Huffer was one of my favorite Transformers when I was a kid.  This happened because 1) he was a toy I owned and 2) he was featured in one of my first comic books.  In the cartoon, Huffer sounded like if Mr. Slate from The Flintstones were a whiny Peter Griffin, and in general he just wants to go home even though he can't.  He was a little orange forky-handed minitruck, he made reluctant friendships with big meaty trucker humans named Bomber Bill, and I loved him.  

Kingdom Huffer is the first attempt by Hasbro to actually try to make a new Huffer that's named Huffer?  In Transformers Cybertron, there was Armorhide, a new Huffer in all but name.  He was a tiny truck that transformed into a tiny robot with Huffer's head.  BotCon 2007 would do that toy in the proper colors and connect the rest of those dots, and that one's been My Huffer since then.  There was Power Core Combiners Huffer, which was an orange truck but didn't look much like him except in the extreme abstract.  And there was a redeco of a smaller-scale Optimus Prime toy with a new Huffer head, but that... well, it was a small orange Prime with a Huffer head.  

So here's Kingdom Huffer, who's A Huffer!   He's got the entire semi cab on his back, as is appropriate, and his arms still turn into the giant-ass smokestacks (but with humanoid fists at the end, instead of the original toy's sporks), and he's the cartoon's orange and lavender-ish colors.  Like the recent Cliffjumper, Warpath, and Bumblebee/Cliffjumper toys, he's an undersized Deluxe Class toy so that he can be in scale with other recent toys.   He's not quite as short as Bumblebee/Cliffjumper, but he's still a bit smaller than a regular Autobot car.  

He comes with a shield and a rifle.  The rifle can split in half and join with the shield to form a truck bed for the vehicle mode, if you want.  I've read from others that his rifle is basically a "Spartan Laser" from Halo.  Possibly lightly plagiarized.  Huffer's one of the few 1984 Transformers whose altmode seems to actually be made up rather than being something real that these days you'd have to license, so I guess this "borrowing" is merely checking off that box in a different way.  

Kingdom Huffer has a slightly more complex transformation for what you'd expect a Huffer toy to pull off.  You gotta open up his torso, fold the front set of wheels out of his torso (though the hinges there are stronger than the pegs for the wheels, so they pop out a little too easily), configure his arms, fold out his heels into the truck's trailer hitch and... well, okay, it's not that complicated.  Mostly the wheel hiding and the leg folding are the new wrinkles. 

The truck cab backpack is thankfully on a multi-part hinge, because you'll be pulling it out of the way whenever you want to fit your fingers in to turn the robot's head.  And I've got tiny girl hands, so imagine how much more difficult it'd be for real men.  Other than this small roadblock, Huffer is a pretty luxurious action figure for a Huffer.  He's got the now-typical waist rotation and ankle tilts, and all of this is stuff Huffer's never had before.  He can now do sweet action poses, which is apparently something this Huffer is capable of when he's not being a whiny butthole.  

Yeah, yeah, I know, Transformers: Kingdom is where Beast Wars is making its big return, and yet Kingdom Inferno isn't the Predacon fire ant.  It seems awry!  Well, it seems a little less awry when you remember Inferno (and Transmetal Scavenger) shelfwarmed so hard you could still find him five years later.   Reportedly Polar Claw was in the cards in the early days, but they moved up Tigatron out of Deluxetown to take up his Voyager spot, so even when Hasbro had more Beast Wars spots available, they'd dragged out Polar Claw instead of Inferno!  They went to a non-cartoon guy!  That's how bad Inferno shelfwarmed.

(additionally, BW Inferno can't take the spot of G1 Inferno, as G1 Inferno is a simple Grapple retool, and BW Inferno would be all new, and so their budgets are not equal)

they'll probably get to him eventually if Kingdom does well

ANYWAY, here's boring ol' Kingdom (G1) Inferno!  So boring he's got a boyfriend in every continuity!  He Princess Carries Red Alert around in the cartoon, and snuggles up with Smokescreen in the Marvel UK stuff.  And he's got a girlfriend, too!  Everybody wants a piece of Inferno!   He's clearly got something going on.  Look how long his ladder is!

