Prowl/Bluestreak/Smokescreen, the three Datsun Autobot guys, they actually have different animation models, despite being drawn from the same toy.  Prowl was in the very first batch of animation models done, Bluestreak was designed slightly later and was slightly different, and Smokescreen came the following year, and his animation model was completely different.  Completely different from Starscream and his Seeker guys, who are literally all just the same model but in different colors.  

When Hasbro goes back to the three Datsun Autobot guys to make new toys, they tend to do Prowl's head.  It's the most toy-accurate of the head designs, while Bluestreak's is more abstracted and Smokescreen's is just... a face in a box.  Bluestreak and Smokescreen will get Prowl's head and they'll like it!!!!  Sometimes Smokescreen gets his own head, because it's bizarrely different, but Bluestreak?  Basically never. 

But EarthRise Bluestreak is it -- the Bluestreakest Bluestreak.  This is a Bluestreak with Bluestreak's head!  And PROWL (coming out later in a two-pack with Ironhide) is the one who gets Bluestreak's head!  Take that!  Looks like this year, All Cops Are Bluestreak.  

No one's exactly sure how EarthRise Bluestreak will be released.  Probably Amazon, since he has a listing there in other countries, but he's not officially announced yet.  HOWEVER, he came out in Asia and TheChosenPrime imported him, and I bought one during that 15-minute window they had him in stock.  And so I have him (he arrived in a DAY), despite him being the only one of the three not yet officially announced.  Smokescreen's in the second wave of retail Deluxe Class toys which is just now beginning to hit Targets, and Prowl's in that aforementioned Amazon two-pack.  

Last year's Walmart-exclusive Stege Bluestreak, ostensibly a Cybertronian alternate mode version, feels a little scrawny compared to this Definitely A Datsun Sportscar version.  EarthRise Bluestreak is blocky and beefy and substantial, while Stege was a little on the scrawny side.  Stege was a little shorter, too.  That's not to say that EarthRise is superior in that regard.  The Stege Prowl/Bluestreak/Smokescreen toy was actually pretty solid and easy to play with, despite how anemic it appeared from some angles.  You could collapse his thighs into his shins in a snap.  Satisfying.  I liked it.  EarthRise Bluestreak takes some fussing to do the same, and the way his spine accordions is often confusing.

In fact, I just flat-out broke my EarthRise Bluestreak trying to get him into car mode once.  He's brokes.  The little translucent hooks on the thin translucent windshield/roof part just shattered.  I pushed the wrong thing trying to get him into car mode and the weakest point gave.  SO BE CAREFUL WITH THAT I GUESS.  I glued the windshield back on -- not to the hinges, since that's just impossible, but to the broad red support beam underneath it.  The actual tiny hinges are still shot, but the functionality remains.  All my pictures here are taken afterwards, even.  It's just super annoying to know those hinges are broken.  And I can see the superglue smeared in the windshield.  I'll try to get a replacement when he's made available properly.  

Honestly, having the roof break off your Bluestreak is pretty integral to the Vintage Generation 1 Transformers Experience.  A++++ nostalgia.  

Grumble.

It took four toylines (Titans Return, skipping Power of the Primes, Stege, and EarthRise) to finish the 1987 Decepticon Headmasters, but here we are!  Snapdragon is here!  Trailing Scorponok by only a little.  It's been remarked upon that Titans Return was a toyline with the express gimmick of Headmastering, with the secondary gimmick of Voyager Class guys who triple change, and for some reason it didn't give us Apeface and Snapdragon, the larger Decepticon Headmasters who could triple change.  But, well, it is what it is, and they're both here now.  Apeface sputtered out just barely at the end of Stege, and now Snapdragon is here for Wave 2 of Earthrise.  

Snapdragon, again, is a Headmaster who Triple Changes!  He's a robot, a spaceship, and an extremely-widely-hipped dragon.  I guess dragons are fictional, and so they can have as wide a stance as they like.  His head transforms into Krunk, who is not Patrick Warburton from Emperor's New Groove.  That's Kronk, with an O.  Common mistake.

