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.

 *finally climbs out of a pile of babies*

Look, I have new toys!  New Combiner Wars toys!  I don't have these guys' torso yet, but let's talk about the limbs.  They're wave six of the Deluxe Class guys, aka The Final Wave.  I mean, there's still a buttload of more box sets coming out through the rest of the year, but these are the last single-packed guys before Combiner Wars gets transitioned into Titans Return (aka Everyone Is A Headmaster).

Wheeljack is the most changed of these four.  Though he used to be Breakdown, he's had his entire car mode replaced and most of his robot mode as well.  He's 90% new toy, though he transforms exactly the same and has all the same functionality.  I'm happy for the vehicle mode reshelling the most, because I just kinda feel like Wheeljack needs to look like a Lancia Stratos, moreso than most other Autobot cars need to be their original car model.  I mean, it's cool that he has new robot parts, too, but that feels like extra on top of a necessity.

In between promo renders and the final product, some of Wheeljack's black plastic is now white, like his crotch and elbows.  This is not helpful, since he was kinda too-white already!  And so now he's really white.  Don't get me wrong, he has a lot of paint -- Wheeljack kind of has to have a lot of paint, since he's got a distinctive rally deco, but all his budget went into creating that, so you don't get a lot of the small stuff like having painted forearms and whatnot.  S'okay, I'll paint a lot of that stuff myself later.

Second, let's just get Smokescreen out of the way.  He's a straight redeco of Prowl.  Like Wheeljack, he uses up all his paint budget in his vehicle mode's rally deco, and so his robot mode's a little plain.  Smokescreen's a little frustrating, because we know there are other unused heads on these guys that might not make it to retail (coughcoughRatchetcoughcough) but I guess Hasbro proooobably wanted a race car instead of a second white-and-red ambulance.  S'okay, Ratchet's likely this year's BotCon customization class guy anyway.

Hound is Swindle with a new Hound head!  Swindle himself was a heavy retool of Rook in the same way that Wheeljack is a retool of Breakdown -- aka, it's all new except for a crotch and a peg and some tiny joints here and there.  In addition to Hound's new head, his smaller weapon now has nubs on the back so that it can be shoved into the rollbar cage on his robot mode back, giving him an over-the-shoulder weapon.  (Some later versions of Swindle reportedly have this as well.)   Over-the-shoulder weapon pleases me!  

Where Hound is frustrating is how they deco him.  He's got, like, two separate vehicle fronts sculpted on his torso.  Up top on his chest is one set of fake vehicle front, and then there's a separate set of fake vehicle front on his stomach.  This is so he can do double duty as both Hound and Swindle provided you illuminate the right parts with paint.  However, the right parts were not illimunated with paint!  Hound has his Swindle parts painted, ignoring completely the Hound bumper across his ribcage, while those Swindle parts were ignored on Swindle.  Grrrr!   Maybe I'll do some painting on Hound as well.

And finally there's Trailbreaker, who even-more-finally has his own original name back.  Hasbro tried to make so many Trailbreakers over the years, realized they didn't have the trademark but weren't willing to find a new one, and so we got a lot of black Ironhides.  And so finally, a year or two ago they were all FINE, dubbed him "Trailcutter," put out a few Trailcutter toys, and even got Trailbreaker to change his name to Trailcutter in the IDW comics.  And then Trailcutter died.  And now they got "Trailbreaker"-the-Trademark back for real and so I guess they can give his proper name to his corpse.  

Poor Trailbreaker.

Trailbreaker has a few retoolings, but not nearly as many as Wheeljack.  He's got a new head, obvs, but he's also got new forearms and new fingers on his combiner mode fist.  One of his new forearms ends in a hand and the other ends in a gun, as Trailbreakers do, but they made the end a 5mm peghole so you can shove his combiner mode fist in there.  Sweet.  His combiner mode fist now has kind of a claw thing going on instead of fingers, which is super neat.  Well, it'd be super neater if this tooling got used a second use (as Hoist?) so you could give a combiner robot double claw hands, but whatcha gonna do.  (Other than buy a second Trailbreaker.)  