Inferno's a retool of Earthrise Grapple (another shelfwarmer), but he's the superior version for a handful of reasons.  One, he's a fire truck, and fire trucks are rad.  Two, love those wings on the sides of his head.  Three, little hoses on his legs!  And four, and most importantly, his retooling includes modified pegs that attach his headbox to his soles in vehicle mode.  That broke a lot on Grapple if you yanked too hard, but now the pegs are shorter and more strongly attached to the headbox.  That's miles better just there.  

Also he's got more boyfriends than Grapple.  Has Grapple had any boyfriends?  I don't think so.  Checkmate.

If I'm being completely honest with myself, my primary interest in Transformers: War for Cybertron: Chapter Three: Kingdom is as a vehicle to deliver me additional Dinobot toys.  Yeah, I mean, I'm not ever gonna turn my nose up at More Beast Wars Action Figures, but they're side dishes to this main course.  Cue ObiWan_thats_why_im_here.gif.

Regardless, I'm in a weird place, Dinobot-toy-wise, as we live in a post Masterpiece Dinobot world.  I already have the perfect representation of Dinobot in plastic form, there's zero chance that a $30 mass release Dinobot is going to approach that level of accuracy, and so... I'm not sure what I'm actually asking for in Dinobot toys in this moment in time.  Anything Dinobot would likely please me, because I'm here for the General Dinobot Content.  Like, any style direction for him I'm game for.  I've got Super Accurate, let's see what else we've got up Dinobot's sleeve.  

Kingdom's seeming goals for Beast Wars characters in Kingdom are "more-realistic animals with animation-accurate robot modes."  And as such, Kingdom Dinobot slots right into those priorities, with the caveat that he's a more-realistic 1990s Jurassic Park velociraptor, not an actual Velociraptor mongoliensis, which was more like a turkey with teeth.  Kingdom Dinobot is large, he's scaley, and he's got slappers not clappers.  He's pretty successful at his chosen goals, though his wrists are pretty limp-looking due to how they gotta fold up to store inside his ribcage, and he's got his robot mode's double thumbs sticking out of the back of his raptor feet.  His robot legs hide surprisingly well underneath the torso.  I mean, they're obviously there, but at the low-end of "obvious."

Dinobot's robot mode head looks like it's the Masterpiece toy's CAD information scaled down.  Which is to say, it's perfect.  It's the Dinobotest.  It may be my favorite thing about the toy itself, though it's in a bloody battle with the way his dino thighs split and become his robot mode torso.  It's an idea that solves so many problems perfectly.  Problem 1: Dinobot's robot arms don't look like velociraptor thighs, especially his big golden shoulder pads.  Problem 2: Where does Dinobot's fake raptor head chest torso come from?  Problem 3: If Dinobot's robot mode torso weren't stored in the velociraptor torso, it'd be easier to hide his giant robot legs up in there!  So, like, BAM, this elegant solution to this multitiered problem.  

It does negate any dino-hip articulation, however.  The transformation execution is more important to me than this, though.  Articulate him at the knees and below all you want in the meantime!

His sword is purple.  In the show it's often silver chrome and kinda pinkish in some lighting, the latter of which was reflected in his Masterpiece toy.  His Kingdom sword is just full-on purple, though.  I like it, honestly, if only because I see it as a reference to Beast Wars co-story editor Bob Forward's legendary "purple-headed pole of pontification."  If you don't like the purple sword, that just means you're not a cool nerd like me who gets things.  

His rotate blade doesn't rotate.  ...and considering how he transforms, it's easy to see why.  His finally proportionally-large head takes up all that space back there for any push-lever gearing.  Pretend it spins, just like you pretend G1 Megatron's fusion cannon shoots things.  

The place to be is robot mode, though.  What a fantastic action figure he is here.  His arms have so much movement, aided much by his articulated wrists that not just rotate but bend to and fro.  He's got waist articulation, which is a new one for a mass release Dinobot, and his neck lets his head tilt as he pleases.  And, of course, the now-standard ankle tilts.

