I haven't been buying all of the Masterpiece Transformers, just the guys that I really liked when I was a kid or think make interesting new toys.  And so I've skipped guys like the original Sideswipe, Red Alert, Smokescreen, and Bluestreak.  And it occurs to me, as I put Wheeljack on my shelf next to Prowl, that if things keep going as they are, I am going to have a buttload of white guys.  Other Autobots I'd buy are, like, Jazz and Ratchet.  Apparently I'm super into the Autobots who were white with some other trim color.  What a boring-looking shelf of favorite characters I'm going to have.  Hopefully Bumblebee will help break that up a little.  

I've talked about being into Wheeljack before, with older reviews about other toys of him.  As a child, I focused on his appearance in the nineth Marvel US comic book issue, "DIS-Integrated Circuits," in which he and Jazz fight Frenzy and Starscream.  It was one of the first comic books I've ever read, and due to the realities of media availability at the time, I reread that comic book a billion million zillion times at any point of my choosing, while I could only watch the cartoon whenever it aired.  Prowl also pops up in that issue, but nearly as much, and Ratchet also features, but he like super-features in all the comics leading up to that issue, so that was more of a Ratchet chaser than a main course.  Even Buzzsaw's in that one.  What I'm saying is, that was basically my Transformers Ground Zero, as far as Characters I Like.

I didn't have toys of any of these guys at the time, and so I'd meticulously study the panels in which they transformed, trying to figure out how they worked.  This was mostly a fool's errand, since none of the art was particularly accurate to how the toys really worked -- and they couldn't be, since the robot mode character models were truly fiction -- but Wheeljack's sequence of panels where he transforms in that issue was meat enough for me.  

That personal history is partly why I sought out Wheeljack's Masterpiece toy.  For the first time, that one thing can actually become the other thing, from Lancia Stratos to character model.  And the toy does a pretty good job of it, as much as any toy really could without involving size changing of certain parts.  The shins and feet still have to be the actual hood of the car, unable to shrink down into thin little legs.  The wheels and other car architecture can't just disappear as the animator wishes, and so it all has to go physically somewhere.  On the original toy, the entire back of the car behind the canopy merely folds out into his giant gorilla arms.  Here, some of the back becomes his normal-sized arms, but much of it buries itself behind his chest, inside his torso.  This is where the rear wheels hide.  The forward wheels don't hide, which is fine, I feel.  They remain on the outsides of his shins, though sandwiched between the hood and the doors of the car.  The roof of the car splits up asymmetrically so that his head can fit inside while in car mode, and then it latches back together once this is done.  The wings remain attached throughout the process, unlike how they were merely removeable accessories before.  There's hinges at their base so you can choose to point them back at a slight angle, if you wish.  He looks a little more dynamic that way.

Though his wings were integrated into the transformation, his weaponry was not.  His shoulder cannon and its detachable missile has to be removed, and it can be repegged onto his roof once you're done putting him back in car mode.  The handgun pegs underneath as the exhaust pipe.  

Complexity-wise, he's not as gloriously straight-forward as Prowl, but also not as frustratingly fragmentary as Sideswipe.  Over time, the reality of the original Wheeljack toy has contaminated my mind's eye version of Wheeljack, and so it's a little odd to see Wheeljack as this perfectly-proportioned humanoid guy, rather than the gorilla-shape of the 1984 toy.  He looks skinnier than I expect him to be, but the intended goal was to look like the skinnier, more-humanoid cartoon drawing, so I can't fault the toy for it.  

What I really need is a Ratchet.  Okay, what I really really need is a Ratchet with a red helmet and white chevron, but I know I'm going to have to paint that myself.  

Stupid cartoon.

Ratbat is an expert at shrewdly spending resources, and so I don't think he'd be pleased by how much I paid just to get him.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd be in pretty big trouble.  I'd probably be fired.  