Trailbreaker's new claw things give me pause, though.  The fronts of the claw are painted, which is... weird.  Other than dipping the whole damn thing in silver, like with the Optimus Maximus guys, these hand/foot weapons don't really get paint, and they certainly don't get spot paint.  I have this feeling that the silver finger fronts are meaningful in some way, but I can't find any new way for the weapon to interact with the robot mode.  I mean, obviously, the first thing you think of is Trailbreaker's silver forcefield generator which usually goes over his head, but you can't shove this weapon behind Trailbreaker's head any better than any other version of the mold.  (ie, terribly)  I dunno.  It's gonna bug me.  

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.

In the same box from BigBadToyStore as Artfire was Prime Starquake and Dark Energon Wheeljack.  I keep internally calling it my Super Expensive Box of Entirely Redecoes, but I think that title's taken by BotCon each year.   Skyquake I had on preorder 'cuz, well, he's a tailender, so no guarantee he'll hit stores in great numbers.  Beast Hunters stuff is already coming out, so his time on the shelf is limited.  And I had Dark Energon Wheeljack on preorder 'cuz he's friggin' Slicer.  In fact, he had Decepticon faction symbol Reprolabels stickers on him in about thirty seconds, once I looked up on Transformers Wiki to see whether he had photos taken of him yet.

Because Skyquake has been dead in fiction for years (seriously, he showed up to die in the first episode of Transformers Prime's proper first season), I started to come up with a backstory for him.  He doesn't really have a present- or a future-story, so that's all he gets.  And, hey, look, he came in a box from BBTS with another guy based on a Europe-only release from the early Nineties.  That's right, he and Slicer are now super badass partners-in-evil.  In the past.  Before Skyquake got locked in a closet in a mountain on Earth.  Where Slicer is these days, I dunno.

At some point retailers were all, yeah, okay, we get it, there's lots of Transformers toys.  Turns out we like them, we just don't like-like them.  And so Wheeljack/Que's wave never came out in the United States.  And a bunch of other stuff.  But Asia got them!  And so, after the fact, I got a Wheeljack/Que sent from Asia for myself and Graham, doubled up to save on shipping.

(Man, how bad is "Que" as a name?  It's like Michael Bay just flat-out plagiarizes a James Bond character, but then they realize, uh, I don't think we can call him that, for real, so why don't we... spell it badly...?)

Wheeljack is your typical movie-style Transformer.  He's all panels and greebles.  He's not too counter-intuitive to transform, though, and the only thing that bugs me about him is how the bright blue parts on the front of his shins like to pop off at a moment's notice.  Also, his legs are shades of TFPrime Vehicon, since they're formed from the entire roof.  (But not the hood.)  I was afraid he was gonna be a monster to get back into car mode, but he wasn't too bad.

He comes with a MechTech weapon, same as the other DOTM Deluxes.  It's a saw!  A saw with a bipid, and he can carry it like a Ghostbuster containment unit.  Kinda sweet.  He also comes with three clip-on weapons.  These do not store in vehicle mode.  They do clip onto him kind of awkwardly in robot mode, like he's got extra limbs on his ribcage which happen to be blowtorches.  But Wheeljack's supposed to be a gadgety guy, so it makes sense.  (I have to say, a spear is pretty much the least Wheeljack-esque weapon ever.)

SPOILERS: He's dead.  And so it feels weird to buy a guy who's already offed.  But then I catch myself, and realize, hey, that's the situation with everyone in that movie.  And the new guy who lived, Mirage, doesn't get a toy, 'cuz Ferrari hates you.

This is Wheeljack!

...

Man, we just got a Generations Wheeljack last year in the Deluxe Class scale, and so this feels kind of deja vu-y.  And I like that Wheeljack a lot.  It was a Wheeljack that I spent a lot of time with as a character.  This Wheeljack was in one episode and he wasn't even himself for 95% of that, since it was an Evil Imposter episode.