The best thing about Krunk, other than his name, is that the little cockpit area he sits in has decoed control panels.  That's wild for a mainline toy!  They never do that.  I mean, it looks like a little LEGO control panel, with buttons tampographed onto a slick surface, but it's still great.  (Getting the cockpit window halves to split so you can place Krunk in there, though, is a workout.)  

Unlike the original Snapdragon, Krunk doesn't become the entirety of both the dragon and robot mode heads.  He still transforms into the full robot head, but in dragon mode his legs become the lower jaw and the rest of him is shoved up into the roof of the mouth of the rest of the dragon mode head.  It's amusing because Snapdragon's dragon mode head has Krunk's arms sculpted and painted onto his cheeks, so that he matches original Snapdragon despite transforming differently.  

Snapdragon's transformation into all three modes is pretty straight-forward.  If he's a jet, you bend out the wings and engines into either robot arms or dragon legs, and then you either need to make the jet's nose into robot legs or bend them into a dragon tail.  There's not as much peg-to-slot massaging as with Apeface.  

I do wish Snapdragon had better shoulder articulation in dragon mode.  The shoulders only rotate up and down, not outwards.  He does have balljointed elbows, you can point his tiny tyrannosaurus-esque arms out to the sides, but working this motion only reminds you that his shoulders don't move much.  

It explains why Daniel Witwicky had to jump directly on Snapdragon's head to get within reach of his jaws.  Those tiny forelimbs would be no help.

Both Stege and EarthRise like to beat the hell out of that 1984 drum, but ever so often it'll give us a small crumb from the margins of the original toyline.  So, hey, say hello to Doubledealer!  This 1988 Double Powermaster is back, minus his Powermasters, sort of.  

Transformers has been steadfastly adhering to the old Eighties cartoon as its bible, and so Doubledealer comes in like an enigma.  We like to have things look like the cartoon, but Doubledealer only appeared in animated form in a commercial which you can only find fuzzy versions of on YouTube.  We like things to be SCALED like they were in the cartoon, but, again, same issue.  What Doubledealer looks like and how big he is are largely things Hasbro could make up.  And so EarthRise Doubledealer takes its lead from the original toy a lot more than it would otherwise.  And it turns out Doubledealer is a pretty chonky dude!  He's Leader Class, which recently means "Voyager Class-sized robot with extra stuff," but in his case he's extra wide and a little extra tall and a higher parts count.  He's dense.

The original Doubledealer was pretty lanky, but EarthRise Doubledealer adds girth so that his torso can encompass a gimmick borrowed from Soundwave.  Yeah, he's got a tape cassette compartment!  That's how the Powermaster angle is achieved with him this go-round.  His Powermaster buds were released separately as part of an online-exclusive mini-cassette four-pack, and so instead of attaching them to him as little engines, you slot them into a big box on his chest.  Knok (the red humanoid partner) has his details sculpted into Doubledealer's abs, but you can still put Knok into Doubledealer's chest compartment, unplug a portion of the engine detail from the abs, and replug it onto Knok.  Ditto with Skar, though Skar doesn't seem to be sculpted into Doubledealer's bird mode.

(That was Doubledealer's double deal.  He was an Autobot-aligned robot who transformed into a Decepticon-aligned vulture/chicken/thing, and his missile truck mode was the... neutral mode?  In practice, he was pretending to be two folks -- Both an Autobot robot/truck guy and a Decepticon bird/truck guy.   Just... two guys, both with the same missile truck mode.  You weren't supposed to connect the robot guy to the bird guy.  Optimus Prime wasn't very perceptive, I guess.)

EarthRise Doubledealer is... complicated!  Like I said, he's got a high parts count.  Lots of hinges and stuff, all of which help you get a pretty okay robot to an acceptable missile truck to a block with a head and wings on it that's a bird because we say so.  When there's a robot/vehicle/animal Triple Changer, I feel it's the animal mode that suffers the most.  And being a bird doesn't help, either.  Transformers has trouble with birds.  There's a not a lot of volume in a bird for stuff to go, and so you end up with situations like Doubledealer where he looks like a chicken that's trying to poop a truck.  Like half his beast mode is truck butt, with a tiny little bit of tailfeathers on top.

