For decades, Greenlight and Lancer were known as "the green one" and "the orange one."  The original cartoon episode, "The Search for Alpha Trion," had named Elita-One (the pink one), Moonracer (the teal one), Firestar (the red one), and Chromia (the blue one), but there were two more Female Autobots appearing occasionally in the background who didn't get names until a bit of Transformers Collectors' Club prose.  

And then years later, Mairghread Scott put them in the Windblade comic book series and paired them up, making them the first w|w couple to be depicted in Transformers fiction.

And now they both have toys!

Power of the Primes introduced figures of Moonracer and Firestar, with Firestar being Moonracer with a new head, and Stege Greenlight and Lancer follow the same pattern, with Lancer being Greenlight with a new head.  Greenlight herself is the Moonracer/Firestar mold with some new thighs, forearms, torso, and head.  At the end of the day, this means Moonracer and Greenlight are the most accurate to their cartoon portrayals, while Firestar and Lancer have accurate new heads but with bodies that don't suit them as well.  

(It's too bad, because cartoon Lancer has this whole layered armor look going on.)  

Other than surface details, the biggest change to Greenlight/Lancer versus Moonracer/Firestar are the new forearms.  The fists are no longer separate pieces, so those don't fold in during transformation to car or limb modes.  And the 5mm pegholes are removed entirely, which is a bizarre choice for a line that boasts 5mm pegholes everywhere for weapon compatibility!

Greenlight also comes with Dazzlestrike, a ... well, repaint of Battle Master Lionizer.  Literally the same plastic colors with some green painted on the blade.  Feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to do something different.  

With Greenlight and Lancer out, you can finally complete ORTHIA, which is a combiner formed out of five Female Autobots introduced in "The Search for Alpha Trion."  You just gotta dig up your Power of the Primes Elita One, Moonracer, and Firestar.  Chromia's the only teammate left out, as she got a similar-but-retooled-to-be-combinerless toy in Stege's second wave.  

And since there's been a handful of Alpha Trions, the arrival of Lancer means every new character introduced in that episode now has a toy!  That's pretty neat. 

Since IDW's comic continuity was rebooted, it seems Greenlight's been shacking up with Arcee instead of Lancer, but I'm probably the last person who can point fingers at pairings being swapped around after a continuity reboot.

Lancer was debuted this weekend at San Diego Comic Con, and you can preorder her from Entertainment Earth, while Greenlight's over at Amazon.   

Dang, Transformers: Stege has been so committed to keeping robot mode scale consistent that they up and went and made a new Commander Class price point so that they could do Jetfire at the right size.  This is very crazy and also I respect it.

But yeah!  Jetfire!  He's PRETTY BIG!  Not as big as the 27"+ Unicron that went up for HasLab crowdfunding today, but definitely a large-ass guy!  At over a foot tall, he's nearly as massive as the old Armada Unicron we got, that's how big he is.  Starscream and Optimus Prime only come up to the tops of his thighs.  This is accurate to his portrayal in the cartoon, where he was a gigantic scientist who keeps getting left for dead until the next time the Autobots need him to fly them somewhere.  Because, again, he swol.  

Jetfire has a lot of small... stuffs about him.  Little things, here and there that make you think, yeah, okay, the Commander Class price tag is worth it, hopefully.  First of all, you know those 5mm pegholes they put in fists that let them hold weaponry?  Well, Jetfire has them, sure, but only when his fists are closed.  When you open his fist's fingers out into a relaxed shape, the 5mm peghole hides away into the palm.  Very neat!  

The Autobot logo on his chest can be flipped around to display a Decepticon logo.  Jetfire was a former Decepticon in nearly every continuity, so this is a good feature.  

All Stege has waist rotation and ankle tilts, and Jetfire is no exception.  His waist articulation is a little shallow, because of hip kibble, but it's there.  The rest of him is pretty dang articulated!  Again, articulated palms. That Commander Class price point money went into joints.  

Open up his jet cockpit.  Pull out the chunk of greeble inside.  Now there's a seat for a Titan Master!  (Remember, the little head guys from Titans Return?)  Open up the other window area on the back of the jet, and there's another two Titan Master seats hidden there.

When he's in jet mode, he has four 5mm pegs that can deploy from underneath him.  You can have other, smaller Transformers hold onto those pegs so that they can catch a ride with Jetfire into battle.  This is also very neat, but admittedly hard to coordinate.  

