I've got a few hours before we gotta head over to the theatre, so I've got a little time to crank out more photos and words about the BotCon exclusives I haven't given specific attention to yet.  I'm in the middle of packing away toys for our move in a few weeks anyway, and I can't box away some of my Animated stuff until I get them photographed with their BotCon redecoes and/or retools!  I can't help it.  It's my compulsion.

So here's Lockdown and his BotCon counterpart, the Stunticon Wildrider.  For being a dark gray redeco of a black toy, they look pretty different, which is nothing short of amazing.  (Note: My Lockdown is a little custom-painted.)  The silver and burgundy definitely distinguish him, and the most recognizable part of of Lockdown, his lantern-shaped head, is replaced by a new one.  Wildrider has a pointier jaw with jagged teeth and a little helmet.

Another nice thing about Wildrider is that he's the "Blazing Lockdown" mold, which means he comes with the chainsaw instead of the hook.  I never got the chainsaw version, so that's an extra bonus for me.

Despite Wildrider's feral appearance, he actually sounds like Dr. Smith from Lost in Space.

I kid, mostly.  We got our G2 Breakdown last year, so it's nice to have the first BotCon exclusive of Breakdown which isn't in his G2 colors, as much as I love my cyan and magenta.  It's just... his regular colors are kinda boring.  I never dug the off-white.  And the BotCon exclusives are basically the only reason I know Breakdown exists, so I have no nostalgia for it.  Honestly, out of all five of the Animated Stunticons in the box set, Animated Breakdown is probably my least favorite.

...which is made up by Animated Sideswipe being so awesome.  Sideswipe was one of the at-show souvenir add-ons, bundled with Toxitron.  Unlike Breakdown, Sideswipe IS in his G2 colors, which are his G1 colors (red and black) reversed.  The original G2 Sideswipe toy had a green launcher and a few green stickers, and the Animated version ramps up the green to beautiful effect.  It's really a great combination, the bright green and the black and the red and the white.  It's not a color combination we get much.

Why is Animated Sideswipe in G2 colors?  I imagine it's 'cuz that mold's already been in red as Rodimus.  (It's already been in black as Black Rodimus, but not a lot of people have that, and it's pretty different anyway.)  Plus, well, G2 Sideswipe colors are just objectively better than G1 Sideswipe colors anyway.  There, I said it!  I've never owned a G1 Sideswipe, since I picked up a G2 Sideswipe in my late teens and never saw a reason to pick up any of the G1 reissues as they've been paraded out in the past decade, 'cuz, well, why?  I already had the better version!  Sideswipe didn't really do anything until the Marvel G2 comic anyway.

Another nice thing about this pair is the head.  It strikes a great compromise between both of their head designs.  Breakdown's head looks like Breakdown's (animation model) and Sideswipe's head looks like Sideswipe's.  It's amazing what a little hedging and color differences can do.  And they both kind of deserve the dour expression on their face, what with Breakdown being an unhappy nervous wreck and Sideswipe being a bitter ol' cop.

(Neil Ross did a great voice for him at BotCon 2011's script reading.)

Plus, you know me and mold reuse.  Reuse a mold once, and I shrug.  Reuse it a dozen times and suddenly I'm compelled to own all of them.  That collector mentality kicks in.  It's why I own 30 Dinobots.  And if you think I'm happy with my four Animated Rodimus reuses, wait 'til we get to my Animated Cybertronian Ratchet reuses.

One of BotCon 2011's add-on sets included Toxitron.  I'm sure most of you are asking, WHO THE HELL IS TOXITRON??  Well, until last weekend, nobody, really.  He is technically a new character.  However, he's one that has his roots.

See, years ago, there was a BotCon panel hosted by Rik Alvarez that showed various Transformers rarities.  One of them was a potential Generation 2 Laser Optimus Prime redeco in purple, gray, and green named "Toxitron."  A few BotCons later Toxitron was on display at the Hasbro Tour.  And so Toxitron, a guy who was never released, and a guy we'd never really know about otherwise, had built up a tiny bit of infamy.

So, hey, guess what.  Here's Animated Toxitron.  The concept of Toxitron fits pretty well into the sometimes (and thankfully) goofy Animated universe.  Toxitron's a tongue-in-cheek parody of Bizarro Superman, speech-pattern and all.  He's a not-so-good clone of Optimus Prime.  He drives backwards.  He's super-strong but not so smart.