The original Doubledealer placed his giant missile slung under his torso in bird mode.  Earthrise Doubledealer realizes, yo, this looks like a huge dick, and officially the missile gets placed on his bird mode back.  ....however, there's 5mm pegs placed underneath if you still want to give him that huge traditional bird dick.  And it's not a happy accident, they're definitely there for that purpose.  Gotta keep the fans happy with bird dick!

That's essentially EarthRise Doubledealer's deal!  1) Hooray, a minor character from the latter days of G1 who's not, like, the 30th Prowl toy!  And 2) oh dang he is fussy.  He's just trying to do so many things at once, but not any of it well.  Not any of it TERRIBLY either, just, you know, he's solidly in the middle.  

When a new $80 "Commander" size class for Transformers was announced last year , just so that a Jetfire toy would be at cartoon scale, the amount of eye-rolling in my reaction was non-zero.  I mean, sweet, new size class, yes, and yeah actually I do like scale, and the Jetfire it produced was actually surprisingly good, but... what else could this new avenue bring us?

Well, David of the past, nuts to you, because this year's Commander Sky Lynx is glorious, actually.  And it's largely due to his size.  He's just... an enviable chonk of Sky Lynx.  He's a big dude!  Well, two big dudes that combine into one bigger dude.  ...fine, one bigger dude that separates into two smaller dudes.  You know what I mean.  He's a lynx.  He's a bird.  He combines into a dragon.  The dragon transforms into a shuttle on a transport.  The shuttle can detach from the transport.  There's a lot going on here!

There's apparently a lot of budget room to work with on an $80 Transformers toy.  Jetfire spent its moolah on a lot of smaller things like hands that disappeared their 5mm ports when the palm opened and little handholds for smaller Transformers to hold onto while Jetfire airdrops them into battle.  There aren't many things exactly like that on Sky Lynx, but he feels like he has a robust budget all the same.  His poseable neck and tail, the ankle rockers on all six of his limbs (the bird has two), the myriad of ways you can pose his wings... Sky Lynx is just impressive.

Because he's a large Earthrise toy, he's got a new base mode.  You unfold the lynx into a shuttle launch pad with multiple ramps!  The ramps each have connectors to attach to other EarthRise base modes.  There's two broad white cannons  you can awkwardly attach to the lynx feet in this mode, helping you pretend these are towers and not, you know, feet.  This is probably the weakest aspect of the whole arrangement.  In lynx or dragon modes, you can attach these cannons to his hips.

One of the biggest joys of Sky Lynx is standing other guys next to him and getting this sense of scale.  Again, he's a big guy, and it's neat to see Optimus Prime small next to him.  Plus, like, huge winged dinosaur thing.  And, yes, his face is just a shuttle cockpit with a jaw, but it still possesses this shocking charisma.  

EarthRise SkyLynx's altmode is actually licensed by NASA.   Like, it's got the NASA logo on there, and on purpose, and he transforms into a very accurate 80's style space shuttle.    His shuttle name is the Magnificence.  Later this summer, there's a pair of Micromasters that transform together into a shuttle which also have the NASA logo printed on them, so Hasbro went for broke this year, NASA-wise.

I'm just always delighted to see this thing on my desk.  I need to eventually put him away where he needs to end up in my display shelves, but he's just gonna be mostly hidden behind so many other guys, and I'll be sad.  I put him there once just to make sure he fit (he did, amazingly), but had to yank him out soon enough so I could love him more.  

Though it's also possible I'm just going mad from being inside for 4 months, I dunno.

If I recall, I bemoaned Stege Optimus Prime for being a uncanny valley Earth Truck, so very close that it looked like an Earth truck wearing some extra parts stapled on it.  Well, here's the truck underneath those parts!  It's what you wanted really all along, after we sold you the other one that tried to be this but not really!  Stege was ""not"" Earth truck, and EarthRise Optimus Prime is just Earth truck.