Because there's some sort of rule that Jetfires have to have battle armor pieces, Stege Jetfire comes with some of that.  And a mask, even!  It feels very perfunctory.  I honestly don't care for all that junk, but that's not new to my feelings on Jetfires.  I've always tossed that armor stuff aside.  (In jet mode, it all combines into a little hat you can put on top!)

Jetfire's the first toy bigger than the smallest size class (Battle Masters) to come with his own effects parts!  You know, the translucent plastic explosions and blasts and what not that you can peg onto your Stege guys?  Jetfire comes with two thruster bursts, which each can break apart into three pieces.  They're my favorite effects parts so far.  They can work for thrusters or weapon blasts or Jetfire's chest taking hits from other weapons...  Jetfire's effects parts are very satisfying.  

He transforms into that box with wings he was in the original cartoon and comic.  It's not nearly as sleek as the Robotech or whatever thing he was originally licensed from, but that's cool.  Cartoon/comic Jetfire transforms into something that looks like a kid drew it, and that kind of tickles me.  It's the Axe Cop of spaceships.  Again, it's just some boxes with some wings with another box on top with some tinier wings.  And it transforms about how you'd expect.  (Fold out the cockpit, fold the arms under, collapse the legs, lay it down.)  

There are some fun details in that otherwise standard transformation, however.  For example, there's the way the wings fold up between robot and jet modes.  The wings themselves transform.  They don't merely swing up.  There are multiple maneuvers that sculpt the tinier, stubbier robot mode wings into the longer, more aerodynamic wings the jet mode has.

He's honestly the Jetfire to end all Jetfires.

(They'll still make more.)

I think I've definitely fallen out of love with the Universe (2008) Sideswipe/Sunstreaker/RedAlert/Punch/ Counterpunch/G2Breakdown/Breakdown mold.  I guess it doesn't help that a number of those were misassembled, causing the neat little "rotate the roof backpack to cause the head to rise up out of the torso" gimmick to result in an always-off-angled roof backpack.  But mostly, like, yeah, it tried to do so much, and the end result is this tall and gangly guy with funny ears.  

I guess that's one of the advantages of so much Transformer stuff being budgeted out after a decade of rising costs.   You really gotta narrow your toys down to the basics.  They get a lot less fiddly!  A little less flying too close to the sun, y'know?  Brass effin' tacks.

Anyway, I've already reluctantly sung Stege Sideswipe's praises.  Reluctantly mostly because, really?  I'm not that attached to Sideswipe-the-character.  The most interesting thing he's ever done is die, whether it's Pat Lee making it up that he died in the movie, or actually dying in the IDW comic that one time.

But Stege Red Alert!  I like him.  He has a personality.  He's a paranoid, anxious mess.  And who among us on Today's Internet can't relate to that?  So I've been keeping a keener eye on replacing Universe Red Alert, more than Universe Sideswipe, with Stege Red Alert.

Red Alert is what you'd expect from a Red Alert.  He's Sideswipe, but in white/red/black Fire Chief deco!  He's got his red helmet from the cartoon, which is nice, because non-black helmets are interesting.  Most of his white plastic is stark white, but his arms and thighs are this off-white color.  He's not an Earth vehicle, and so the "F D" that's typically on his chest has been swapped out for the Cybertronian letters for "F" and "D."  

The one thing I don't like is that he doesn't come with the same shoulder missile launcher weapon thingy that Sideswipe does.  They both had that!  The should both have that.  Instead, Red Alert comes with a rifle, which you can also attach his flasher lights to and have him hold the whole contraption as an axe.  Maybe something presumably made out of glass isn't something you should be swinging around at metal people, but whatever.

He's a good, satisfying toy, now available in Interesting Character Flavor.

man, transformers used to have a lot more deco, didn't they

We're just gonna have to face some facts -- Springer gets pretty great toys.  Well, okay, not the first one.  That toy was... not super great.  But the BotCon 2007 redeco of Cybertron Defense Hot Shot?  The Universe redeco of Cybertron Evac?  The GDO retool of Movie Tomahawk?  And (pen)ultimately, the Thrilling 30 Springer that was the first triple-changing Springer since the original and is widely considered to be one of the better Transformers of all time?  