So what to say about Prime Wheeljack.

He's more interesting to transform than I expected.  Yeah, he's one of those guys whose hood becomes his feet and the roof becomes  his chest and the rear becomes his arms.  There are lots of those guys.  Like G1 Wheeljack.  But there's some surprises, like how his shins transform.  Both his forearms and the "bones" of his shins are on these long pieces that rotate between modes.  Starting out in car mode, you split the legs, and then split the legs again, rotating the inner half that has the feet attached.  Then you have to slide up the rest of the hood and fold it over.  I'm doing a terrible job of describing it.

Wheeljack also has swords.  Wheeljack can hold them in his hands, peg them into his shoulders, or in vehicle mode he can stow them underneath or attach them to the front bumper like big... sword things on the front of a car.

He looks like a good recreation of the show model, best I can tell from images.  So that's another plus.

Wheeljack's not bad.  He's just not a pleasant surprise like Cliffjumper was.

Man, what the hell.

It's been crazy all up in this shit.  I had a red-eye flight back from Seattle, got home in Columbus around 9am, took a cab home, and I spent an hour or two doing things on the Internet and opening my Generations Wheeljack.  I'd ordered him online and he'd arrived on Friday while I was gone.  So I cracked open the bubble, transformed him into robot mode, and then went to take a nap.

And when I woke up from my nap, I was the sickest I have ever been in my life.  I spent 20 hours out of Tuesday in bed, asleep, and Wednesday wasn't looking too different until about 5pm.  But I'm slowly getting my strength and energy back.

So this Wheeljack may have the plague or something.  Or it was that awkward guy who hovered over my exhibitor table all three days in Seattle, wiping his nose on the book he read meticulously but didn't buy, and leaving his trash behind.  Either or.

Wheeljack's got a special place in my heart from my childhood, though probably not from the same childhood place as many other people.  When I was wee, the first comic books I ever owned were three-packs of Transformers titles sold at the K-mart register.  So I got a polybagged set of issues 7, 8, and 9, and another polybagged set of 10, 11, and 12.  Since I wasn't always home from school in time to watch the Transformers cartoon, these six issues were the main source of Transformers lore.  That I could read them over and over and over at my leisure kind of tipped the scale in their favor as well.  The world didn't have TiVo back then.  Hell, it barely had BetaMax.

But these issues are why, to this day, I love Ratchet and Huffer and Frenzy and Jazz and Wheeljack.  Specifically, I loved the Wheeljack as he appeared in issue 9, "DIS-Integrated Circuits!" He wasn't addressed as a mad scientist, he was just a gung-ho wise-talking warrior.  He was also, I had decided, due to issue 9, always Jazz's partner.  As my experience with Transformers widened, my idea of Wheeljack started encompassing the greater "Wheeljack is a wacky mad scientist" deal, but deep in my soul, he's that plucky wisecracker from issue 9.

I talked a lot about this Wheeljack toy back when I reviewed Tracks, his mold buddy.  He's a pretty extensive retool!  And he  has even more surprises.  We could tell from the photos that Wheeljack had a new head, new wrenches (instead of missiles), new feet, a new shin transformation, new spoiler, and new wingtips.  That in itself is pretty impressive.  But what's even crazier is this: when you transform him from vehicle to robot mode, his head is on a geared track that moves up and out along with his shoulders.  Wheeljack's geared track is more shallow than Tracks's, meaning his torso ends up a smidge wider.  In addition, Wheeljack's legs don't extend as far as Tracks's legs do.  This means even the robot mode proportions between Tracks and Wheeljack are retooled.  Wheeljack's original toy was short and stocky and Tracks's original toy was tall and lithe, so this makes some manner of sense, and it results in Wheeljacks's new toy being a head shorter than new Tracks.

Sweet deal, yes?

As mentioned previously, the backs of Wheeljack's shins are retooled, what for making the altered leg transformation, but there's also new C joint rods back there to store his wrenches, if you're so inclined.  Wheeljack can't carry his wrenches around forever!