Masterpiece Ratbat comes with Masterpiece Soundblaster, who is Soundwave with his blues swapped out for black.  As I've stated previously, the two kind of look the same if you squint.  It's not a very daring redeco.  I've bought Soundblasters to get exclusive Recordicons before, but the Soundblaster-to-Recordicon ratio has never been quite so staggering.   I paid $20 to get Fall of Cybertron Buzzsaw.  I paid about $70 to get Enemy and Wingthing.  But Masterpiece Soundblaster and his one exclusive little guy is about $150 depending on where you get him from.  I don't expect to see Ratbat released in any other manner -- would Toys"R"Us USA bother with a black Soundwave and a bat?  -- and so a bullet was bitten.  I have to have Ratbat.  And, hey, I have pornlord money now, so pornlord money spent!

And, yeah, it's not like it's going to be lucrative to unload the unwanted 90% of this arrangement on eBay.  Nobody's buying him for the black Soundwave, and if they were, they probably also want, you know, Ratbat.  It was kind of funny to see some folks claiming they'd just buy Ratbat separately, loose, on eBay, from those who only wanted the Black Soundwave.  Yeah.  You try that.  Meanwhile, I'll find Bigfoot.

Anyway, Ratbat himself is pretty great.  WHICH HE'D DAMN WELL BETTER BE, CONSIDERING.  Just like the two condors and Ravage, all his parts are integrated into his transformation.  You don't pop those gold chrome weapons into him at the end -- those parts are built into him from the start.  And, like the condors, it's pretty amazing that it works.  He's just a tiny bit more complicated than them, but not so much that it's annoying.  And he's way less fragile-feeling than Ravage.  

The only thing that bugs me about him is his fake kibble.  He's got little sculpted cassette spools in his chest right next to his actual cassette spools in his shoulders.  I understand why this is a thing that has occurred, but it's still something Ratbat's engineering suffers that the others don't, to the best of my recollection.

And he's leader of the Decepticons.  Have I ever mentioned that?  I probably have.  But I mentioned it again.  Plus he kicked Fortress Maximus's ass.  He's a tiny god.  A tiny accountant god.  

I wasn't super-interested in Masterpiece Sideswipe when he was first announced, and I was kind of disappointed when I fiddled with my friend's, so that lack of interest felt vindicated.  

BUT

I gladly threw down dollars when it was announced that Masterpiece Sideswipe was coming out in his Generation 2 color scheme with a new snarly face and two new giant Derek Yaniger guns and two spikey wheels for his shoulders and a new sword.  The only thing that's missing is his bandolier.  I really want that bandolier.  (Okay, fine there's also a third gun we saw on his back that's missing, but eh, mostly I'm about the bandolier.)

The toy is about what I remember when I tried to transform my friend's.  Masterpiece Prowl was involved but pretty intuitive and easily do-able, but Sideswipe gets in his own way too much.  Sideswipe feels more fragile when you move stuff around.  He definitely seems more complicated than he has to be.  I mean, the original toy's legs just pulled out and you flopped the feet down.  I'm not entirely sure why this toy can't do that rather than having each shin blow up into shards which you reassemble to get basically the same look.  

The toy comes bare, but there's a sticker sheet included if you want to push the look of the G2 toy.  The comic book's Sideswipe left off the toy's green, so if you wanna strictly comic-accurate Sideswipe you should leave those off.  But while I'm in love with that first G2 comic book issue, I'd rather my toy be prettier and acknowledge the original toy more, so I applied those stickers first-thing.  

All the extra parts combine into a megaweapon which attaches to the roof of the car just like in the comic.  Yeah, that can also include the wheels and the sword.  It's pretty awesome.  

I'm not likely to transform Sideswipe much since he's kinda a chore, so I'm glad he makes a pretty great action figure in robot mode.  Visually, he's everything I've ever wanted from a Sideswipe, for seriouslies.  Sideswipe is just kinda boring unless you G2 him up.

I was pretty fine skipping MP Sideswipe, because, really, who the hell is Sideswipe?  He's only a popular guy because 1) he's from 1984 and 2) he's red.  He's kind of the Default Autobot.  (Now, put him in G2 colors and we'll talk.)  But I don't think I can pass up on Prowl.  