Yeah, well, the new Stege Springer is up there, too.  

Thrilling 30 Springer was so good that a lot of folks are saying, yeah, okay, so why do I need this other new Stege Springer?  It's a legitimate question!  And there's no definitive answer.  But I can definitely say that Stege Springer is a great toy in its own right.  It fits in that category that so many other War for Cybertron: Siege [sic] toys hail from -- aka, ugh it's just the cartoon design, oh wait, once it's in my hands it's pretty satisfying, what is this??? oh no I like it.  

While Thrilling 30 Springer was a glorious adaptation of Nick Roche's IDW Springer, albeit too skinny to get the exact feel of it, Stege Springer is a fairly faithful adaptation of Springer as we remember him from the cartoon.  This time, though, he's not lanky.  He's wide.  He has the presence.  He's got that Han Solo-esque charisma.  

It helps immensely that Stege Springer isn't as... Stegey as Stege often gets.  For example, Stege Starscream is a chunk of technogreeble detail that overwhelms the eyes if you look at him in focus.  Stege Chromia's another where you want to say, yikes, guys, scale it back a bit.  But Stege Springer doesn't suffer from that at all.  He's not overdetailed, he's just detailed.  Heck, his entire chest front is an absolutely flat box with nigh a sculpt line across it.  

And while he's a big pile of boxes, it's nice to see a few curves on him nonetheless, from the exhaust ports on the back of his canopy, to the wheel wells, to his helmet.  His toy strikes a good balance between edges and curves, between detail and negative space.  

He feels very at home with Titans Return Hot Rod, Blurr, and Kup, and Thrilling 30 Arcee.  ...not so much with Stege Ultra Magnus who is, again, looks like somebody was sculpting uniform detail across him while zoomed in at a billion percent.  

Some folks have described Stege Springer as fiddly, and, honestly, he's not any more fiddlier than Thrilling 30 Springer.  Perhaps less fiddly.  It is up to you whether the end result of that fiddliness results in very faithful renditions of Springer's original collaboration-of-boxes altmodes.  These aren't the reimagined car and helicopter modes of the Thrilling 30 Springer toy.  These, again, are just what he looked like in the cartoon, for better or worse.  He'll fit in well, again, with your newer Hot Rod, Blurr, and Kup toys.  

Springer comes with quite a few accessories, which is surprising considering how much Stege's gimmick is "buy these other toys to arm your other Stege toys."  His helicopter blade splits into three pieces -- two swords and a connector piece.  He also comes with two guns which combine into a longer gun.  You could probably get away with doing a Springer with just the swords in these budget-conscious days, but he comes with guns, too.  You can combine all the accessories together to make a larger cannon, though it's just the longer gun on top of the propeller connector with swords on the side.  Otherwise, he's got more weapons than he has hands, so I like to put the guns on his back, pointing upwards, to call back to his 2007 BotCon toy.  The propeller connector also fits back there, out of view.  

He looks good using the effects pieces that come with the two Battle Masters that transform into swords.  

He's fun and I like him.  He's an excellent Springer and an excellent toy.  

So anyway, there's this Decepticon who transforms from a robot into a stick.  And then that stick can wad back up into a box, and if you get two more of the same robot-to-stick toy, you can make combine those three boxes into a larger box!

This Decepticon is Refraktor, the trademark-sidestepping name for Reflector, the ol' three-guys-become-a-camera dude.  Remember him?  The toys were all different, but the show just took the middle guy and made two clones out of him, but without the lens on his tummy.  And, honestly, the execution of this new toy is better than it sounds?  It's almost satisfying.  It's so very close.

I mean, let's get this out there: one Refraktor is worthless.  As stated, you get a robot who lays down and you put his gun between his ankles and you put his shield over his head.  That's a spaceship!  Maybe!  And every single shortfall of this toy is entirely because it's saving its engineering for the occasion in which you have three of him.  The gun combines with two other guns to become a tripod.  The shield combines with two other shields to become a camera lens.  The robot transforms into an unremarkable plank because that robot also needs to become an unremarkable third chunk of a camera.  

And the real kicker is that if you buy this toy and plug in the blacklight code into the website, you get a tease for a better possible version of the toy you just bought, with a flashcube and other extra parts.  That's just mean, Hasbro.

