Jay Cochran over at ToyNewsI was a little worried about this strip's Challenger explosion reference.  Even though the reference was just the setting of the joke, not the source of the joke, it was still a potential yikes!  Substituting some other sad topic for a national memorial service would have only been a lateral move, so hey, here it is on my own site, where we have no such standards.

This is the last of my six new guys from my Giant Box Of Awesomeness.  He was the only retool of a toy I already had of the bunch, so of course he was the least interesting to talk about, and that's why he's bringing up the rear.  His name...

...is Solar Storm Grappel.

Yes, that's right.  "Grappel."  Misspelled for some reason.  It can't be for trademark purposes, since, well, trademark doesn't really work that way.  Hasbro couldn't sell a toy named "Batmanne."  And usually the name prefixes like "Solar Storm" are appended onto common nouns that are hard for Hasbro to defend ownership of, like with "Special Ops Jazz" or "Turbo Tracks."  But "Grappel" isn't a word, much less a common one.  Except maybe, I guess, amongst drunken people.

So I assume this was the worst kind of typo.  Even if it wasn't, it's still horrible.

But, at least, this means I can start calling the guy who used to be simply "Grapple" the distinguished name of "Grah-PELL."  Y'know, pronounced all French-like or something.  Like "GRA-pell" was his commoner name and now that he's a famous arteeeest, he's known in the galleries as "Grahh-PELLLLLL."   This amuses me.

Grahpell is an extensive retool of Inferno, the fire truck.  They shared a toy back in 1985, and they do so again in 2011.  And by extensive, I mean they changed wayyy more than the water cannon, which would have been sufficient.  Grahpell has a new crane hook arm, obviously, since a crane is what he's supposed to be, but he also has a new head based on the original cartoon's character model for him.  He also has new forearms, new hands, and new feet.  The new hands are sculpted into an open position, but not the kind that still allows for him to hold 5mm peg weapons.  No, they're just open to look pretty.  They don't rotate at the wrist, either.  The new forearms do away with the previous version of the mold's ability to rotate the vehicle kibble higher up onto the arm and out of the way of the hands.  It's all one solid piece here.

The crane hook arm can extend in either mode, but it's kind of unwieldy in robot mode.  Since the wrists don't rotate, it always has to be slung under his arm, meaning the crane hook arm's hook has to always be hanging, uh, upwards, unless you want his arm to look broken.

A plus for this version of the toy is that it holds together much better in vehicle mode than either of the older versions I have.  The arm panels lock into his legs more securely.   This might be because of the loss of rotating arm panels or it might be plain ol' plastic tolerances, who knows.

And finally, because Grahpell's not gonna be left out, the little rungs on the tops of his shoulders have been widened so that they can interact with the whole C joint clip system that all the other current toys are a part of.  This, my friends, is sweet ass.

Oh man.  I was just lookin' through this guy's DeviantArt account a few days ago.

Clement Sauvé is the character designer on G.I. Joe Renegades, the new show currently running on The Hub.  He was only 33, and he died of cancer on Wednesday.  That really blows.  I'll be watching the new episode on Saturday (and the rest of the season) with a heavy heart.

The visual style was a huge part of why the new series appealed to me.  It's sad that we're not only losing the dude, but also the potential for more of his work.

Damn.

Man, earliest BotCon reveal ever, or what? Sure feels like it.

The theme for this year's BotCon convention figure set has been revealed, and everything's coming up Animated.  You thought it was all over, didn't you?  Ha!  Animated will never die!  It's like the bad guy in the horror film who always springs up that one last time after you thought he was dead, except in this case instead of a serial murderer or whatever, it's a beautiful person of the gender of your choice who will have sex with you all night long.

It looks like the box set is going to be strictly Animated-style Stunticons, and the first one we get to see is Dead End, who's a redeco of Animated Jazz.  He is, according to Animated character designer Derrick Wyatt, who was responsible for helping put this together, a "depressingly dour beat poet."  Which is pretty awesome.  And explains the facial hair he's rocking.

