every Grimlock toy ever, but with a sword and shield.  He transforms exactly how you expect with some few minor surprises, the end.

(And, yeah, it's likely tyrannosauruses had feathers of some kind.  Feathered t-rex remains haven't been found, but feathered remains of their ancestors have, even as adults.)

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the Beast Hunters toyline, which is all about a whole faction of dragons, will include new toys based on the original Terrorcons, who were a combiner team made out of dragons.  I was happy enough to find out that Sinnertwin was getting an homage in Twinstrike, but I get to have all of them?  And they'll combine???

(P.S. in case nobody's noticed, yeah, apparently Hasbro doesn't wanna name a toy "sinnertwin" any more)

I had two Sinnertwins when I was a kid.  I don't know how that happened, but it did.  And so I have some nostalgia invested in him.  And so, hot dang, I am super into Twinstrike, the concept.  Now that he's in hand, I am super into Twinstrike the toy, as well.  This is a friggin' awesome dude.  Sinnertwin was a box that had dragon parts on it.  To transform him, you folded back all the dragon parts and stood it up.  Not terribly compelling.  But Twinstrike is friggin' awesome, especially for his small size.  (He and the other reimagined Terrorcons are Legion Class, the tiny dudes.)  I'm not used to Legion Class toys being this involved.  He's a tiny marvel.

The dragon forelegs and double-tail still fold back behind him, but otherwise this is a completely different approach.  The two dragon heads become arms, obviously.  The torso splits open so you can flip the robot head inside.  The feet flip around so the toes become heels.  And in completely-unexpected-in-a-legion-class-toy land, the dragon thighs pull out and rotate down to cover the dragon's digitigrade hind legs.

I heart him.

Plus, y'know, it helps that he's yellow and teal.

More of those little Data Disk guys are out, and this time they're Autobots for Blaster!  There's the usual folks you'd expect, like Ramhorn and the Eject/Rewind twins.  However, rounding out the set of four (since Steeljaw comes with Blaster himself) is a character new to United States toy shelves.  It's Sunder!

From Kiss Players.

Well, okay, in Kiss Players, we'd translated his name as Sundor, but "Sunder" is an actual English word, so there's that.  (There's a non-toy Animated Sunder as well, from the AllSpark Almanac books, which is likely where the name interpretation comes from.)  But yeah, enjoy your Kiss Players homage dude.

And you will enjoy him, because he's friggin' beautiful.  I don't know if my photography captures it exactly, but he's the most striking use of bright orange,  yellow, red, and gray that I think is humanly possible.  He's way more striking than the original Sundor, who's more of a John Boehner orange than glorious day-glo.  I just want to put him in my mouth.  Sunder, not John Boehner.

Y'know, I sought out the original Kiss Players Sundor only because he was orange.  Coincidentally, he came with two other Recordicons, Rosanna and Glit.  I didn't care so much for them, I just wanted the orange Laserbeak/Buzzsaw guy.  And even then I wouldn't have bought the three to get Sundor if I hadn't had BotCon's clear Classics Mirage to sell to Big Bad Toy Store first.  My budget was only so stretchy for picking up tiny dudes (from Kiss Players) who cost me $50.

But without all that, we never woulda had Shattered Glass Ravage.  

So, uh, thank you BotCon clear Mirage for sucking and Sundor for being orange.

And helloooooo awesome new Sunder.

So I guess Hasbro is doing this small line of really fancy redecoes and retools in really fancy shiny metallic packaging, called Platinum Edition or whatevs.  The first two are new versions of Energon Optimus Prime and Omega Supreme as their Aligned continuity family selves, and oy, is their big shiny metallic packaging a mixed bag.  I mean, it's very large and very pretty, but there's the thing with the box art.  They're just color-shifted versions of the original box art, which is from deep in the Horrible Dreamwave era.  I love me some Marcelo Matere, what with him being an amazing artist and all, but it looks like he was drawing that Omega Supreme while Pat Lee was strangling him. And so the otherwise very pretty (and huge-ass) box went in the trash.  S'probably a good thing, anyway.  As said, it was huge, and I don't got storage space for that kinda stuff.  The upcoming Platinum Ultra Magnus packaging (also with Matere art) will be harder to let go. (Have I praised Matere's Animated artwork enough?  Well, in case I haven't, it's amazing.  Just putting that out there, possibly for the 40th time.)