Like Ravage and Buzzsaw, Prowl is one of those dudes I just like a whole bunch, and feel I should own a "Masterpiece" version of.  Much like Sideswipe, he didn't do much of note for years, but he finally distinguished himself in the very late Generation 1 years in the Marvel comic, where he started appearing again because he had an Action Master toy to sell.  Here, he was strict, by-the-book, and was an amazingly self-righteous prick.  And I gobbled this the hell up, because this was pretty outstanding characterization for an Autobot back in the day.  Other than Grimlock, Autobots tended to be pretty nice.  But Prowl was not.  He was selfish and had an inflated view of his own importance.  He was kind of like Dwight from The Office -- very good at his own actual job, but his inability to connect with others and lack of charisma kept him from rising as far in the ranks as he'd like.  And this really infuriated him.  

I'm very happy the current IDW comics have taken this version of Prowl and ran with it.  If Prowl isn't just a little bit of a jerk, he doesn't feel like Prowl to me.  And while Prowl is indeed a super jerk, it's also nice when he's also right.  He is indeed a by-the-book strategist, a mechanoid run by logic -- kind of a heroic counterpart to Shockwave -- and Prowl's correct when he sees his fellow Autobots championing the more bloodthirsty and reckless amongst their ranks and is disgusted.  But Prowl's just as interested in justifying his means as they are, just from a different angle.

(The cartoon Prowl was basically a non-entity, meanwhile.   It's part of why this Masterpiece toy doesn't COME with anything wacky like much of the other Masterpieces have.  He was not terribly noteable.)

So I'm happy to report that this Masterpiece toy is pretty great!  There are two kinds of Masterpiece toys -- the ones that I want to smash a little with a hammer and the ones that are complicated but not infuriating.  Prowl is thankfully one of the latter!  In fact, I'd say he's less infuriating to transform than both the recentish Universe toy and his more-recent Beast Hunters toy.  He's certainly more involved than either of them, but he doesn't require the harrowing fiddliness they require.  There's no going back and trying to get panels to line up better because you didn't fit something inside the right way.  

And unlike many similar toys which have trouble getting the arm assembly down and out and around the hood during transformation, his arm assembly is pretty no-nonsense.  The whole damn thing just swings down and out of the way first-thing.  Nothing pops off during transformation and nothing ever tries to occupy the same space as the rest of him.  His feet are a much-more complex version of the Universe toy's, but, again, not in a way that will cause frustration.  There's just more steps.  

So, like, major thumbs up.

Prowl's Masterpiece toy is sized based on his robot height relative to Optimus Prime's in the television show.  It's sort of a nonsensical scale beyond that (he'd be much smaller if their vehicle modes were in scale) but I like that it is a purposeful scale of some stripe.  Him being much smaller in general makes me happy.  I don't have Sideswipe, and so most of the Masterpiece toys I have currently are all basically about the same size.  It's nice to have some height variance.  I like height variance.  It makes the Masterpiece line come alive to me. 

Just wish Grimlock were taller.

People are still scrambling Toys "R" Uses this week to get their hands on Masterpiece Soundwave. He's scarce and tends to be bought up in the first five minutes of whatever store he appears at. It's been a mad dash, and hopefully more will continue to filter into stores. I got mine at Comic-Con, from Entertainment Earth's booth, thanks to some help from Phillip Donnelly and his magical mug. (Brandon Bird also owes PD some thanks, as the mug was not only magical but transferable.)

How is the toy? Well, long story short, it's the best robot toy you'll ever own that folds up into a box. And man, does it fold up into a box! I know there's something in my brain that pumps happy juice through my body when I know a robot can transform into something, but damn if that Box Mode ain't superfluous. It's not like you can't do all the stuff you can do with his box mode in robot mode! That mini-cassette door still opens and everything. And it's not like Box Mode actually looks like a micro-cassette recorder -- he looks like a box with a very tiny window in it. This is entirely because his cassette door is still the same size as the original's to accommodate identically-sized micro-cassette toys, but the robot mode which surrounds that door is a chunk larger, and so you have this ridiculous... thing. Like Soundwave's altmode got elephantiasis.