My one actual real gripe is the dropping of tan/gray stripes from his chest in robot mode between the back-of-the-box renders and actual production.  Those would've really helped!  He looks kind of paintbare in robot mode because all of his dino mode stripes vanish themselves during transformation.  I feel a small need to match the tan/gray paint and put those stripes back myself, matched only by my probably larger need to have a "stock" Dinobot to display with my otherwise unaltered Dinobot collection.  I can't start hand-painting them NOW.  And, again, I already have the perfectly-decoed Dinobot in the Masterpiece, so...

Kingdom Dinobot's good.  

Stege Sideswipe's a pretty solid toy, so I'm basically okay with them pumping out like sixteen recolors of him.  And it's a good thing I am, because they are!  

Deep Cover started out as simply a black redeco of the Diaclone toy Sideswipe was gonna be, released only as part of a three-toy box set including a redeco of the Diaclone toy Ultra Magnus was gonna be and a red redeco of the toy Mirage was gonna be.  He had big gold Lamborghini logos on his hood and his doors, because you could do that back then without licensing without getting sued.

BUT in 2003, eHobby reissued that deco as a new Transformers character, Deep Cover, with the Lambo logos replaced with a similar-looking but far more generic and IP-friendly starred badge.  Deep Cover was an undercover policeman!  ...With kind of conspicuous giant golden badges on his doors and hood, so we assume he wasn't a great undercover policeman.

Generations Selects Deep Cover recreates that deco on the Stege Sideswipe toy, golden badges and all.  The Stege car mode for Sideswipe doesn't have, like, bare, stickerable doors, per se, so the door badges kind of go up on the edges of the roof.  It looks fine.  I mean, the whole thing looks great.  Black and blue and white is a great combination on this toy, even if it's really just a red/blue swap for the Generation 2 Sideswipe we got two years ago.  

He just went up online for preorder a few days ago (I got mine from a smaller independent toy store), so, like, if you want one, it's a good time to grab him.  He's expected to ship imminently from most places.

Transformers is about Robot Mode Scale now, and honestly that's the highly-addictive drug I've gotten hooked on.  And while I am definitely into robots who can stand next to each other and look the correct height -- so much so that I've re-bought so many live-action movie robots in Studio Series thus far -- sometimes it means getting a slightly ... worse...? Grimlock than I have already?   Masterpiece Grimlock is pretty dang similar to Studio Series '86 Grimlock, and I even have the fancy Marvel Comics-colored one, with the silver finish and the blue-for-black and the crown.  But it's a head or two too tall, and word is Studio Series '86 is gonna give us the other four Dinobots in turn, and I can't have one of them looking out of place.  

Because, honestly, having a full set of appropriately huge Dinobots is a long-dormant dream of mine.  I mean, it's been fine to have the Dinobot combiner Volcanicus fill in for them, since robot scale means a little less when they're all combined into a super robot.  There's some wiggle room there.  (or rather there isn't, since a combiner has to fit vertically on a shelf, so that limits things)  

Volcanicus shouldn't worry.  I've already found alternate display space for him.  He's a combiner and I love combiners, so he was never really in danger of disappearing into a bin.  

Anyway, Studio Series '86 Grimlock is pretty close in feel to Masterpiece Grimlock!  They're about the same size, and they're roughly the same visual design, and they transform very similarly.  SS86 Grimlock's a little chonkier, and the tail-to-legs transformation is a little less fussy, and he's missing the Turn-Head-Wag-Tail gimmick, nor is he electronic, and he doesn't come with a sword.  Cartoon Grimlock?  Didn't actually have a sword!  He had his double-barreled rifle in his model sheet and no sword.  And so SS86 Grimlock only comes with the rifle.  

He does come with Wheelie, though!  A small, nontransforming Wheelie that exists entirely to be fit onto the top of Grimlock's dinosaur neck or robot shoulder.  He's sculpted into a permanent squat because, again, he's a little prop.  His arms are posed just enough you can get him to aim his slingshot in plenty directions.  (The slingshot does remove from the fist and I think it's a 3mm port)

I have a perfectly fine Wheelie who's not sculpted permanently into a teabagging stance and can also transform, so I think I'll keep that one around for display.  But for those of you who missed out on Titans Return Wheelie from several years ago, this is your chance at him again.  