Platinum "Year of the Snake" Omega Supreme, as stated earlier, is the Energon Omega Supreme toy.  However, not only is it in more G1-y colors (gray and red and gold) but it also has some major retooling done.  He has both a new head and a new claw arm, both inspired by the War for Cybertron design of the character.  The new claw arm has some articulation, though it's pretty shallow, but it does what it needs to, which is be a huge claw thing.  The head has a flip up visor so you can see his face better, plus the neck area underneath the head is new so that the head can collapse into it for transformation.  The Energon version of the toy had a Headmaster guy, and so there wasn't much clearance for a head that wasn't removable.  No Headmaster guy this time around!  Just Omega Supreme himself.  And so that means there's some vestigial features, like the little translucent cockpit in one shoulder and the big Headmaster guy-shaped hole in the manning tower. Otherwise, Omega Supreme still transforms by ripping in half.  This process gives you a friggin' amazing space battleship and a pretty lame claw-armed train.  The battleship is almost worth the price of admission all by itself.  All of the many cannons on the front end are geared together so that if you rotate one, they all rotate together.  Plus it just looks cool.  The claw-armed train thing... is just that.  The claw-arm isn't even long enough or articulated enough to do anything in this state.  It just grasps the air pointlessly.  Maybe it's now a cannon and not a claw?  I don't know.  Either way, it's not the fun half of the toy.

You can shove the train into the ass of the battleship to make a super train thing.  And there's a bunch of other stuff you can do if you got Platinum "Year of the Snake" Optimus Prime as well, but I don't.  Also the electronics are no longer there.  The battery cover is now sealed with one of those triangle-headed screws.  Kind of a bummer. Honestly, I think I prefer the original's colors.  The bright red and yellow with the darker blue was more striking.  This new version's colors are a lot more dull (like Omega Supreme's) and I don't think the translucent yellow parts are particularly attractive.  However, I dumped most of my Energon collection a few years ago except for this guy, so I'm happy to have a version of the toy that can hang out with guys I actually still own.  I'll probably eBay the old one soon enough. Soon there's gonna be a guy twice his size.

It was a pretty empty Hasbro presentation yesterday due to snowstorms, but the folks who managed to make it got to see a lot of crazy-ass stuff.

Of course, Beast Hunters is ongoing this year.  The highlight for me, beyond the usual "yay, Shockwaves and dragons and Ultra Magnuses" is the retooled Beast Hunters Ratchet.  I was already excited for a possible retool of Ratchet in the style of the other retooled toys, but I didn't imagine they'd make him friggin' Dinobot.  Hasbro's (inadvertently?) made him a mix of two of my favorite characters, and my brain doesn't know what to do with this.  (In a positive way.)  It's a Ratchet/Dinobot Fuzor, complete with a rotate blade.  Maybe next year they can take things further and throw some Hot Shot in there too, and we'd have the perfect center of my Favorite Transformers Characters Venn Diagram.

Link: Beast Hunters Deluxes

Link: Beast Hunters Voyagers

Kre-O's also giving us two more waves of blindpacked Micro-Changers.  That's 24 more guys!  And there's folks like Arcee and Cheetor and Guzzle and Lugnut in there.  There's three more Kreon Combiners as well, with Defensor, Abominus, and Piranacon in wave 2.  I am so glad these guys are so cheap 'cuz I wannem all.

Link: Kre-O Micro-Changers 1

Link: Kre-O Micro-Changers 2

Link: Kre-O Micro-Changers 3

Later this year,  Hasbro's beginning to celebrate Transformers' 30th Anniversary.  The centerpiece of all this is holy cow the largest Transformers toy ever made, no joke.  A new toy of Metroplex clocks in at a few inches taller than 1987's Fortress Maximus, which was already nearly two feet tall.  The new Metroplex still has both battlestation and city modes, and I really like the direction the new toy has taken these ideas.  The battle station pushes more of an aircraft carrier vibe with a sizable pair of airstrips running down the legs.  That's way cooler to me than covering up those flat surfaces with giant guns.  And the city mode deals with what I thought was the most annoying thing about Metroplex's original city mode, which was all of the obstructed street paths.  You can send a car from the garage in Metroplex's chest all the way out to the tips of his feet.  No big obstructions in the way.  And, of course, the helipad is still there, and Metroplex has electronic lights and speech, and apparently his pupils can look around???  Metroplex is intended to work with Legends Class toys (he comes with a Legends Class Scamper), and in that vein Hasbro is giving us new Legends versions of Optimus, Bumblebee, Megatron, and Starscream.  There's obviously a whole catalog of older Legends Class and Cyberverse toys as well to fill those ranks.