The door still opens when you press the eject button on the top/shoulder. This time around, there's room inside him for three Recordicons. The back wall of the cassette storage area can slide in by pushing on it, and a button on Soundwave's backside will reset this wall to the usual one-cassette-deep width, so long as he's not full of dudes at the time. The arrow buttons on his crotch also depress, but those don't accomplish anything. There are ridges on both Soundwave's shoulders and his forearms that Buzzsaw or Laserbeak's feet can plug into, all perch-like.

He transforms about as simply as you'd expect -- very similarly to the original toy -- but with a few added wrinkles of some additional fold-out panels to cover up his articulation. His shoulder-mounted missile launcher and hand-held rifle are also included, but this time they don't transform into his batteries and store inside a battery compartment. Mind, they still transform into the same battery shape, but you don't put them inside him like batteries inside his battery compartment anymore (that's where his head goes) and instead they kind of just peg behind him and fill up space easily viewable from behind. D'oh well.

Soundwave also comes with a plethora of additional accessories, other than the five Recordicons and their stuff. He has a little vacuum cleaner attachment for his wrist, he has a digital-readout screen which you can plug into his chest door to make it look like he's computing stuff, he has an energon cube which you can pull the lid off of and plug into his chest door to make it look like he's making energon cubes -- all things he did in the cartoon. I'm not a big cartoon guy, so those won't get much play from me. He also comes with a nontransformable Megatron rifle. I think it's the same one that came with earlier MP toys.

Unlike the Japanese release, though, this Soundwave has yellow eyes instead of red, which reflects more his original toy and early comic book appearances. I welcome this change! I was happy to learn he was getting yellow eyes. On the other hand, his Frenzy seems to be purpler than the Japanese Frenzy, in order to make him look more like cartoon Rumble, even though the packaging still calls him Frenzy. Buzzsaw's accent color is now more yellow than orange, and I think there may be some other very slight color differences all around.

IMPORTANT: Be careful with Soundwave's dang index fingertips. Seriously, this piece will drop from him like ripened fruit. The only thing keeping the fingertip on the rest of his finger is the tiniest bit of friction, and trying to articulate it without it sliding out of "joint" (I use this term loosely because there is barely a set of bumps in there to keep it in place) will almost always cause it to go diving for whatever floor or table or couch you're over at the time. You will be looking for this finger constantly. Years from now, there will be no Soundwaves with complete index fingers. I prophesy this.

 

San Diego Comic-Con was pretty great for new Ravages!  Two of them, anyway, between Hasbro Toy Shop's G.I. Joe Ravage and Entertainment Earth's offering of Masterpiece Soundwave.  I like Ravages, so this was gratifying.

G.I. Joe Ravage is a newly-molded nontransformable Ravage for Baroness to keep on a leash.  This pairing homages an OTFCC 2004-exclusive cover to Devil's Due's Joe Vs. Transformers #3 by Mike Norton and an unreleased First4Figures statue based on that cover.  Both Baroness and the leash are removable from Ravage, and Ravage's articulation consists only of a balljointed neck (at the shoulders).

Masterpiece Ravage is also newly-molded, surprise!  Like the other Masterpiece Recordicons, he still transforms into the same-sized microcassette tape as the original toys, and so he works in either MP Soundwave or either of the original Soundwave or Blaster toys.  He looks great from the front, but the back isn't terribly great.  It's kind of a mess back there, beyond what you usually expect from a Transformers Mini-Cassette guy.  Usually it's at least flat back there, if not obviously an arrangement of animal parts, but here the backside is mostly a hollow pit surrounded by legs.  MP Ravage does not have a very pretty backside, no.