Be careful about the instructions, however.  Though Wheeljack's instructions do give him his new head, they don't depict any of the other mold changes during the transformational steps.  Tracks's legs are supposed to extend way farther than Wheeljacks's, so strictly following the instructions on this may result in some excessive force that shouldn't be applied.  Just pull them out as far as they seem to want to go, and no further.

This is a great Wheeljack toy, one that magically incorporates all of his signature physical attributes: his stumpiness, his shoulder missile launcher, his wings, and even the placement of his wheel kibble.  It's absolutely insane that it also makes a fantastic Tracks toy, created with equal love.

I'm not sure how coherent this has been.  I'm still a little under the weather.

Reveal the Shield Tracks is kind of insane.  He's insane in a way I don't think I'll be able to express fully until his retool comes out, but I'll give it some lip service here, because it's on my mind.

Much like Universe Sunstreaker and Sideswipe, Reveal the Shield Tracks's toy is intended to eventually do double duty as Wheeljack.  What's different this time, though, is the severity of changes between the two toys.  The only difference between Sunstreaker and Sideswipe was a headswap and rotating the waist 180 degrees.  From what we've seen of Wheeljack's toy in promotional photography, though, shows stuff that blows that out of the water.  It's crazy.  I told you, it's insane.

Back in 1984/5, Tracks and Wheeljack were two totally different molds that were entirely unrelated to each other.  They transformed pretty similarly, with both getting the roof-chest, hood-legs treatment, plus they both had wings.  It seems like a smart move to make the new Wheeljack the same guy as the new Tracks, but with a new head and a twist of the waist during transformation.  But, like, holy cow.  The number of new parts we're getting on Wheeljack is crazy.  He's got a new front bumper, a new spoiler, he gets wrenches instead of missiles, different wingtips, and the super-crazy part is the entirely new robot shins. Why are they new?  I dunno!  The robot parts of the shins end up on the back of Wheeljack's robot legs, so you don't even see them!  But apparently it's just that important to make it so that Wheeljack's front wheels can fold down by his heels where they were on the original toy.

Anyway, enough about the toy that Tracks isn't.  It's a hard subject to avoid, since it informs a lot of my feelings about him.  So much about him is just there to be Wheeljack later.  He has Wheeljack's stumpier proportions, for example.  The original Tracks was tall and lean.  His hand weapon is just Wheeljack's shoulder-mounted missile launcher with a 5mm peg.  His wheels are on a hinge that rotates around the upper bicep so that you can position them on the front like Tracks's original toy or out to the side like on Wheeljack's original toy.

I fully expected this hedging to make the toy into a fiddly mess, but Tracks still remains a solid toy that has a lot of Tracks-specific features.  It's not as clean of a transformation as RtS Jazz, but it's not anything near a disaster, either.  The only problem I've ever had transforming him back and forth was finding out exactly where to shove the forearms into the car shell so that they fit.  And now that I have that figured out, it's no problem at all.

Once again the clip-on weapons make the toy enjoyably versatile.  Tracks has three.  One of them, Wheeljack's shoulder weapon, as I mentioned previously, has a peg on it so that Tracks can hold it in either of his hands.  Tracks also has two other clip-on weapons that approximate his dual shoulder missiles.  They can clip under the doors in car mode and either stay stowed or fold out at an angle to the sides, or you can attach them to the back of the car mode via a panel that rotates around a hinge to unveil notches that the missiles can peg onto.

Just like the original Tracks toy, this one also has a winged car mode.  It's, uh, about as good as the original, which isn't saying much, but it's still fun as hell.  I've been keeping him in winged car mode probably more than robot mode, but then I've had a predisposition to flying toy cars around in the air since I was a child.  When I was little, I had a little Matchbox car with little opening doors.  I'd swing them open and pretend the car had wings.  That's... basically where the idea for Ultra Car came from.  A car with wings.  It's basically the best possible vehicle ever, I tell you!

