It's Sunstreaker!  You know, Sideswipe's brother (because they both transform into Lamborghinis and so I guess that's how being a brother in Robotworld works)!  Also known as the first Transformer to be designed, back in the day?  He was #1.  These days, they wait to do him whenever because Sideswipe is more popular (he's red!!!), and since they both transform into the same thing, Sideswipe gets priority. 

But here he is, in Earthrise, a year later after Sideswipe got released in Stege.  You avoid the alt-mode overlap that way, but in Earthrise, there's another kind of overlap.  Both Wheeljack and Runamuck transform essentially the same way!  They all get hood feet and roof chests.  You could easily just make one toy and swap out heads and deco to get reasonably faithful versions of all of them.

HOWEVER, Sunstreaker is entirely new!  .....he's.... extremely similar to Wheeljack, to the point that they essentially share engineering, but the two share zero parts.  Both have an empty torso box that you flip the head into, both put their car roofs on a lever that you rotate around the torso during transformation, both wrap their arms around the back of the car mode (though in different directions), both telescope out their legs the same way...  They feel like the same toy, even though they are not.  

(Runamuck, meanwhile, is absolutely different engineering up and down)

A fun thing about Sunstreaker is that instead of rotating his feet around for robot mode, his feet are sculpted and painted to look like car hood on both sides.  Saves you a step and some engineering, I guess!  

A less fun thing about Sunstreaker is that, unlike Sideswipe, his car mode isn't entirely painted.  This means only his translucent plastic parts get painted yellow to match his yellow plastic, and so he isn't as coherent as Sideswipe is.  Photography of Sunstreaker drastically exaggerates the difference between paint and plastic in person, to the point where you honestly don't notice that there is a difference most of the time.  But put Sunstreaker in front of a camera, and his yellow plastic and paint contrast flares up like this is They Live or something.  Keep Sunstreaker away from cameras!

Which would seriously bum Sunstreaker out.  Dude's vain.  

I've probably mentioned it in this blog before, but when I was a kid, I designed a Transformers combiner.  Powermaster Optimus Prime and Pretender Classics had just happened, and I noticed that we were starting to get old guys (Bumblebee, Jazz, Grimlock, Starscream) redone as new toys with current gimmicks, and I hatched a plan to get me other new toys of guys I wanted years earlier but never got toys of.  And so, using allll the creativity that a ten-year-old can muster, I designed a Transformers gestalt guy made of Ratchet, Ironhide, Prowl, and Wheejack with Optimus Prime as a torso.  It was very creative.  So wow.

Anyway, twenty-five years later, the dream is nearly being realized.  I've got my Ironhide and Prowl, Wheeljack's coming, and there's some art of a possible Ratchet that leaked, and of course there's Optimus Prime.  I am so into this.  I want everyone to be a combiner.  I want to rebuy my entire Transformers collection as combiner limbs and torsos.  Combiner Wars is the shit.

Anyway, all these new limbs here (Ironhide, Sunstreaker, Prowl, and Mirage) are retools of the Stunticons.  Ironhide was Offroad, Sunstreaker was Breakdown, Prowl was Dead End (well, okay, he's a retool of Streetwise who's a retool of Dead End), and Mirage was Drag Strip.  They all get new heads.  They're officially supposed to combine with "Battle Core Optimus," a white redeco of the first wave Optimus Prime torso with a new also-Optimus-Prime head retool, but I'm cool with the first wave Optimus Prime I already have.  My childhood combiner guy didn't have a white redeco of Prime in it.  Also Legends Class Rodimus forms the chest armor.  Sort of.  He likes to not stay on so well.

My favorite of the four is Sunstreaker, since his toy incorporates the big fist/foot/cannon accessory into the robot mode itself.  Plus Sunstreaker's yellow, and you know me and my yellow.  

One thing I don't like is how the fist/foot/cannon accessory on each of these guys is split up between silver-painted plastic and silver plastic.  Some of the plastic in these toys are nylon for structural integrity reasons, and nylon won't take factory paint, but it still makes the weapon modes of each toy look even less cohesive than before, like a piece of gun with some fingers in it.  It's just more conspicuous.  Which, again, is why I'm happiest with Sunstreaker, who can peg his fist/foot/cannon accessory onto his back.  

I've seem some folks complain that we're getting new toys of these four guys when we already have toys of them.  Well, maybe you do!  Those toys came out in 2008!  That was a while ago!  And, like my childhood self, sometimes you don't get to get everything you want during the first pass, so second chances are nice.  And it's even better if these second chances combine into a larger robot.  

Now where's my Wheeljack and my Ratchet?

I'd meant to gab on about Generations Red Alert back on Monday night along with that week's Toy News International strip, but the Mike statues done shown up on my porch and Red got knocked back.

(Only a handful of Mike statues remain!)

As the TNI strip mentions, there's a lotta versions of this mold right now.  I own five, but there are about four more between Japanese versions of three of these guys and an additional (super super rare) G2 version of Sideswipe.  It's not the greatest mold, but it isn't terrible.  How is it that the toys that get redecoed the most are the ones that are actually pretty mediocre?  The original Seeker mold, the Classics Seeker mold, Dinobot... (SHUT UP SHUT UP DINOBOT IS AWESOME)

As I've mentioned previously, no matter how terrible the toy, the more versions of one toy I accumulate, the more desirable extra versions become.  It's absolutely nuts.   Maybe it's like mob mentality, how people get dumber in groups.  Well, these large groups make me dumber!

Red Alert himself isn't a bad version of the mold.  If I had to rank him by prettiness compared to the others, he'd probably rank a distant second after Breakdown.  Breakdown's color scheme has no equal, so that's just not terribly fair, but them's the breaks, Red.  The way the white and gray and sharp red play off each other is striking, just enough to edge him out over his primary color brothers.

As for the tooling itself, he's probably second-to-worst, just ahead of Tiny Head McGee, aka Mr. Punch/Counterpunch.  Why?  Well, because of the light bar on the roof, you can't mount his engine thingy on his back in robot mode anymore.  In addition, the holes on his shoulders are no longer large enough for him to peg his weapon into.  So Red Alert's forced into having to wrap the engine thingy around the gun and peg the whole thing into his wrist... which is an incredibly unstable arrangement even before we realize that this larger gun configuration conflicts with his forearm kibble.

So that's annoying.