And, yeah, he's a sickly green, purple, and gray.

I think my favorite aspect of him is the dripping orange splotches all over him.  There's some on the nozzle of his cannon, too, implying that the orange goop is something he also shoots, not just perspires.  (The gun, by the way, is a functioning water squirter.  Are he and Motor Master the only BotCon toys with water squirters?)

Who can't love Toxitron?  Nobody, that's who!

Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod!

It's Ironfist!  He was the attendee exclusive figure!  If you bought a BotCon box set and came to the convention, he was yours for free!  Oh my lord!  Oh holy crap!

He's Autotrooper, but in orange and teal!  AND HE'S IRONFIST.  Who knew that Autotrooper's head painted up differently was like the perfect Ironfist!  Seriously, mo'fo'in' Ironfist!

IRONFIST.

Like, Last Stand of the Wreckers style!  ANIMATED LAST STAND OF THE WRECKERS IRONFIST.

Never has a more beautiful set of words been strung together.  Never ever.  This toy is my pride and joy.

Excuse me while I go change my pants.

I've always wanted to do one of the annual BotCon customization classes, but never had before due to needing to fly in a day or two early.  I've got comics to draw!  But when this year's BotCon theme was revealed to be Transformers Animated, I had to ensure that I got in.  The customization toy is almost always a mold from that year's toy set, and I wasn't gonna miss a potential new Transformers Animated character.

And, hey, whaddya know.  Animated Minerva.  She's a white and red redeco of Animated Arcee (also used for Animated Drag Strip that year in the box set) with a new part that gives her antenna.  The piece doesn't alter the toy itself, rather, you place it inbetween the front and back halves of her head when you screw them together.  It's a very fragile piece, since it involves two thin stalks of resin, so I'm gonna have to be careful with her.  For the trip home, I folded her up into car mode and shoved her in the box set's foam insert area for Drag Strip.  Like hell was I gonna wad her up in my suitcase!

There's two classes, Wednesday and Thursday, with about 25 people per, and each participant is given a tray, tools, a booklet, and a big bag of unassembled parts, screws, and rivets.  The toy parts are all still on their plastic sprues.

The booklet outlines all of the tools you're gonna use, plus identifies each of the toy parts as being part of the torso, head, right arm, etc.   The first step is removing all of the plastic toy parts from the sprues and organizing them by these groups.  This, like basically everything in the class, is more difficult than one would imagine.  Very few of the parts come free cleanly.  Most you have to sand or knife away the excess residue.  But some you have to take, like, scissors to, because the connection point to the piece and the sprue is really thick.  Clamp down hard as you can, finally the piece gives way, it goes flying across the room...  and then you get to sand or cut away what's left of the sprue attachment point.

Once everything's removed and separated, you put the thing together piece by piece.  Most things are relatively easy to put together, but some things, like where the rivets go in, are difficult to work with.  There's rivets of various size, and the only difference between them is a millimeter or two.  (That's why you get a ruler!)  Once the correct rivet is sorted out, you have to try to get it through the joint you're trying to create.  This usually involved pliers.

As the toy's being assembled, it's probably smart to paint some things as you go.  The red on the top of her torso, for example, was something a lot of people airbrushed.  This involves taping around the sides of her torso piece so that the red doesn't go where you don't want it to.  I tried this out myself, but I ended up with a goopy red thing because I don't know what I'm doing.  So, woo, I ended up dumping the torso in the glass of delicious-looking clear blue thinner, sanding off what didn't wash off, and hand-painting the red instead.

After several hours, you're done.

It's rough, but very rewarding!  I feel very strong ownership over my Animated Minerva.  I made her!  I'm like her daddy!  AND NO DON'T TOUCH HER OH MY GOD THE ANTENNA.

Hey, guys! There was a two-page mini-comic about Animated Cheetor from a few weeks back, and its artist, M Sipher, is putting up the originals on eBay. You should check them out here and here.

It occurred to me that I owned a toy of every unique character released in the various Animated toylines, save just two guys. I'm not talking about the same-character redeco stuff, no. But other than Activators Ramjet (Japan-exclusive) and Black Rodimus (Japan-exclusive), I kinda had them all. (There is an "additional Starscream clone" toy also from Japan that is sort of maybe a new character as well, but it's kind of nebulous and he doesn't get a bio or anything, so I don't really care.)

