The reason I'm... inordinately fond of the 1987 Targetmaster Crosshairs is not one that's likely to be replicable by other, non-me people.  But I am!  I love this guy.  I've been waiting for a modern toy of this dude for a very long time.

So.  

Like, it's 1987.  I am eight.  I still don't own an Optimus Prime.  At this point, I've already tried taking washable red and blue markers to my white Ultra Magnus cab, resulting in a pink and powder blue Easter Optimus, oops.  And so I get taken to the store for, I dunno, my birthday, probably?  And there's still no Optimus.  It's 1987.  But I pick out Crosshairs because he's a red and blue truck.  He'll do!  Sort of!  

I take Crosshairs with me to my third grade class.  He's stolen.  The following day, while I'm still distraught, that kid who bullies me claims he took him home and melted him in his backyard.  A neighbor kid agrees, yeah, he saw a melted puddle of plastic in his back yard!  Crosshairs is gone and he's been murdered.  

The melting story, upon reflection, is not terribly likely, and probably made up to be a jerk.  But Crosshairs was still stolen!  And I was still, in the moment, fairly traumatized.  I became a weird little Crosshairs obsessive, like a very specialized Bruce Wayne.  I can tell you all sorts of things about Crosshairs that nobody else cares about, like his different-from-the-toy head that appeared in the comic and cartoon (and was based on early control art before it got changed to being a super boring normal-ass face head).  Or the white hands he had in the cartoon (which might have been based on the silver stickers across his wrists).  And I might drone on about his voice (supplied by Neil "Shipwreck" Ross) that tried to sort of be Jack Nicholson but came out more Ronald Reagan.  

Every time a new Transformer comes out that's a truck or whatever, I usually pine for a Crosshairs redeco of it.  It even almost happened a few times, like with a shelved BotCon Crosshairs from Generations Kup!  And finally, at long last, this has occurred, using Stege Ironhide.  And even better, Crosshairs has his comic/animation head.  (This is his real, better head, and the original toy's can go haaaang.)  And even even better, Stege Ratchet has compatible white hands I can swap in to give Crosshairs his cartoon white hands.  And even even even better, an updated version of Pinpointer exists (who was recently paired with Windblade).  And so I've got this perfect storm of a perfect Crosshairs.  

Just... try to feel my excitement through the screen, somehow.  I know, I know, he's just a 1987 Targetmaster truck.  Half his appearances are probably drawing errors of Pinpointer.  (He honestly had an overly-fair amount of lines in the cartoon.)  

Toy-wise, he's exactly Ironhide but in different colors and a different head, with Ironhide's hammer/cannon weapon redecoed red and black to look vaguely like Pinpointer.  Ironhide's a pretty good toy, if the side panels don't pop off all the time.  And Crosshairs' don't, so, yeah, we're solid.  And, yes, I swap out the hands and give him his rightful Targetmaster partner, and we're good, and we've almost entirely nailed floorboards over my third grade childhood trauma.  

almost

almost

I spent Saturday getting my usual metric buttload of new Transformers toys, as it was the official street date for Age of Extinction stuff to go out.  The Targets didn't have much, and Walmarts weren't much better, but Toys"R"Us at least fulfilled their part of the contract, so I didn't go home empty handed.  Transformers movie toy street dates have kind of diminished over the years.  For the first movie, the street date felt like an actual event that stores cared about.  Everyone put their stuff out immediately and everywhere.  Everyone had their own exclusives out the first day, too.  It was a Thing.  These days, it feels like they're shrugging a little, even though TF movie stuff still outsells the non-movie stuff by a large margin.  

I've decided to talk about Crosshairs first, since he was a pleasant surprise.  I mean, of course the Dinobots are gonna be sweet-ass Transformers dinosaur toys, and there's an Optimus and a Bumblebee as per usual, but Crosshairs I actually had pretty low expectations for.  It's probably related to how poorly most folks seem to transform him, Hasbro included.  In a lot of images of him, his shoulders aren't transformed out of car mode, so he's got this giant immobile block of plastic surrounding his torso and head.  But hey, no, that all moves away and into position.  The rear bumper folds back behind the torso and the shoulders lower and separate.  The wheels fold back.  He looks way less like an upscaled Legends Class toy when properly converted.

He also has, you know, a trenchcoat.  And goggles, too, but the trenchcoat is a neat motif!  Rubberized parts fold out from inside the car kibble to plug into his ribcage so it looks like a spreading open bit of clothing.  Man, I bet the folks at Hasbro saw concept images of this guy and thanked whoever their respective gods are.  I mean, he's got a kibble coat.  You don't have to engineer most of the car panels into robot parts, you just have to hang them off the back of him and he's accurate.  

For this reason, he isn't very hard to get back into car mode.  You just take everything and plug it back in, for the most part.  There is some fiddling, and everything moves, but nothing moves very far.  

The only weirdness is that only one half of his car mode gets deco.  Is the actual real-life vehicle like this or something?  Because it doesn't really make any sense -- he's packaged in robot mode, so it's not like Hasbro's putting the painted half of the car mode out in front of the package like a bunch of dicks.  It is legitimately boggling.

He comes with three weapons.  He gets two smaller pistols which peg into the insides of his coat and one larger rifle.  In the one clip of him in the trailers, he has two of that larger rifle.  Dangit.   Oh well.

I like him, at any rate.  Doesn't-Realize-Matrix-Trilogy-Isn't-A-Thing-Anymore trenchcoat dude is all right by my book.