It's in service of a fully articulated, as-cartoon-accurate-as-possible-at-the-scale jaguar mode, though!  Like Buzzsaw and Laserbeak, Ravage's previously-removeable weapons are integrated into the transformation itself.  He's pretty damn intricate!  He kind of has to be, at the size he is.  Lots of overlapping skinny parts and, really, he's a jungle of hinges.  He's not bad, though, other than the aforementioned pit at the back of his cassette mode.  He certainly aims to do what he aims to do.  He's just not terribly fun, though, and despite how fully-articulated he is, he doesn't feel as fun to me as Universe 2008 Ravage (the guy who came with Universe Hound).  I like transforming that Ravage back and forth, but this guy's got way more steps (and a foreboding feeling of fragility) that keeps that fun from happening.  Maybe if he had a articulated jaw.

But hey, he can do his stock art pose, so hurrah!

Now all we need is Masterpiece Skids, I guess, so Masterpiece Ravage can get knocked into an abandoned mine shaft and be forgotten in American comics for like fifty issues.

Cheetimus and I split the Masterpiece Frenzy/Buzzsaw set, and I've mailed Frenzy to Cheetimus long ago, but I took pictures of him before I sent him off!  He said I could!  And so let's finally talk about this toy I don't have right now but will later when he comes out in the United States and I rebuy him.

I've always been a Frenzy over a Rumble guy.  The reasons for this are simple and petty: I had Frenzy's toy as a kid, not Rumble, and Frenzy featured prominently in my first comic books, not Rumble.  (I'm sure Rumble was IN them, in fact I know he was, but he was kind of colored blue in them just like Frenzy so it's not like he had a large chance of standing out.)  And the cartoon was for chumps (who got home from school earlier)!

And so I very much would like this Frenzy toy later, but just not for the $30 portion of the Japanese set he is.  My impatience has its limits, and those limits are Buzzsaw-shaped.

Plus, man, I gotta tell ya, Buzzsaw's Masterpiece toy is just so much more compelling than Frenzy/Rumble's.  Buzzsaw was always one of the better early Recordicons because he transformed out of his cassette shape into multiple directions.  He didn't remain flat like Frumble and Ravage.  His wings spread out, sure, but he also poked his legs and head out and became more 3D.  And so, visually, Frenzy just isn't as interesting to me me.  He's a thin dude.  Obviously, Masterpiece Frenzy is way more intricate than the original and makes for a much more poseable and believable humanoid robot, but he's still kinda flat.

Also, Buzzsaw's weaponry, which were previously removable accessories, are integrated into his Masterpiece transformation, which is amazing and impossible.  Buzzsaw gets to break the laws of physics, but Frenzy doesn't.  Frenzy's extra weapons are still extra parts.  It makes logical sense for this to be the case, since these guns are supposed to be able to be removed and replugged into various places, but it's still less awestriking.  The weapons can switch between two pegs, one sized for his spoolholes and the other sized for his fistholes.

And Frenzy's giant piledrivers which he has because of Frumble Mixup are obviously gonna be big extra parts you plug in.  There's also a third part that both piledrivers attach to which then in turn plugs into Frenzy's back, if you want robot mode storage.  It makes him unstandable, so I'm not sure why you would.  But hey, it's there!

So, really, there's more stuff to do with Frenzy than Buzzsaw just by considering the sheer amount of extra stuff he comes with.  But I still prefer amazingly self-contained Buzzsaw.

Laserbeak?  Who the hell's Laserbeak?  A chump, that's what.  A cowardly chump.  Seriously, look up his Tech-Spec bio.  He's not only a condor, he's also ... chicken.

pause for laughter

Now, Buzzsaw, he's where it's at.  Buzzsaw will cut you.  Buzzsaw's got a kill list a mile long.  He's like Rambo, but with a razor-sharp beak.  You know that speech about velociraptors Alan Grant gives the kids in Jurassic Park?  That's Buzzsaw.  He's weaponized bird.  Don't believe me, ask Omega Supreme.  Except you can't.  Because Buzzsaw murdered him.  Murdered him and he never came back ever again.