I mean, it's an Optimus Prime, whaddya want.  A trailer?  It's here!  It even splits open and there's Command Deck inside.  Roller?  It's... not here.  Well, there's plenty of other Rollers.  But this is your Trying To Be The Cartoon G1 Optimus Prime With An Actual Trailer, At Retail.  

And to be honest...?  Heck, I think I preferred the Cybertronian-style one.  I miss the way the front wheels folded up into the ribcage.  I miss it having... I dunno, what small amount of stylization it had.  Yeah, it was an Earth truck wearing goggles, but turns out the goggles were the interesting part.  

I mean, this isn't a bad toy.  It's actually quite good!  It has some new ways to get Cartoon Optimus out of a box.  I like how it wads its truck stuff up inside its shirt.  I do actually like the trailer -- it's largely why I bothered with it.  My kids are... VERY into trucks with trailers and also connecting all my Transformer base stuff together.  The middle section of the trailer door slides out and becomes a shield, AND it has hinged edges that connects to all the road pieces from the rest of the line (plus Stege's Omega Supreme).  If I skipped this Optimus Prime toy that has a trailer with base-connecting capability, I'd be a monster.  

I did have to fix his eyes, though.  They were blue, which... well, his face is also blue, so they kind of disappear.  I opened up his noggin and painted his eyes gold.  That's one major thing I like about current Transformers toys, the part where the eyes are sculpted into the back of the head but poke out through the front, likely to make painting them easier for the factories.  Well, it makes it easier for me, too!  Huzzah.  Those gold eyes pop, now.  

EarthRise Optimus Prime also comes with an ion cannon (his rifle) that folds in half and can store anywhere there's a 5mm peghole.  (There are lots.)  And there's a Matrix of Leadership inside his chest which can be removed.  Technically this is why his hands are sculpted to open, but he's not great at holding it.  Kind of have to wedge either end around his thumbs and pray.  But!  If you flip around the Matrix, there's a 5mm port there, which means you can shove effects parts into there if you want to have him do Matrix Blasts or whatever Optimus Prime is up to these days.  Or just have the Matrix zoom through the sky like Nyan Cat.  

One of my favorite oddities with EarthRise Optimus Prime is that he's partially made from actual Stege Optimus Prime parts, especially his legs.  But they gutted his legs, put some new stuff in there, and they don't flip around to transform anymore, and so you have this extra, vestigial 5mm trailer hitch peghole split across the outsides of his shins, with a new 5mm peg added to the insides of his new legs.  It's wild.

I'm not sure any of you followed that.  I barely understood myself reading it.

Oh well.

It's Optimus Prime, folks.  

Yo, if you've got any familiarity with the original Grapple toy, dang is EarthRise Grapple gonna feel like some dejavu!   In ways more than other retreads, he feels solidly like "this 1980s guy but with joints."  He transforms basically identically, but now there's knees.  And because Grapple's cartoon model was designed in 1985, he's gonna look pretty much just like his original toy, too!  Due to Circumstances, there is not a lot new here.

And generally, with Stege/EarthRise stuff, things just work so dang well -- executed so simply and flawlessly -- that even though there's (again) that feeling of dejavu, it's all cool!  ... However, Grapple has a big problem.

See, he's got some pegs at the back of his head/crane arm that plug into the back of the vehicle/his feet while transforming into crane mode.  But the connections between the pegs and the crane arm are kind of Not Enough and so there's a chance of plugging them into the pegholes for the first time and then ... them tearing off inside the pegholes when you try to untransform him.  Mine has not done this, but the problem was already reported and I was careful and it was still... an... ordeal to get them out.  Just, like, pulling on them as straight and outward as I could, very slowly.  Some folks sand the pegs or the peghole down, some folks just snip the pegs in half.  But this is still a pretty serious oopsie-doodle!  The default of "Stege/EarthRise is boringly G1 but executed really well so it's hard to be mad" has been poked in the eye by this feller.  

*DISTRAUGHT SHRUG*

I painted the helmet on my Grapple black.  The all yellow head look from the cartoon IS NOT GOOD.  I fixed it.  