Guess we'll be seeing Motormaster, Drag Strip, Wildrider, and Breakdown some time soon.  (Man, we got a Breakdown last year, too...)  Now we get to speculate who's going to get made from whom.

This past year, it seems Hasbro's been doing its darnedest to do mainline retail versions of guys from the BotCon 2009 set.  I talked about Kup a few days ago, there's a Banzaitron in stores (which I didn't buy because I preferred the BotCon version), and now here's Generations Scourge.   There's also Dirge, Thrust, and (soon) Thundercracker in stores, which replaces a chunk of the BotCon 2007 set, but that stings a lot less, 'cuz, hey, I've had those for nearly five years by now.  It hurts more when BotCon toys get replaced in what feels like a few months.

But hey, that's why BotCon should probably stay away from popular guys who are undoubtedly going to get new toys at some point, like Kup and Scourge, and why BotCon 2010's set is more valuable to me personally.  Hasbro's probably not chomping at the bit to make Rapido or G2 Breakdown so much.

That said, I'm pretty okay with getting a new Scourge.  I never thought BotCon 2009's Scourge, which was Cybertron Sideways with a new head, worked well as him.  He was a space jet, but beyond that the similarities weren't really there.  It did help that BotCon also offered a set of Sweeps that year, which helped the illusion that this toy was Scourge, via sheer number, and I figger I'll keep using those Sweep toys even with my new Scourge that doesn't match.  Hey, they're the only real, actual Sweeps toys!  I mean, you COULD buy multiple Scourges, but...

Despite being an entirely new toy designed to be Scourge from the start, Generations Scourge transforms into a very similar altmode to BotCon Scourge, albeit a more real-world approach than alien.  Either altmode is pretty different from the original Scourge's altmode, which was a flying bathtub.  I'll allow it.  The most important thing, I maintain, about this new altmode, is its undocumented feature.  In the original cartoon, Scourge could stick his head up out of the back of his flying bathtub form, an artifact of his preliminary design.  Well, dude, look who can really do that now?  And no, it's not just an accident.  His head pulls up an extra notch not needed for the transformation to robot mode, undoubtedly just to recreate this oddity. Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout.

There are a few annoyances with the transformation to robot mode.  Firstly, his wings like to pop off when you try to get them into the proper positioning.  There's a lot of friction back there with the parts surrounding his wings.  They're also kind of a bitch to put back on, since there's not much room given for the hinge to slip back into the socket.  The other annoyance is due to an opposite problem -- it's hard to get his feet pulled out of his legs.  There's no groove to get leverage, so you kind of have to try to wiggle them back and forth for a few minutes, hoping something gives.

Another undocumented feature from the instructions is that you can open his wings to create a more-accurate "caped" appearance.  Opening the wings also gives you a place to store his two guns in vehicle mode, which combine into a bigger gun via a C joint.  The combined gun looks a lot like Scourge's 1986 Targetmaster parter, Fracas, but it does not transform into him.  (Though since Universe Cyclonus's Targetmaster partner is basically Fracas already, and I have an extra, I can remedy Scourge's Nebulan-impairment pretty easily.)  The gun on Scourge's head is also C joint compatible so you can clip one of his handheld weapons onto it.

Overall, this Scourge is a much better companion for Universe Cyclonus than the BotCon version, which served as a helpful stopgap in the meantime.  I prefer the facial hair on my Transformers to be painted, after all, so you can see it better.

If you're fixing for a Scourge of  your own, TFSource has both the American and Japanese versions available for preorder.

Hey, I bet you thought you were getting Generations Scourge or RtS Grapple today, didn't ya?  Tough noogies, yer gettin' ponies!  Some things are just that important.

McDonald's Happy Meals are doing one of their usual split boy/girl sets, this time between My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and some boring Tonka trucks or something.   Man, fuck that Tonka shit.  I want my fuckin' ponies.  There's a McDonald's within three blocks walking distance of our house, much to the consternation of my health, but this particular location was being amazingly stubborn in getting this wave of Happy Meal toys in.  There was a period last week where I was checking in on every lunch just in case, but no, there were just the remainders of whatever lame stuff was in the previous promotion.  Maggie and I visited this McDonald's again today, and finally I had found my fuckin' ponies.