Black Rodimus came out last week, so I figged, hey, why not, let's get 'im. What's his story? Surprise, Megatron cloned Rodimus Prime using Starscream's cloning technology.  How novel!  Y'know, one of those experimental prototype things, to see if it'd work on a larger scale. But whoops, evil Rodimus just wants to take over the Decepticons, and he's actually pretty good at it, so now Megatron has a problem on his hands. The end! It's a dumb story, but it's a story, and so it's a hole in my collection that my brain requires me to fill.

Black Rodimus is exactly what you'd expect in a "black repaint' Rodimus toy. He's basically Shattered Glass Rodimus colors. And to that end, it would have been suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper awesome if they'd given him Shattered Glass Rodimus's goatee. I mean, c'mon. Evil clone! But no. Black Rodimus's purple is metallic, like most of the rest of Japan's Animated line, which doesn't look tacky on this toy, thankfully. And it's a good toy all around, regardless of color, so it's nice to have another of it.  Buying an evil clone guy would have been a much tougher decision if it were of a toy I didn't like.

I'll of course be getting a third iteration at BotCon next month, when they give him a new head and call him Breakdown. I'll welcome that, too. Again, good toy.

I was gonna make a bigger post later on, but apparently they're, like, 50% sold out of Primus Package sets already. So, uh, yeah, Animated seems to be doing pretty well for Fun Publications.  Run over there and sign up for some expensive toys if you desire them, before it's all gone.

Me, I'm just really thankful I was able to get the Customization Class thing.  I've never tried to do it before, but the idea of an Animated character in toy form that I don't own sounds like a horrible thing that would destroy me.  (Okay, it could be a nonAnimated mold if there are any nonAnimated souvenir add-on sets, but that's much less likely, given the statistics.)

Glad I drove home early from C2E2.

Reprolabels sticker upgrades for Animated Wreck-Gar arrived in the same envelope as my RtS Jazz stickers, but my need for the Wreck-Gar set wasn't nearly as drastic as it was for Jazz's.  The set comes with a lot of stuff, mostly alternate heads and faction logos and such, but I really just wanted the damn toes.  Wreck-Gar has three red toes on each foot on his character design, and the toy's feet are solid black.  It's easy for me to paint black, and I've done that all over Wreck-Gar's body already, where necessary, but painting red is much harder for me to do in a way that doesn't look horribly sloppy.

So, woo, toes!

I did use a few more from the set, but not many.  There are also orange stickers for his heels which I applied, and new orange stripe stickers to go over his preexisting painted orange stripes where his forearms meet his elbow.  The paint doesn't go quite all the way around, which I guess is the reason for the sticker's existence, but it's not something I absolutely needed.  There's also stickers to cover up the orange on the top of the torso, surrounding the head, but you can't see them in any of my photographs because they're really not all that exciting.  Oh, and the Autobot symbol.  I used that.

Stickers I didn't use include the small black stickers to stick up under Wreck-Gar's forehead, but I'd already painted that, so those weren't necessary.  He also comes with a bunch of faces and facial expressions you can paste over his toy's face, but... wow, no.  Never.  That'd be awful.

I'd completely forgotten that I'd gotten Weird Al's signature on my Wreck-Gar.  That was a fun rediscovery.

BotCon's continued to roll out the exclusive toy previews.  Last week we got Breakdown, who is roughly the fifteen millionth Breakdown BotCon has done in its time.  But the first in G1 colors!  And the first that referenced his head design in the original cartoon, which was entirely different from the one his toy had.

But I've sort of hit Breakdown saturation, so I didn't blog about it.

This week, though, I'm excited again.  BotCon's revealed their third toy, Drag Strip, who's also in original Drag Strip colors.  ...as a girl.  Ha ha ha.  She's been female-ized!  There's only so many sports car molds in the Animated toyline, see, and Arcee happened to be one of them.  So this is a thing that has happened.

I'm actually all for it.  Arcee's a great mold, and the Transformers universe can use more chicks.  Especially yellow ones.  The BotCon Twitter feed seems to suggest she's characterized as Kill Bill's the Black Mamba, who was also a sword-wielding yellow chick.  Watch out for your eyes!

NOTE: No, you are not the first and/or only person to come here and make a HUR HUR DRAG AMIRITE?? joke.  They tire me.  They will be deleted.  If you want them, try every single other Transformers forum or blog on the face of the planet.

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.