UPDATE: Vote HERE

Today (Monday), Transformers fans are called to flock to transformers.com to vote on five nominees for the new Transformers Hall of Fame.  Hasbro automatically inducted Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, and Starscream, because, really, let's get those guys out of the way, and they left the fifth inductee this year up to us.  The winner will be announced at BotCon.

Last month, a bunch of participating websites, including the Transformers Wiki, held separate polls to get their own lists of five worthy Transformers.  The results were sent in, and Hasbro used these results to create a list of five final nominees, the ones we'll be voting on today.  The first five were pretty obvious:  Soundwave, Grimlock, Jazz, and Shockwave.  The fifth I imagine was a surprise, as this week's TNI strip addresses.  It's Dinobot!  Some guy from friggin' Beast Wars who hasn't appeared in any other series!  He showed up on almost everybody's lists, and was the #1 choice from the Transformers Wiki.

This is because Dinobot is awesome.

(Though not everybody thinks so.  Some folks from TFW2005 were very adamant that Dinobot was shoved into the Nominee list by Hasbro, as part of some underhanded coup, because Hasbro hates the fans, because nobody would vote for Dinobot!  Nobody!)

Of course, I don't think he's going to win.  He doesn't have a chance in hell against Soundwave.  Dinobot may win some local polls at certain websites, but we're talking general transformers.com traffic here.  Soundwave's got it locked.  But a man can still dream, and I'm still voting Dinobot.  (Well, when the poll on transformers.com goes up sometime today.)

I've, uh, probably exhausted my well of Dinobot toy photos, especially recently, what with me trying to get every use of his mold ever together in one spot.  But there is one thing I know I definitely haven't photographed for this blog, or photographed period for about 15 years.  In 1997, disappointed with Dinobot's toy (what was wrong with me???), I bought a blue 5" Iron Man figure, covered him with sculpey and paint and called it a day.  His rigid grill structure's kinda broken off and he's been at the bottom of  a toy bin for a decade, but other than the paint wear that resulted, he's still in surprisingly good condition.

So enjoy this little bit of personal action figure history.  In 1997, Dinobot was a big part of my world.  In 2010, even though he hasn't appeared in a television series since then, he still is.  That's why I'm voting for him.

Yesterday I mentioned that Soundwave was the first of five nominees for the Transformers Hall of Fame.  Nominee number 2 is Grimlock, who is equally unsurprising.  I mean, yeah, once voting opens, Soundwave has this locked up, but Grimlock is the only guy who could possibly ever steal it from him.  Even though he won't.

Just like Soundwave's Hall of Fame bio, Grimlock's also drops some new information about him.  His speech impediment has been explained various ways before.  In the Marvel stuff, he didn't talk right because talking right was for prissy losers.  He talked badly because he wanted to.  In the original cartoon, he didn't talk very well because he was a primitive creation of Wheeljack.  (In fact, one could say that without a trip to Vector Sigma to endow him with life, he wasn't actually truly alive, but merely a complex machine.)

The Hall of Fame bio claims that his speech is fucked up because Scorponok damaged his voice processor during a battle.  Well, okay, let's add that one to the pile, I guess.

Hopefully, Dinobot will be tomorrow's nominee.  If not, I may be kind of fucked (I'll explain later), but if he is revealed to be a nominee sometime this week, I wonder what crazy retconned trivia we'll learn about him.  Is he Megatron's son?  Did he earn his rigid grill structure for pulling off a successful heist?  Will we finally learn what a steses pod is?

Who knows.  Other than us, potentially sometime tomorrow morning.