I'm less down on the toy than I seem, I'm pretty sure?  I mean, at the end of the day, it's three guys who combine to form a camera, which is neat.  The gun-tripod and shield-lens are good engineering.  And it's Reflector, the camera guy.  You can even yank the tummy-lens off two of them (plugging them into their butts), so you can have the regular tummy-lensed guy and his two non-tummy-lensed sidekicks.  

He just, you know, exists almost entirely on the steam of recreating something from the cartoon, without a lot of gas put in the tank of "is this fun for people in general."  And it works for me, because I've been in Transformers for 35 years and so I put value in these sorts of things.  But it's.... probably not a good sell to anybody else?  Unless they like Transformers who become sticks?

And lord knows I do if their name is Rung, but, like, he's a real character, and Reflector -- the perpetual cameo -- is so not.  

dang this came out a heck of a lot more sour than i was expecting

gonna get this out of the way first, but the rubber ducky is a season two thing, and this is a season one megatron toy, so no it wasn't gonna ever come with a rubber ducky and no it's not weird or wrong that it doesn't

Many people assume Dinobot is my favorite Transformers character.  I do like him a lot, and I collect him religiously, but he's not actually my Number One.  My favorite Transformers character is actually Dinobot's nemesis, Predacon Megatron.  Megatron's an intellectual and physical powerhouse whose only weakness is he loves being evil with style and class.  He's not just a jackass, he also enjoys being a jackass, and he wants you to know he enjoys being a jackass.  It's fun to watch him fail, it's fun to watch him succeed -- it's just fun to watch him, which is rare for a Megatron.  

So the Masterpiece toy line has finally gotten to my favorite Transformers character, and... it's a big'un.  He's not the biggest Masterpiece toy so far (Ultra Magnus and Star Saber are larger), but he towers a bit over the G1 and Movie Optimus Primes and G1 Megatron.  Masterpiece toys have long maintained a strict robot mode scale, and if you want Megatron to be in scale with Masterpiece Optimus Primal and the nearly-as-large Masterpiece Dinobot, you're going to have a giant-ass Beast Wars Megatron toy.  

Like the other Beast Wars Masterpieces, Megatron is meticulously decoed.  He's got metallic paint and/or plastic to match the look of the mid-90s CGI.  He's got texture-mapped deco across his dinosaur skin surfaces.  The color matching is meticulous.  There's no places where the paint runs out because it goes around a corner and the budget's thin.  He's painted from every angle.  

He's electronic!  Batteries go into both of his heads.  The batteries in his robot head make his eyes light up.  The batteries in his tyrannosaur head play speech clips.  They're all in Japanese, of course, but there are quite a few of them.  

For the reasons listed above, he's also pretty expensive!  Amazon.jp has pretty good discounts on preorders, but without them, he was the most expensive Masterpiece toy thus far.  That is, until the third Masterpiece Optimus Prime comes out this fall.  (Prime's shorter, but he comes with, you know, a trailer.)

Megatron comes with a handful of accessories.  He's got two extra faces in addition to the neutral one.   There's the trademark grimace, which should remind us of the original toy's expression.  And most importantly, there's the Grin.  Some call it the Triangle Grin, some call it the Eric Cartman Grin, but it's the Grin.  I love that face.  It's the "Yeeessss!" face.  It's the "I love being an evil jackass" face.  And finally it's in plastic.  

There's also a toothbrush.  Yeah, there's a toothbrush, so you can replicate that scene in "Before the Storm" where we catch him with all his extra parts off brushing his dinosaur hand's teeth.  ...the extra parts also all come off.  You can yank off the hip guns, the tail itself from the arm, the kibble piled on his back, and the shoulderpads.  This leaves you with a pretty skeletal Megatron robot that's only got the dinosaur hand, his dinosaur boots, and the dinosaur taint.  And it's all so you can more faithfully replicate that time he brushed his dinosaur hand's teeth. These Transformers folks at TakaraTomy are madmen.  

Megatron comes with the shotgun he carries in "Call of the Wild."  He also comes with an adaptor for Dinobot's stand so you can mount Megatron on the stand's arm so that Optimus Primal can stand under Megatron's raised body -- also to replicate a scene from that same episode.  (There are also stand adaptor pieces for both robot and dinosaur modes.  There is no stand itself included -- you've gotta use Dinobot's or get a second Dinobot.)  There's also a weapon blast effect that you can plug into one of the shotgun barrels or into Megatron's open tyrannosaur mouth.  