Also I had to shave down the pegs on mine as a precaution.  

One of those things I shouldn't be expected to do with my stuff.  

Hot on the heels of Stege Starscream and his Colonial Viper altmode is... EarthRise Starscream, who's back to being an F-15!  You're like, "hey, didn't we just get a Voyager Class Starscream, and this is a new Voyager Class Starscream?" and the answer is "YUP."

(Though honestly, it's Starscream.  He's popular.  Folks will buy him, even if you or I are not one of those folks.)

The thing about Stege Starscream is that he was surprisingly great.  You know, for a shellformer.  He wadded up his robot mode into a little ball and you close the spaceship mode around him, the end.  And while that in itself may not be what we strictly want out of a transforming toy, it did offer some advantages.  Mostly, like, Stege Starscream's robot mode was incredibly poseable, especially for a Starscream.  It had waist rotation, it had ankle tilts, it had double-jointed elbows, it had shoulders with wide range... you could get the danged thing to fold its arms across its chest, fer cheese's sake.  It could do that BECAUSE it folded up into a ball and the altmode closed around it.  

EarthRise Starscream, meanwhile, is ... a Transformer.  It transforms.  The cockpit becomes the cockpit chest, the wings become the wings, etc.  The robot becomes the jet -- at least as much as most Transformer robots become jets.  And that... means the articulation is scaled back.  It's been noted by everyone (including Hasbro) that ER Starscream is essentially a scaled-up Classics 2006 Starscream.  And it... has slightly more articulation than that toy, which was notoriously stiff.  ER Starscream adds some wider range to Classics Starscream's shallower joints, plus a bicep swivel, and the head turns independently of the nosecone on his back, there's those ankle tilts that are all the range...

But there's no waist rotation, which is a gaddanged FIRST among the Deluxe-and-up toys in this War for Cybertron toyline trilogy.  There's no double-jointed elbows, no extra range in the shoulders for arms-folding (it was required for transformation on the Stege toy).  And so after the absolute bounty of articulation that Stege offered a Starscream for the first time, this new Starscream feels stiff.  Even though, on average, his articulation is more than Starscream toys typically have.  

On the other hand, it actually transforms traditionally without being a Popple.  

So, y'know, pick your poison, I guess.  

I have two.  I bought a second one to paint up in Early Marvel Comics Starscream colors, from back when the interiors colorist was working off early Starscream model sheets where his chest was black instead of red.  I got halfway through that one and realized, yo, if I stop here, I've got a toy colors Starscream, with darker blues instead of the cartoon's brighter blues.  It looked nice, so I kept it there!  I also gave him Classics Starscream's null ray arm cannons, because I like them bulky.  ...and then I painted my back-up ER Starscream toy in the Early Marvel scheme.  Y'know, comics blue-for-black chest, blue head and face with white eyes, inverted colors on the feet...  And I fold the wings back out of view, since Mike Manley didn't draw them in issue 9.  

no i'm not gonna lop off an ear, jose delbo drew him earless only after the color scheme was updated

You see the phrase "mini-Masterpiece" thrown around at some modern regular retail toys.  Stege Sideswipe?  Mini-Masterpiece!  Earthrise Grapple?  Mini-Masterpiece!   It gives the impression that these retail toys are just scaled down Masterpiece toys.  And honestly, these toys are not much like their larger, expensiver counterparts at all.  They just all try to look like the cartoon, while transforming pretty differently.  

EarthRiseEarthrise Wheeljack is like that!  He looks like a smaller toy of Masterpiece Wheeljack, but he's really not.  He just wants to look like the same source material.  And so he has similar proportions and colors, and he transforms into the same box with a dome, but he doesn't feel like he takes home any lessons in particular from the Masterpiece.  Heck, his arms pull out of the back of the car mode in a completely different way.  His torso transforms (so that parts are facing the right way) in a much simpler, elegant way than, you know, turning inside out as per usual.  