Maggie suggested also getting a Happy Meal just so we could double up on pony goodness.  (I know you can buy them separately from the food, but I always feel like a schmuck for doing so, for some reason.)  She asked which ponies they had, and the helpful lady at the register grabbed three baggies from the bin.  Maggie immediately picked out Applejack, who is one of the few ponies she tolerates.  But me, I had to choose between Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy.  This was a really rough choice, and I was on the spot.  I mean, Pinkie Pie is awesome.  She's basically Robin (which is why Maggie hates her).  And Fluttershy is adorkable.  She's basically Dina (which is why Maggie hates her).  No grown man should have to choose between his favorite ponies!

I was about to suggest, fuck it all, just give me three Happy Meals, but the register lady reminded us that we could buy the the third toy separately from the meal.  I reluctantly agreed, despite my usual reservations.  At least this would prevent me from having to make a real decision.  We took our ponies home.

The Happy Meal ponies are inarticulated, of course.  They're solid plastic other than their "real" pony tail hair.  Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy are sculpted to be seen from one side; the other side's face is sculpted over in their mane.  I assume this is to preserve character model accuracy from the one side.  The characters as seen on the television show are not designed strictly for three-dimensional depiction.  They're Flash-animated (or facsimile thereof), and as such are designed for maximum abstracted cuteness, not hyper realism.  The main being sculpted over one eye seems to work for the introverted Fluttershy, but it's disappointing that I can't witness the full insane fury of both of Pinkie Pie's eyes.  Applejack retains both her eyes.  Her mane is done up in a pony tail (so to speak), so it can be sculpted out of the way.  I do wish Applejack had her cowboy hat.  I think it's an important part of her appearance.

Each pony comes with their own unique display stand that is shaped like their individual Cutie Mark.  Fluttershy's stand is a butterfly, Applejack's is an apple, and Pinkie Pie... I decided hers is a whoopie cushion.  Maggie tells me, no, it's a balloon,  you dimwit, but a whoopie cushion is way cooler.  Each display stand comes apart in the middle to form two combs.  You know, for brushing.  This is pretty cool.  Well, it'd be cooler if the teeth of the combs were, well, thinner, because it's not particularly conducive to combing hair if your comb's teeth are half a centimeter thick and fairly blunt at the ends.  Still, it's a nice thought.

I need more.

What has happened to me.

Unlike Wreck-Gar, Lugnut, and Kup, Perceptor doesn't happen to be in my Hall of Awesome. I mean, I like Perceptor well enough, I guess, but he's always just kind of there, y'know? Being a scientist. Being a buzzkill. Being a favorite subject of slashfic, apparently. (Slashfic writers love their repressed nerds.)  Besides, I think I got all of the "How I Feel About Perceptor" out of my system when I talked about his Toys"R"Us reissue a while back.

But right at the beginning, let's get this out of the way: Perceptor's a bit of a shellformer.

If you've got Perceptor's legs, you've got 75% of his vehicle mode.  It all wads up in there, the entire back half of his truck mode.  During transformation from robot to truck, you unfold all these panels and treads and assemble the back half of the truck.  Next you wad up his robot mode inside this truck shell you've created, and seal it off with the truck hood that's on his back.  It is not terribly compelling, and it can be very frustrating at times.  It's not, like, Side Burn level or anything, but it's just not my favorite transformation style.

But on the positive side, I think I am positively in love with his robot mode.  I'm not sure exactly what it is that does it for me.  Maybe it's his lankiness.  I've always thought Perceptor should be more lanky.  I mean, he's a nerd, right?  He shouldn't be the same pile of rectangles that everyone else is.  I love how his forearms taper organically.  Maybe what's happening is that his more angular shape puts me in mind of his All Hail Megatron redesign appearances in IDW comics, particularly his role in Last Stand of the Wreckers, which anyone who reads this blog regularly should know that I have a boner for.  The shape of the chromed piece on his chest definitely calls out to his design in that series, though I don't know if this specific call-back was intentional, or whether it was merely a side-effect of Hasbro's intentions of retooling Perceptor as Reflector.  Reflector's chest is shaped like this, after all.