Transforming him the first time isn't fun!  The instructions actually come with a second, smaller sheet of... corrections, so that you transform him properly without breaking him.  Some of his hinges -- especially within the pile of tyrannosaur hide that bunches up on his back -- feel a little fragile.  The instructions want you to fold them in the proper order.  It's also difficult to pull the tyrannosaur hide parts apart the first time.  They're locked together pretty well, and you don't know yet where the connection pieces are and where the hinges are.  It's a pretty large web of interconnected thin plastic sheets.  

The second problem area is transforming his torso.  Most of it pulls out along a slider, and that sucker is, like, paint-locked or something.  It requires excessive force to pull out the first time, and you're not really sure what you can leverage against without breaking something.  I recommend... pushing with your thumb against the inside of the top of the pelvis while yanking back?  I dunno. 

It's all much easier the second time around.  You know where the tabs are, you know where the weak points are, and everything stops being so hard to yank out as it was the first time.  Which is good, because both modes are excellent (unlike Dinobot's) and so you're actually going to want to spend time with both of them.  

Some people have reported problems with the purple swirly plastic in the crotch.  A handful have reported cracking, and a few more have reported fear of cracking.  It's swirly plastic, and there are already some carved grooves in there, and so once you hear about splitting, every facet looks like breakage.  Mine, so far, doesn't seem to have any problems.  It's been suggested that the problem is not actually weak plastic, but that those few handful of cracked crotches were because of a rarely-occurring gear misassembly inside the crotch.  Meaning, hopefully, that it's not something inevitable that will happen to everybody's Megatron, but something that will happen immediately to maybe five people once they move a hip in any direction, and everybody else's will likely be fine.  

Since mine seems to be okay, really the only downside to this fucking gorgeous toy is that my kids expect me to transform it constantly, and also transform it immediately.  Like, children, okay, but come back in half an hour, all right?  This is not a satisfactory answer to them.  They want dinosaur mode right now.  

I hand them Rescue Bots T-Rex Optimus Prime.  You just twist that guy's waist and he's done.

When I was a much younger lad, in those golden years before even the term "Autobot" had made a resurgence within Transformers stuffs after a long nap, when buying a new Optimus Prime (not Primal) toy seemed like a crazy pipe dream, I had lots of ideas about What Optimus Prime Should Look Like In Real Life.  It was largely based on the aesthetics of the original 1984 toy, with its giant box for a torso atop a pair of comparatively skinny legs.  It was very "this thing is a truck first and a robot second," with this shell of a Freightliner housing this skeleton of pistons and gears.  This foggy concept floating in my brain was my Idealized Prime.  And you could nourish that sort of thing for forever as it grew and grew, because in that desert bare of any possibility of a Transformers revival, that was all you figured you'd ever have.  

And then, you know, suddenly came the parade of reimagined Optimus Primes across countless aesthetics, culminating in a recent snap-back to the source material (by which we mean the cartoon).  

But Bumblebee Movie's Optimus Prime is so very close to what was in my brain all those decades ago.  Mind, I'm talking more about the action figure itself.  What we see on screen has less of what I want.  The CGI model is, you know, just An Optimus Prime.  The toy, though, has to become a truck.  And so that toy IS truck.  The robot IS truck.  

And what a friggin' great truck it is.  Unlike usual, this Voyager Class Optimus Prime toy feels like it's prioritizing the truck and then making a robot out of that truck.  It's not just an Optimus Prime chest with robot legs poking out the back.  It's an actual truck.  The back of it doesn't look like legs.  Instead, about half of the legs folds up into the back-end of the cab.  This leaves a more realistic-looking hitch section behind, which should really be just some railing for wheels to attach to.  

The rest explodes and then recompacts into a solid robot form.  Most of the bottom front of the truck, including the bumper, flips and turns around to become Optimus Prime's back.  His arms hide inside the cab in the usual L formation, but some panels cover them from view.  Some parts might pop out of their hinges in the process if you're not gentle, but they snap back on.  This is the toy's only frustration.  