Which is why Buzzsaw is the only Masterpiece Recordicon I sought out.  Yeah, I'll get them all later (including Buzzsaw) when they're sold as a package deal as a Toys"R"Us exclusive over here in North America, but I wanted Buzzsaw now.  At $60 for the Japanese set of him and Frenzy, that was a little cost prohibitive, but I struck a deal with Cheetimus since he wanted Frenzy but not Buzzsaw.  And so now I have my Buzzsaw.  Frenzy is already repackaged up and ready to go out the door.

Part of the reason I want him now, other than Wanting Him Now And Not Later, is that there's no guarantee the Hasbro release will be so creamy orange.  It's hard to tell from Hasbro's stock photography because it's so Photoshopped and airbrushed, but Hasbro seems to be doing a toy-color kinda theme with their version of Soundwave and the Recordicons, particularly with Soundwave's yellow eyes.  But I want that damn orange.  It matches the color of Buzzsaw in the comic.  It also matches the color of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.  Toy-accurate gold is acceptable but not perfect.  And for Buzzsaw, I want perfect.

With Masterpiece Buzzsaw, perfect is exactly what you get.  I mean, I like my Ravages and all, but Masterpiece Laserbeak/Buzzsaw's mold is insanely perfect.  Impossibly perfect.  You know how on the original Buzzsaw toy you had to plug in half his mass with those chromed wing pieces?  Yeah, well, screw that with this new version, because that stuff is all incorporated into the transformation.  Somehow this engineering marvel gets everything to extract out of the exact same sized mini-cassette shape as the original.  Masterpiece Ravage's add-on guns are also included in his transformation, but it's a much less-elegant looking tape when you're done with it.  With Laserbeak, you flip him over and he's still a flat surface back there, even if that flat surface has condor-shaped carvings through it.  Ravage... Ravage seems to be kind of a mess back there.  I mean, he looks nice enough, but he's relatively a little rough around the edges and I don't have to have him now-now.  I can wait.

But really, the best part about Buzzsaw is that he can perch.  He's not always stuck in the swooping-forward pose, nose out, head down.  You can rear him back up on his hind legs and he can just sort of hang out casually.  That's something I really really like and it doesn't happen incredibly often.   And he has a little flip-up camera on his head.  You know.  Because this toy wasn't perfect enough.

This is a toy I can imagine keeping on my shelf basically forever.  I have a few toys that hit that sweet spot for me that outlive their usual desk life, and I'm pretty sure Buzzsaw's gonna be among them.  He hits all the right notes.  He's the Buzzsaw of my mind's eye.  When Masterpiece Soundwave and all his little duders show up later this year whenever, you buy the hell out of it.  Just for the Buzzsaw.

Or for Laserbeak, if you wanna be all mainstream about it.

The original Masterpiece Optimus Prime is nearing a decade old, released in 2004 as "20th Anniversary Prime."  And since this is Optimus Prime, it's no surprise TakaraTomy's come back again after all this time to do it again.  .... but maybe a little smaller, yes?  The first MP Prime was... kind of huge.  He was clearly designed to be a stand-alone item, without thought to "oh hey i guess maybe we should do some other guys to go with him," forgetting, uh, maybe not everyone wants a range of folks-who-aren't-Optimus-Prime at that huge-ass scale.

So this new MP Prime is smaller, but not dinky by any rate.  He's got some die-cast in him, so he's got a good heft -- but not so much heft that he's constantly in danger of falling over, like the old one was.  The ankles on this guy don't have to support nearly as much.  And New MP Prime has a different transformation and some retooled proportions.  He makes the Old MP Prime look like My Buddy and/or Kid Sister.

(I really need to throw my old MP Prime up on eBay, but I can't find any accessories other than the Energon Axe.  No Matrix, no ion cannon, no nothin'.  Knew I shouldn't have let Zombie Tarantulas keep MP Prime's Matrix for eight years.  Dude totally ganked it.)

New MP Prime does some of the things the old one did, but not all.  His chest doors still open up to reveal the Matrix, of course, and you can still pry it out of there.  He doesn't have some of the smaller things, though.  There's no more wrist communicators in his arms, his mouthplate doesn't do the talky-talky thing, nor do the flaps on the fronts of his legs flare when he steps.  However, his transformation does make room for Spike Witwicky (who's included) to sit inside while Prime's in truck mode.  And, oh my lord,  his truck mode actually has side-view mirrors.  They managed a way to get those to exist.  It makes me happy.