(It is because of his design's similarity to LSotW Perceptor that I am happy to lend him Blurr's sniper rifle.)

Back to Perceptor's chromed chestpiece. Yes, Perceptor has chromed parts, which is eyebrow-raising for a mainline Hasbro product.  It just doesn't happen that often.  I guess someone at  Hasbro thought it was important?  Me, I can take it or leave it, in theory, but I do kind of think it makes him stand out a bit too much from his peers.  Plus, well, you know how much I like the C joint system, with the clips?  The dials on Perceptor's wrists have C joint rungs sculpted into them.  Two per.  Sweet, right?  No, because the vacuum-metalized coating makes these rungs too thick to work with the clips.

It took me a while to notice this, and at first I was wondering why Perceptor felt so, well, gimmickless, compared to the rest of his contemporaries.  He doesn't have a handweapon, only the truck-lights-become-his-shoulder-cannon thing.  (I'm not sure how the cannon's crosshairs helps, what with it being set behind his head.)  I kept thinking I must be missing something crucial.  But no, it's just that his compatibility with the rest of his wave is hindered by his chrome.  Kinda annoying.

I do like his choice of altmode.  Frankly, I never liked the microscope.  He didn't even ever look like a microscope so much as a robot folded into something that sort of looked like a microscope, if you were mostly blind.  So I'm happy that Hasbro remembered Perceptor's third mode, his mobile tank/cannon/thingy, and ran with that instead.  Yay,  half-track SUV!

Anyway, his chest opens up, the end.

TFSource.com is considering sponsoring Shortpacked! in the future, so in a practice flexing of my web-muscle, here's a link to their RtS Perceptor order page.  He's (of course) sold out at the moment, though, so maybe a link to the Japanese United version would also be prudent?

Kup is right up there in my upper tier of favorite characters.  Part of the reason for this is his prominence in the later Marvel Comics stories.  There wasn't a particular reason for Kup to stay around in those latter-year stories.  He was even around for the G2 stuff, years and years later.  His toy wasn't on shelves any more, and by the time those G2 issues were out, it'd been about a decade.  But he's just a good archetype.  He's an important one to have around.  You need an old, grizzled dude who won't bullshit you, and who's just a little crazy, what with the millions of years of combat under his belt.  A dude who has the spark of horrible, unspeakable violence under the whole grandpa pastiche.  Kup's a really old warrior who's still around because he's just that good, for all the positives and negatives that implies.

I really like the direction that IDW comics has taken Kup these past few years.  Kup, I think, has benefited the most out of all the other Transformers characters they've handled.  Spotlight: Kup was the first IDW story I truly enjoyed genuinely on every level, rather than "hey it's a Transfomers story, of course I enjoy it."  He was a robot past his prime, left on a planet to die... if not for the intense radiation that not only kept him going, but was giving him paranoid hallucinations.  Kup was so good at what he does that he took down every single unnaturally-animated zombie that came his way... unaware that these were actually Autobot soldiers sent to retrieve him.

But what really clinched it for me was birthed out of All Hail Megatron.  I know, I know, please don't hit me.  I know.  But say what you will about Shane McCarthy's work, Kup adopting a cigar into his body language really made him come alive as a character.  It was a simple prop, but it embodied what I feel Kup is.  Artist Casey Coller has apparently always envisioned Kup as Sgt. Rock, which is a character angle I appreciate.  Throw some Nick Fury or some Hannibal in there, and I think the picture is complete.  That was the difference between the original cartoon's Kup and the one in the Marvel stuff.  The Kup of the cartoon is just your grandpa.  The Kup of Marvel is a seasoned warrior who's pretty rough around the edges.  Adding the cigar brings in that Marvel-esque aspect, solidifying and focusing it into a stronger character concept all-around.  Plus it forces artists to incorporate unique body language: is he holding it in his teeth?  Is he pinching it in his fingers?  No other Transformers character does this, since none of them have ever had a cigar.