The result is a robot that looks like it's made of truck.  An Optimus Prime made out of truck parts, rather than a truck made out of Optimus Prime.  I prefer to keep the silver stripe ab pieces folded down.  This is not accurate to the CGI model, but it's accurate to how I view the shape of Optimus Prime's chest.  It's a giant box.  Flipping the stripe-abs down approximates this.  

Plus if you got a hankering to go watch this design in motion, you'll see an Optimus Prime who shoots to disable, not shoots to graphically disembowel.  That's an extra bonus.

Transformers Stege is just tearing through Universe (2008) Autobots with so-so toys and replacing them with solid entries.  Universe Sideswipe, Ironhide, and Prowl were all toys with some problems, and these Stege iterations are just dancing on their graves.  (The lone exception is Hound, whose Universe 2008 toy is still nigh-perfect.)  

The issue with Universe Prowl was that he was impossible to transform without his door wings popping off.  There just wasn't clearance, and the balljoints weren't very secure to begin with.  It was easier to just yank those car parts off to begin with before attempting transformation just to get it over with and out of the way.  Plus he commonly had some bad paint that reportedly came off in lots of folks' hands, and his painted translucent plastic doors (the ones that pop off) always had kind of a sticky texture to them. 

More subjectively, the dude was a little too tall and gangly to read perfectly as Prowl to me.  And when I got him off the shelf to take pictures of him for this, apparently he's hard to stand?  His heels are not sufficiently large.  He just likes to fall over backwards a bunch.

(Note: The Universe Prowl pictured below has been customized with stickers and had his thighs swapped with Universe Smokescreens.)

But this new Stege Prowl?  I have been excited for this Prowl ever since we got to see stock images of him.  He's deliciously short and stocky (the original 1984 Datsun toy has the platonic ideal for Autobot Car proportions, I feel), and he's in a toyline where there hasn't really been an issue with toys being too fiddly or fall-aparty.  And sure enough, Prowl's toy takes some cues from Stege Sideswipe's execution.  During transformation, everything fits neatly into place.  It's very simple.  There's no cramming anything past anything else.  Nothing pops off.  (The only balljoint on him is his neck.)  He's just efficient, straightforward, and compact.  

The result is a very good Prowl robot mode (with the standard Stege articulation which includes waist and ankle tilts) which transforms into a reasonably space-y police car.  I mean, okay, this space police car has Japanese patrol car markings on the hood, but that's just what Prowl looks like, so whatever.  I like his giant clompy feet.  I like his meaty fists (which are on rotatable mushroom joints).  He's got a great look to him.  

Some people don't like his legs.  These people are wrong.

Prowl comes with two accessories.  One his his lightbar, which plugs into his roof with a 5mm peg.  The other is his rifle.  You can plug the lightbar into the top of the rifle.  You can also plug the rifle into the top of the lightbar!  Or you can, just like, leave the lightbar on the roof in either mode and have him carry his gun around normally without a big flashing bowtie on it, I dunno.

I did make some visual modifications to this guy.  I painted his thighs, abs, and gun silver.  I'm a big fan of original Prowl's silver accents, but Transformers toys tend to keep Prowl a black/white-only guy, so I tend to have to finish his deco myself.

Transformers Stege is moving on to wave 2, and so here's Starscream.  He's half of the second wave of Voyager Class guys, and gaddangit, I like him.  I hate that I like him.  

First of all, like, dude, he is very Stege.  His legs look like a close-up of the Death Star trench run.  Like he was carved out of a Cheddar Bay Biscuit.  Like he is literally a sponge.  I could go on.  It's not an aesthetic I like.  There's not an art to his leg details, it just looks like detail for detail's sake.  An obsession with lines without understanding how they fit into the whole.  It's like drawing in Photoshop while zoomed in too much.

The silver lining is that the soot and scorch marks they slop all over his legs has a flattening effect!  There's just so much detail on top of detail that your eyes kind of glaze over and can't focus on it!   *uneasy thumbs up*

It's maddening that this is the style they chose for this particular Starscream, because otherwise this particular Starscream is superb.  He is... delightfully poseable.  He's more poseable than the Masterpiece.  (though the Masterpiece is admittedly pretty stiff)  It's not just the amount of articulation points, but the range.  His elbows are double-jointed.  His wrists turn and can hinge down a bit.  His knees aren't double-jointed, but when you fold his legs up, the thighs collapse into the shins, allowing the legs to bend as much as a human's.  (there is a spring-activated piece of plastic back there so that his shins don't look hollow from behind)  And, universal across Stege toys Deluxe and larger, a dedication to giving each figure ankle tilts and waist rotation.  Yeah, that's right.  A Starscream toy has waist rotation.  You'd think that'd be impossible, based on, you know, how his chest canopy window usually has to reach across to his happy trail area, but this toy says LOL and splits that canopy in two so you can twist his torso as you please.  And also, he's got extra hinging at his shoulders for transformation that also allow you to get his arms across his torso into one of the best approximations of folded arms I've seen in a Transformers toy.  