What's better about SS86 Grimlock that isn't his precise scale?  Well, he's cheaper than MP Grimlock, for one.  Most of his joints are ratcheted, while my Masterpiece's joints are all friction-based and getting kinda floppy after twelve years.  I like the range of motion his robot mode dino-rib wings have.  His articulation is a little more solid.  There's a 5mm port for effects parts inside his dinosaur mouth.  He can steal the Masterpiece's sword (since it also used a 5mm port) and crown (it barely balances on his head, but that was true of the masterpiece too honestly).  

Both still transform into that ugly-ass dinosaur mode, though.  I mean, we all know dinosaurs were birds, but it's weird when you see a T. rex waddle around like an upright duck.  However, he's releasing at the same time as Beast Megatron and Fossilizer Paleotrex, so it's not like there aren't other style options for Transformers tyrannosaurs!  See, they also come in both flesh and naked.  (And both with more realistic posture.)

there's just been so many grimlocks that transform this exact same way from the exact same terrible dinosaur to the exact same robot mode, you guys

They just really have trouble replicating Kup's head in plastic, don't they?  Every single time it just looks a little off.  Maybe it's the need to put bags under his eyes that sets everything else off, I dunno.  It wouldn't be so surprising this time around if Studio Series '86 Hot Rod's head weren't so absolutely spot-on.  But Kup (and Blurr a little bit) noteably miss the mark when next to Hot Rod.

Anyway, it's Kup!  I love Kup.  Always have.  I'm sure a lot of that is me having a Targetmaster Kup toy when I was a kid moreso than me being drawn naturally to Old Robot Grandpas Who Transform Into Sort Of Pickup Trucks And Have Terrible Names.  But he's teal!  Either a bright teal or a washed-out teal, depending on if you're going for animation-accurate or original toy-accurate.  Teal with orange highlights?  Yeah!  Do that to me!  Do that to me in toy form!

Since '86 Kup is supposed to be faithful to The Transformers The Movie, he of course transforms from his animation model truck to his animation model robot.  (with a larger chin than necessary, honestly)  There's a lot of interesting ideas in his transformation, though the execution is a little tedious.  In truck mode, he ends up shoving his arms through his crotch between his legs, which is a place to put his arms that allow them to be Not Short, since the original toy just bunched them up under his own chest.  But you got to fasten a few panels together over all this arrangement, and that's the Not So Fun part.  I mean, it's not the worst.  Transforming Kup's second toy, the first Generations one with the giant rifle -- that's the worst.  But the Titans Return/Legends Targetmaster one managed to do a similar design but was much more fun to convert.  

Kup comes with both his animation-accurate gun and a container for Energon goodies to feed Allicons.  The container fits into the top of his fist with a 5mm peg, and both it and the gun slot into the side of the vehicle mode using much smaller pegs.  

Kup's arms and legs also come off at the mid-bicep and mid-thigh areas so that you can replicate the scene in The Transformers The Movie where Hot Rod has to rescue him from a giant robot squid and then repair him.  (Hot Rod's toy can swap out one of its fists for a welder torch for this same thing.)  This is neat, but what's most neat about it is that everything is done with 5mm pegs so that you can do all sorts of nutty stuff using Weaponizers and Fossilizers.  Want to give Kup a T.rex arm?  Of course you fucking do.  Do it.  Give him a T. rex arm.  

That's what this new Kup is really for.  

Reveal the Shield Jazz came out 11 years ago, and we were all thinking at the time, okay, this is the Best Jazz Possible.  There is no topping it.  No reason to buy any other G1 Jazzes!  And Power of the Primes Jazz came out 2017, and it was definitely a step down from RTS Jazz, but it became a combiner limb, so at least it serves a different sort of purpose.  So RTS Jazz still reigns supreme.  Unsurmountable.  Impossible.