Link: Metroplex

Link: Generations Legends

In the smaller end of the 30th Anniversary line are a series of Deluxes that are based on the IDW comics.  You know those Spotlight issues that are coming out now?  Those are the issues that will be backed in with these toys, and the titular character gets a toy in the body that's seen in that issue.  So Orion Pax, Thundercracker, Megatron, Bumblebee, Trailcutter (Trailbreaker), and more are getting this treatment.  And, oh, hey, two new Voyager Triple Changers, Blitzwing and Springer.  Blitzwing's okay, but Springer is my Best Possible Springer.  He's based directly on Nick Roche's design from Last Stand of the Wreckers.  Seriously, dudes!  That's like the only thing that would make me excited about a new Springer toy, Triple Changer or no.  That shoots him up to the top of my list.  Sorry, Chinese Springer I just bought.  Your helicopter mode is a pretty toy-y gray, but this new guy is friggin' Nick Roche Springer.

Link: Generations Deluxes

Link: Generations Voyagers

It's just.... this guy is so toyetic, you know???

He's a giant red and blue and silver robot who has a big green translucent sword and like four wings and there are boosters back there too but they can be guns if you want and oh look he also transforms into a friggin' snarled monster of a semi with friggin' bumper claws.  It's the kind of Transformers stuff we'd get before the Movies, when it was decided that everything must look like realistic vehicles.  This toy says eff you, I'm gonna be a claw truck.  Oh, you don't like that my arms just fold behind the cab and are barely covered up by wings barely pretending to be the surface of a trailer?  Well, that's too bad, because I just impaled you.  Honey Optimus don't care.

I dunno.  He's just bulky and extravagant in all the ways I think I needed right now.  He looks like a toy, not carefully-maintained-flagship-character-for-a-toy-franchise-desperate-for-mainstream-legitimacy, and he doesn't apologize for it.  Screw you, my windows are friggin' green.  Yeah, that's right.  Take a picture, it'll last longer.  

(I took several.)

There's gonna be a bigger and more insane version coming out later this year, and we'll probably see photos of it today at Toy Fair if anyone can master the snow, but I couldn't wait.  I wanted this guy, this particular one.  I might want the bigger one, too, I dunno yet.  But I do know that this one was always meant to be mine, and finally is.  He is the one I have been waiting for.  Him and his Beast Wars Transmetally grimace.  He's mad as hell, and he's not gonna faceplate up anymore.

Beasts, you've been warned.

Back in 1984, there was a strange yellow non-Bumblebee Mini Vehicle that was sold on Cliffjumper cards.  Years later, Transformers fandom would dub this dude "Bumblejumper" (or "Bumper" for short) by portmanteauing the two names together.  The Bumper name was later made official by appearances in Dreamwave comics.

Venksta, the guy behind Renderform.com, did some custom heads to replace your Classics Bumblebee heads to make other dudes.  Bumper, Hubcap, and Goldbug were among them.  This was a sweet idea, especially since getting the Bumblebee toy in yellow as some non-Bumblebee guy seemed like Not A Terribly Likely Occurrence.  I didn't want to do both Hubcap and Bumper (and didn't want to replace Bumblebee on my shelf with Goldbug... wait, why?  That's awesome, what's wrong with me?)  and so I had to choose between the two.  I settled on  Bumper because Hubcap is a more popular guy who's more likely to get his own official toy eventually.  Bumper?  Not so much.  He's a footnote's footnote.  If you're doing Yellow Bumblebee #2, it's gonna be Hubcap.

And so here he is!  His head comes in a baggy along with an assortment of 5mm-peg weaponry, 'cuz, y 'know, just a baggy with a single head in it feels a little empty.  So, hey, added value.  The head's of excellent quality and looks like it belongs on the toy.   I've always wanted to try out a Renderform head, and so scratch that off the bucket list!  Judging by this guy, I'll be happy to try out more.

(If you want to get a Goldbug head, BigBadToyStore.com has some in stock.)