As a result of this, you can give him a lot of personality.  This is what will sell you on owning him once you have him in hand.

He transforms like a Transformers jet.  You know, he's got a robot on the bottom and a jet on the top.  In Starscream's case, you kind of put him in a limbo pose and then fold his backpack around him while twisting his shoulder intakes into the jet's nose.  And by "jet," I mean this guy is a Cybertronian Tetrajet, as seen in the first episode of the original Transformers cartoon.  And by "Cybertronian Tetrajet," I mean this guy is a Colonial Viper.  

I'd love for this guy's face sculpt to have a smirk.  Instead, Thundercracker seems to have the smirk head, if the samples at Toy Fair last month were indicative of the final production run.  Smoove move, guys.  You got Seeker noggins switched.  (i guess they switched the original tech spec numbers around in the 80s, so maybe this is an homage)

To sum up, if you like Starscream and don't mind that his leg texture looks like an Escher print, get your hands on this guy.  He is a great toy in spite of himself.  I originally planned to buy him only because he's so Steged that he looks like the overdetailed art of Underbase-powered Starscream from the Marvel Comics.  But now I just genuinely like him.  It sucks.

So far the Studio Series Leader Class toys have been pretty baller.  Like, Blackout and Grimlock?  Very good.  And here comes Dark of the Moon Megatron and... oh no, he's also baller!  Dang!  Oh no!  These are all great!

For Dark of the Moon Megatron, it's about time.  He's my favorite live-action Megatron design, largely because he actually turns into some kind of Earth thing.  Plus he's wearing a tarp on his head like he's Obi-Wan Kenobi, chilling in Africa shooting elephants (but only in a scene cut from the movie but left in the various adaptations).  He's such an impressive visual that Megatron even looked like that for a bit in the IDW Generation 1 comics.  

The original Dark of the Moon Voyager Class toy of this design was Not Impressive!  He was this dinky, skinny little thing.  Gangly, even.  And so that never really satisfied.  

But this new toy does that design very well!  Does it an amount of justice!  You may be put off at first by the soft goods, since it's very obviously a small piece of beige fabric that does not look like it is actually a very large tarp on a very large robot.  But you can squish it around a bit in your fingers, or get it wet and drape it better until it dries, or other kind of weathering techniques, and it starts looking pretty okay.  I am not really done playing with mine yet, because I didn't want to make too many changes before taking photography.  Didn't want to give off too false of an impression.  But I'll be wadding it up a bit now that I'm wrapped here.  See if I can get properly to Ragged.

Impressively, Megatron scales well to Studio Series Optimus Prime in vehicle mode.  Like, their semi cabs are the same size, with Megatron towing a large covered trailer behind him.  How does this work, with Megatron transforming into only a slightly larger robot?  Here's the secret:

the truck cab is essentially hollow

For real, look under it, and there will be nothing in there.  It's a shell.  It breaks up into pieces and then compacts into his legs, which are much less hollow, because they are several strata of truck cab wadded up.  And then his thighs and upwards become the entirety of the trailer.  Fold the tarp over the top, wrap his little rubber chain harness across that, and you're done.  It's a very large truck-and-trailer mode, and it looks very neat.  Very Mad Max, with the spike bumper and what-have-you.  

And then you unwrap it back into a large hunchy robot with half its skull blown off and wearing a hood.  He's got a lot of personality and I like it.  

Bonus: He comes with Igor, the little disembodied head guy who appeared in the movie but otherwise didn't receive a toy, possibly because Hasbro didn't know he existed until it was too late.  Hasbro also didn't know DOTM Megatron carried a shotgun, and they released the shotgun with an Optimus Prime from the following movie.  It happens.  But hey!  Igor!

I really like Megs and Igor.  They're neat.