(I-Gear is planning to sell third-party Kup heads with cigars.  I'll have to think about it.  I can prooobably make my own cigar for pretty cheap, should I decide to.  I need, what, a grain of rice, glue, and a silver Sharpie?)

But anyway, back to Kup's new toy.  Despite how important I feel Kup is, he doesn't get many figures.  He got his original toy in 1986, plus the Targetmaster retool the following year, and then nothing nothing nothing nothing, all the way up to 2009, when BotCon did a figure of him.  Man, I was so excited to get that Kup, even though my excitement was dulled by how much I hated the toy they were making him out of.  It was the wrong kind of vehicle, it was the wrong kind of body shape, and it was an annoying toy to transform.  But it was Kup and I loved it.  Because, man, I'll take my Kup love where I can get it.

Generations "Sergeant Kup" has arrived now, however, and it is my hero.  It's exactly the Kup toy I've always wanted.  I remember when Alternators were the big thing, and I was all about Kup being a Chevy SSR.  Kup's name is taken from the last three letters of "pickup," you see.  He should be a roundish pickup truck thing, and the Chevy SSR fit the bill perfectly.  Generations Kup isn't exactly an SSR, but it's certainly the same kind of vehicle.  It's a roundish retro-style pickup truck.   This was my ultimate wish.

His robot mode's not too shabby, either.  Despite being a roundish pickup truck, he still transforms into a recognizable facsimile of his original robot mode.  I love his thick blocky legs and his rounded arms.  Plus there's his old man belt and the fake truck grill tummy that the cartoon made up.  And one of the best details is the slight fake windshield that rises up out of his collarbone.  I can't help but feel that it's a callback to his pre-Earth War Within design from the Dreamwave comics.

The transformation isn't exactly as no-fuss as I'd like, but it's far from murderous.  I'm still a little confused on how to get his torso to go from one mode to the other in a more streamlined fashion, since I always feel like I'm kind of forcing it instead of taking the right steps in the right order.  (Instructions are never really any good at helping with these minor things.)  And if there's one nagging detail about the robot mode itself, it's the door kibble that hangs off his forearms.  It's hard to get them not in the way.  Looking at them, you think they need to be rotated up and away from his hands, but that just gets them in the way of his elbows and his shoulder wheels, and that's the vehicle mode configuration anyhow.  The proper positioning does give him more freedom of movement, but they look a little awkward hanging out so far past his hands.

Kup still comes with his musket laser, as always.  No matter what Kup toy you're dealing with, it has a laser musket.  It might be a little cyan sci-fi gun, it might be a dude who turns into a gun, or it might be an arm-mounted black cone.  In Generations Kup's case, his musket laser (or laser musket, as the packaging calls it) looks more like an actual musket.  This is pretty nerdy and awesome, since someone on the design team had to have done this on purpose, rather than "laser musket" being something the packaging copy guy added later after Googling "what the hell was Kup's old weapon called?" at 3am.  In vehicle mode, the musket laser becomes one of his exhaust pipes, or you can clip it to his rooftop on one of the C joints.  Kup has two C joints on his roof/backpack, plus two more on each of the aforementioned wrist-mounted kibble bits.

I also adore Kup's colors.  Kup's colors are often botched.  His original toy was one of those colors that just don't photograph accurately, as it hovered somewhere between cyan and teal.  The toy in person is decidedly on the greenish teal side, but Marvel really liked coloring him in light blue.  Generations Kup is very minty, which pleases me greatly.  It's not exactly a color Kup has been before, but it's a color that I feel suits him.  Anything but blue, really.  Kup is not blue.  Kup should never, ever be blue.   (Except in the Big Looker storybooks, which I allow to live on a technicality.)

Kup is starting to pop up at Target and Kohl's, folks.  You should (wait a week or so and) go find him.