In that way, it's a pretty satisfying Wheeljack toy!  He... looks like Wheeljack.  And handling him doesn't disprove the existence of a benevolent god.  (that's jetfire's job)

The first Deluxe Class G1-style Wheeljack toy came out in... what, 2011?  Dang, 9 years ago.  In between then and now there was also the Combiner Wars Deluxe.  Neither have something that's very important to me: rally deco.  I want sponsor logos!  And so regardless of how I feel about the rest of this new Wheeljack, the fact that he has doors covered in tiny fake sponsor logos makes him the best one.  The red hubcaps don't hurt, either.  

"Regardless of how I feel about the rest of this new Wheeljack" makes it seem like I'm trying to compensate for some faults.  I'm not, actually!  He's a pretty good Wheeljack.  There have been ... well, honestly, not that many Wheeljacks.  It feels like more Wheeljacks.  A lotta Wheeljacks.  Maybe there's some premature Wheeljack fatigue.  But this is still a pretty good one.  Maybe the best one.  

It has sponsor logos.

Dangit, Stege is over, and so now it's EarthRise time.   I'm going to miss Stege, because I liked calling it Stege.  It's just fun to say and fun to type.  EarthRise is just EarthRise.   And you gotta abbreviate it as "ER" which always makes me think of George Clooney.  Goodbye, Stege.  You were too Stege for this world.

Check out Hoist!  That's right, he's mistakably an Earth truck, because, well, EarthRise.  The toyline is, in theory, on Earth.  And so he's not just an Earth truck that Hasbro tells us is a Cybertronian vehicle, he's properly an Earth truck.  And because this is Hasbro in the late 2010s to early 2020s, he's an Extremely Eighties Earth truck.  He seems to be a Toyota Hi-Lux pickup, same as the original toy.  Or at least a Close Enough But Not Too Close That We Gotta License It version.  Which is fine to me if only because I prefer boxy vehicles 'cuz they're way easier for me to draw.  They're just rectangles.  None of those pesky curves.

The original toy had a little platform that lowered down off the bed of the truck to help Hoist tow other Transformer cars.  This is equally true for the new EarthRise Hoist, but specifically with Rest Of The Toyline compatibility!  See, Earthrise's "other than transforming" gimmick is "there are bases with interconnecting ramps."  And Hoist's towing platform thing is compatible with the ramps.  And so you can lengthen the towing platform with a piece of ramp, or connect it to a base and drag the base around, who knows.  It connects.  Connecting is neat.

Hoist's truck transforms into a... properly huge robot.  EarthRise continues Stege's commitment to adhering to cartoon robot scale, even if it results in large variations of robot size within a single size class.  Hoist is on the high end of the spectrum of Deluxe Class toys.  He's about the size and heft of Stege Ratchet and Ironhide.  They're all trucks and vans, so they're bigger than the sports car guys.  (but not quite big enough to rate being Voyager Class)  This is very satisfying to me, since the previous Hoist toy, from Thrilling Thirty, was a pretty small Deluxe.  For Deluxes, he was eensy!  And this won't do.  I mean, I'm gonna keep that toy, since that's the Lost Light design for Hoist, and I gotta Lost Light shelf display, but it's nice to have a Hoist that's Rightfully Huge next to, say, anybody else.  

Since Hoist is obviously gonna be retooled into his pickup truck buddy Trailbreaker later, his robot mode is a compromise of their two designs.  He keeps the toy-accurate truck kibble hiding behind his arms that Hoist's animation model had, while borrowing Trailbreaker's legs.  (Trailbreaker and Hoist, despite being drawn from the same toy, had animation models designed by two separate artists, and so their cartoon/comic appearances were more different than you'd think.) 

Hoist comes with an orange nozzle you can fit over one of his fists so he has his gun arm.  He's also got the standard articulation you'd expect from a Stege or (apparently) EarthRise toy, including ankle tilts, waist rotation, and all the other little movement spots that are now expected.  ER Hoist also continues Stege's seeming commitment to straightforward, non-reason-for-murdery transformation sequences.  It's a pleasurable encounter going back and forth.

He's a hefty boy and I like him.  All I need is a tiny Brick Springhorn figurine to complete him.