And then Hasbro decided to reboot everything under a strictly adhered-to style (heavily cartoon-based) and also a unified scale.  RTS Jazz suddenly finds himself too tall and style-wise out-of-fashion.  He's clearly from a Different Era.  By the time Studio Series '86 Jazz was announced, you're already wishing for a Jazz that fits in better with everybody.  

I mean, if you'd rather your collection have a wider spread of styles, which is definitely a neat-o thing to do, then, yeah, keep your RTS Jazz.  It has its faults, but so does this new Jazz.  They're pretty similar in their placement on the joy vs annoyance spectrum, and about equally as complex.  New Jazz is definitely smaller (and about $5 more expensive after adjusting for inflation), but, again, he won't tower over the other guys he should be the same size as.  He does the job he's supposed to.  

The obvious difference between the two is that SS'86 Jazz tries to Be The Cartoon Model, and that means it needs to tuck those door wings away.  I'm pro door wing for Jazz in general, but this toy does an okay job of hiding them.  You tuck one layer of roof into another layer of roof, tuck the doors inside, and then just pile all that on his back.  Giving him door wings would be a more interesting use of that mass, but again we're trying to be the animation model.  

It is pretty great that despite having sixteen billion Transformers toys that transform with hoods folding down into chests, we're still discovering new ways to make that happen.  How will we have to fit the arms under there this time???  Well, in SS'86 Jazz's case, you ... rotate the abs around the spine to make room for them.  That's a new one on me.  

Jazz comes with a Moonbase One backdrop and a rifle.  Unlike Kup and Blurr from his wave, he doesn't come with a non-gun The Transformers: The Movie-inspired accessory.  

Hey, remember Shattered Glass?  That's the name of the Transformers mirrorverse where the Autobots are bad and the Decepticons are good.  It's... generally only interesting when played for absurdity, because honestly just swapping dispositions left-right isn't fundamentally interesting.  I like it when it's able to be used as more of a commentary on Transformers itself.  Like, you know, science fiction's science fiction. 

Or when it's about lolcats.

Anyway, it was largely only a BotCon thing except for an Optimus Prime redeco here or there, but here we are with Generations Selects Shattered Glass Optimus Prime and Ratchet.  Ratchet's the big deal here since the only Shattered Glass Ratchet toy is a BotCon customization class exclusive that was limited to ... not many.  There were, what, maybe 50 customization class slots, and there were four options for the single Ratchet toy you got?  And how many chose to paint up their assembled Ratchet toy into Shattered Glass Ratchet instead of two flavors regular ol' G1 Ratchet, an imagined G2 Ratchet, or Rescue Bots Medix?  

I'm probably the only one who splurged to get all four.  (Thankfully that was a year you could purchase unpainted, pre-assembled extras.)  

The point is, except for like maybe five people, there was no other Shattered Glass Ratchet toy until now.  And so here he is!  A different deco than we've seen previously, but I do dig the teal.  I always dig teal. 

And there's Shattered Glass Optimus Prime too, sure.  I had to get him because I wanted the Ratchet.  He's pretty too, but I've already got two BotCon SG Primes in those colors, so.   It's disappointing he doesn't have "TILL ALL ARE GONE" tampoed on him like the first one.

Since a lot of recent Leader Class toys have been Voyager Class Guys With Extra Stuff recently, it's nice to dig into one of the fewer Leaders that are just properly large boys.  Leader Class Megatron (Beast) is one of those boys.  A full head taller than the original 1996 Ultra Class Beast Wars Megatron, our new T. rex Megs is a tower of chonk.

Like Kingdom's other Beast Wars reimaginings, he marries a cartoon-accurate robot mode with a more realistic-looking animal mode.  (The animal mode doesn't try to look like the 1996 CGI but the robot does.)  Megatron's beast mode does attempt something that the smaller toys don't, however -- it tries to recreate the feeling of hide.  Much of the Tyrannosaurus skin sections are a slightly rubbery plastic affixed to a solid plastic interior.  Like an ogre, he's got layers.  Many of the interior plastic sections are cast in a bony white color, and so it has the presentation of flesh over a skeleton.  It's a pretty compelling arrangement, and it makes handling him feel different from other toys.  