I'm still loving the open-sculpted hands.  Tracks's are particularly good, since I like how bulky his fingers are, like he's wearing hockey gloves.  They add so much personality to a toy.

I really like this toy as Tracks, so I'm bound to like a partially-different toy as Wheeljack!  I look forward to him so hard.  But, man, I am not complaining for having to have 70% of the toy twice.  This is a good toy.  And, Jesus, the lengths they're going to distinguish the two is admirable.  Hasbro/Tomy's outdoing themselves here.

I have wanted this exact toy for the past six years.

Back when Transformers ended in North America in 1990ish, Europe still kept cranking out robots.  One of them was a redeco of Action Master Wheeljack as a new Decepticon named Slicer.  I didn't learn about this guy until about a decade later, after immersion in the Internets, but once I did I needed on.  Not the toy itself, really, but I really really wanted a transformable Wheeljack toy in Slicer's colors.  It seemed easy enough!  Well, sort of, since Generation 1 stuff was pretty dead at the time.

My desire gathered steam when Energon Downshift, Wheeljack's doppelganger, showed up in 2004.  Well, hell yes!  They could easily redeco that sucker into Slicer!  Easy buck for Hasbro, super love for me.  But it didn't happen for some reason probably related to nobody knowing/caring about Slicer.  (Also, whoops, there's an Autobot symbol molded onto his collarbone.)  But when Fun Publications got the convention/fan club  license in 2005, I had new people to pester for Slicer.  I photoshopped up a "fake convention set" with an Action Master theme which included Slicer from Energon Downshift.  I must have put Slicer-from-Energon-Downshift on my BotCon feedback form every year for five years.

Some time in 2008, when the Shattered Glass text stories were in full swing, Shattered Glass Wheeljack made an appearance, and, woo, he was Energon Downshift in Slicer colors!  So close!  So close I could taste it!  But I worried that we might get a Shattered Glass Wheeljack toy instead of a Slicer one.  The name on the profile card is a technicality, but a technicality that my brain would always register in the back of my cranium, even on pleasant days.  On the other hand, this deco-sharing might be the most practical way to get what I wanted in spirit, if not the letter?  Hmm.

And sweet hot damnation, 2010 is Hallelujah Time.  And "Decepticon Slice" is just as glorious as I have dreamed.  As I mentioned, he does have that Autobot logo sculpted into his collarbone, but it's painted purple like the Shattered Glass Autobot logo so you can use your Slicer toy as a Shattered Wheeljack if you wanted.  But he's nominally Slicer, which was my initial preference.

Over the course of BotCon weekend, I kept telling folks "Slicer was made just for me!"   To which they reminded me that if any of this year's set was "just for me," it was Shattered Ravage.  Well, fuck it, both are.  Also, most of the rest of the set.  They're all for me.  But Slicer is especially for me, because Slicer is my pipe dream come to life.  His vibrant blue and warm gray and copper warm up all the right neurons.  I do kind of think his translucents should have been orange to "match" his copper, but dark red will do.  It's what color  his windows are supposed to be, so I understand.  I love Slicer so much that I carried him around with me most of the weekend.  He rarely left my side.

On the other hand, they had to go and make him French.  Which means I've been pronouncing his name wrong all these years.  Hmm.

If there's anything unfortunate about him, it's that he was the Attendee Exclusive.  If you bought the full Primus box set and showed up at the convention, you got one.  To get a second one, you have to get another Primus box set.  So if you want both a Slicer and a Shattered Wheeljack, you're looking at eBay!  And since he's given one per person, no extras, he's gonna be an expensive find.

Ah well.  After he's done his rounds on my BotCon shelf, I'm gonna sit him next to his other Action Masters-who-got-transformable-toys brethren.  Hello, Axer!  Hello, Banzai-Tron and Gutcruncher!  Hello, this year's Double Punch!

(I have decided, incidentally, that the running boards kibble along Slicer's forearms are actually blades, like the ones on movie Sideswipe.  See, that's why they call him Slicer!)

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.