I also like the new range of motion for his head.  It's articulated at the neck plus the neck itself can rotate back and forth, allowing Prime to look up into the air or into his own collarbone.  His fingers are articulated, with a joint at the knuckles for his pinky/ring/middle fingers and one at the knuckles and mid-finger for his index finger.  I do wish his elbows and knees were double-jointed so they could bend over on themselves.  He can't do the Kneeling Big Nooooooo!, which is a tragedy.

TakaraTomy also decided that his legs should awkwardly conceal his leg-wheels, since those disappeared during transformation in the cartoon.  Well, their execution looks dippy, and I like seeing his wheels there, so I've been leaving the concealing flap folded back against the rear of his legs.

Since this Prime is smaller, it's not nearly as incredible an ordeal to give him a trailer.   The Old MP Prime got a trailer (eventually) in Japan, and I bet that thing is stupidly huge.  This one is just small enough to survive the transition to American toy shelves.  Even so, the packaging is still pretty huge.  Grabbing it off the shelf and carrying it to the check-out counter is like toting a giant stereo boombox.  Also, hey, you're going to have to completely tear apart the packaging to get the instructions out.  They buried that sucker deep in the bowels of this thing.  Like the tell-tale heart, the instructions are hidden under the floorboards.

Generally I'm fine when Primes don't have trailers.  The original trailer is just a box.  A box that takes up space.  Looooots of space.  It's a waste of mass.  But I don't absolutely hate this trailer.  For one thing, it hides the back of Optimus Prime's truck mode, which is obviously a pair of robot legs and not the back of an actual truck.  It also does all of the things the original 1984 trailer did, like open into a battlestation or repair bay.  Roller is included, who can also tow the trailer himself if he wants to, while Spike drives.  Unlike the original trailer, this one has spots to stow all of Optimus Prime's extra stuff.  You can nestle his axe and gun in their intended spots.  (The gun also folds in half and stores in Optimus Prime's back as first seen in the Dreamwave comics.  Thanks, Pat Lee.)

If you like Optimus Prime, he's a pretty good thing to have.  He's exclusive to Toys"R"Us, though.  Hopefully his $100 price tag ('cuz of the huge trailer, you see) will mean he won't disappear off the shelves quicker-than-the-eye.

I have some additional photos on my Tumblr.

So I ended up getting MP Thundercracker.  I wanted his stand, really, for Sunstorm (and I bought some Goo Be Gone on the same trip so I can remove "Thunder Cracker"'s misparsed name from it) and yesterday we stumbled across a buncha Thundercrackers, so.

His colors are nice.  I might like them better if I weren't having to compare them to Sunstorm's, whose colors are just an orange-shift away from Absolute Perfection.  He's a dark, deep blue, and I like his charcoaly forearms.  Also, man, he's got some goofy tampographs, which I adore.  The ones on top of his jet intakes that look like his original toy's stickers I don't really care for, but the rest are adorkable.  He's got Kyde's name on one side and... J. "Dragon" Sass's on the other...  And there's "Sonic Boom!" tampos on his tailfins and weird tattoos of Reflector on the backs of his shoulders, visible from the sides of his jet mode.   These goofy tampos make him slightly less boring.

It's obvious that Hasbro thought they were putting the original version of the mold in this package, given all of the call-outs.  It claims he has a swappable face, which is totes not true anymore, and he comes with the original version's jet mode missile pods, even though they're not exactly compatible with him anymore.  The instructions, of course, have the original version depicted as well, so that'll give somebody an ulcer, I'm sure.

I'll have to decide if I'm keeping him.  I want the stand, certainly, but I need some time to decide if I want to keep the robot.  If you want one of your own, he's Toys"R"Us exclusive, so keep a vigil for one there.  They'll go fast.