The robot mode rearranges (with some parts clicking together a little too solidly) into a pretty amazing T. rex.  The trade on this is that the robot mode piles more beast mode parts on his back.  The thighs are now back there, too, since some actual Tyrannosaur thighs were wanted for beast mode rather than just the old flat missile-firing cylinders of the original toy.  There's some creative jointing there to allow the thighs to articulate with the rest of the legs while connected.  

Megatron's robot mode does have a fist sculpted into the tail arm, but the tail itself doesn't separate.  There's no water-squirting bladder in the dinosaur head arm, but there is a 5mm port inside the mouth if you want to add energy effects parts (sold separately).  

The toy tries its best to make the dinosaur mode poseable.  There's jointing at the middle of the tail and at the base, giving the tail a chance to sway how you want.  And the dinosaur neck has... lots of stuff going on to make the head be able to move around while keeping fleshy panels filling in the gaps, with mixed success.  There's a springloaded trapezoid of neck flesh on either side of the head, which more or less follows the skull as you move it to and fro, but the unspringloaded panel above the neck has to be manually moved into position each time the head moves.  But I like the effort.

Another change is that Megatron's dino torso transforms upside-down compared to other versions.  The beige tummy coloring ends up on the tops of Megatron's shoulders, rather than the green coloring along the spine.  

The important thing is that the toy has a great presence that's equal to Megatron's powerful personality.  It meets the Beast Wars Megatron of the mind's eye, and that's what you pay for and receive.

If there's anything we know about Transformer toys since Studio Series and War for Cybertron started, it's that robot height in animation is king.  Pull out those scale charts!  We're adherin' to them no matter what, unless you're Rattrap!  Did you think some characters were the same height?  Well, they weren't!  Were they actually always drawn the same height except for one two-second scene where one of them was taller?  Well, guess what?  That was actually the one time somebody paid attention the scale chart!  And that's what we're copyin'!  

So, hey, Kingdom Cyclonus.  You're tall.  We know we're getting a Galvatron from this line, and we haven't seen him yet and we don't know how big he is, but I wouldn't be surprised if Galvatron were shorter than this Cyclonus.  It'd match the scale chart.  Because Cyclonus is a big boy.  Galvatron pilots him in jet mode!  Ultra Magnus is his most common opponent in the cartoon!  He's just large.  

And, yeah, usually he's just drawn the same size as his often-partner Scourge, who's just Starscream-sized.  But on scale charts (and when he's countering Ultra Magnus) he's huge.

Guess Bombshell had a glo-up.

Since Kingdom Cyclonus is basically just a large version of the animation model sheet, his toy kind of feels like an oversized knockoff in your hands.  As if your eyes are cheating you.  It should be smaller!  But it is not.  And someone scaled it up, and there was no increase in sculpting detail, and it's just... large.  That, and also there's a budget spectrum for toys with one end labeled "SIZE" and the other "COMPLEXITY" and Cyclonus is at the SIZE end.  He's big, and so he will have less going on.  Remember how I mentioned that his wavemate Optimus Primal is relatively tiny and has a lot of flip-out stuff?  Same deal, but opposite.  

Also remember how I mentioned I scraped the paint off of one of Optimus Primal's thighs?  Well, my Cyclonus came with tiny little paint scrapes on his thighs.  (It's purple plastic under there.)  And the transformation involves.... shoving those surfaces just barely past the insides of his shins.  I have not yet actually scraped any paint off myself, but Optimus Primal gave me a complex.  This part of Cyclonus's transformation is not fun.  

The fun part of his transformation is telescoping like three or four layers of nosecone out of his torso.  He's a nesting doll in there.  

One thing I've noticed is that the panels that fold down on either side of the cockpit in jet mode don't... actually rest snug where they should?  They just kind of flare out a bit?  I checked images of other folks' Cyclonuses, and all others seem to have the same issue, and the official renders seem to suggest it's supposed to cling snugly instead.  I dunno.  

It's a big Cyclonus!