Wreck-Gar is part of the second chunk of Studio Series '86 guys, following Slag (have I talked about him yet?), and with Gnaw not far behind.  How many other Transformers are named after Hagar the Horrible?  (Get it?  Wreck... Gar?  instead of Hagar?  "Cuz he's a viking from a garbage planet?  Look, it's better than "Kup.")  Not many, I'm pretty sure!

As always, Wreck-Gar is super-relatable because he lives in filth and he speaks in memes.  And he's had a handful of toys over the years, but never one that actually tried to look like his appearance on the cartoon.  There was the original toy, which was based on Floro Dery's preliminary artwork, the Generations "Reveal the Shield" toy that tried to give him a more modern day spin and have him transform into a more realistic earth motorcycle, and the two Combiner Wars Wreck-Gars which were retooled from both Combiner Wars Grooves.  But a toy that attempts his finalized model sheet?  New territory!  

The first thing that strikes you about '86 Wreck-Gar is his colors.  His toy was a bunch of tans and mustard, which is interesting in its own way, but the actual animation colors?  It's a mixture of colors you've never see combined on a Transformers toy before.  Everything's cranked a little into the red category, and it's beauty to behold.  It's sharp and bold and it's hard to take your eyes off of.  After a toyline trilogy of guys based on the primary-color-plus-black ethos of Diaclone color schemes, seeing hazard red and reddish beige and brown and... parma rosa?  Is that a color?   Whatever the color name of "mixing alfredo and marinara sauce together" is.  Maybe "clay" works.  Anyway, getting sidetracked by the inability to describe the colors Wreck-Gar has because they're that unusual.

In robot mode, Wreck-Gar is an immaculate Wreck-Gar action figure.  He's got all the usual currently-expected articulation, including ankle tilts and waist rotation, plus wrist rotation and a bit of an ab crunch because of his transformation!  He looks like Wreck-Gar stepped off the screen.  Yes, his axe looked like a pinwheel in the movie, too, we're sorry.  The only thing they really had to compromise on was his beard, which is drawn to hang over the edge of his chest, but that doesn't really work on a head you need to be able to rotate.  So it's a lot stubbier.  

His gun barrel nipples are balljointed.

He's also properly huge!  Wreck-Gar was drawn about Rodimus/Springer size, so him getting a Voyager Class figure means he's finally as tall as he needs to be, after a long period of Deluxe Class attempts.  

The transformation is relatively simple, which is just as well since his motorcycle mode is clearly a robot bending over and straddling a pair of wheels like Cy-Kill.  The only complexity is the way his torso accordions out in three directions, and figuring out which exact configuration you need to unaccordion all the struts back together.  The wheels are partsforming, which you kind of have to do if you want an accurate Wreck-Gar.  The robot head, which originally transformed into the handlebars and headlights of the motorcycle (you just flipped a door to cover the face), now tucks inside the actual handlebars/headlights of the new vehicle mode.  You can see his painted fake windshield forehead just under the translucent actual windshield.  The robot head and vehicle mode analog are just two different shapes, so I can't think of a better solution.

The axe plugs into the back of the motorcycle.  There's two kickstands underneath, tucked under the robot legs.  

Another bonus of Wreck-Gar being Voyager Class means he's big enough for more of your toys to ride!  His handlebars are 5mm pegs, so as long as your rider has fists that can rotate to grip them, Wreck-Gar is rideable.  Undoubtably we will get at least one retool of this toy into other Junkions.  I think there's a store listing for Junkyard.  

This is a very good toy of Wreck-Gar, who sounds like Eric Idle gargling salt water while repeating television jingles.  Get him if you see him. 

See? A rut. First Octopunch, then SG Prime, and now these guys.  I left them all for last, and now this feels like a big hate parade.

I feel about the Shattered Glass Junkions the same way I did about Shattered Glass on its debut year.  I wanted to add to my existing armies and not start new ones.  I was really excited when we found out about Hasbro making Junkions.  Junkions with three heads, even!  That was guaranteed a souvenir set of some sort.  And it meant I could double the number of Junkions from three to six.  Maybe we'd even get a new head or something, who knows.

But naw dawg, have some mirrorverse Junkions.

Mirrorverse Junkions who borged a bunch of guys I like into more mirrorverse Junkions.

It just wasn't what I wanted from these molds at BotCon.

At least they're attractive.

Today I found Junkheap at Target.  Two Junkheaps, in fact!  And they're buy-two-for-$11.99 or so, so I got one for Graham as well.  That's a $6 Junkheap!

And so Junkheap joins Wreck-Gar and Scrapheap.  Junkheap's name is probably meant to be "Junkyard," which is a name Hasbro owns and belongs to a pre-existing Junkion, but this is probably one of those things where Hasbro decided that "Junkyard" is "a G.I. Joe name" and gave him an alternate.  I'm thinking that's why they recently put out G.I. Joe Shockwave as "Shockblast," even though they owned the "Shockwave" trademark at the time.  "Shockwave" is "a Transformers name."

Junkheap is undoubtedly supposed to be the Transformer-previously-known-as-Junkyard, though there seem to have been some speedbumps along the way, even other than the name.  He's got a pretty similar color scheme and color placement, to be sure, but what clinches it is the head he got in the instructions.  It had Junkyard's upturned-corkscrew horns, as well as his shades and general helmet shape.  However, somewhere between the instruction art's creation and the toy's release, Junkheap's horns are now these tiny indistinct nubs.  A safety problem?  Who knows.  But it makes him look less like Junkyard.  Also, that mustache.  That doesn't help either.

Scrapheap's brown, gray, and red color scheme was kind of dull, and Junkheap's colors are similar. They're much brighter, but not in an interesting way.  Maybe I just don't like Junkion colors, which are kind of limited to the area of the spectrum between "rust" and "mustard."  My brain just wants there to be a vibrant blue somewhere to balance it all out.  Alas, it is not to be.

I gots an e-Hobby 3-pack!  It came with a pointless translucent Hot Rod, a potentially redundant Kup, and this third guy who I actually wanted.  How much of the rest of the set will I be selling off?  Further news as events warrant!

The guy I wanted was Scrapheap, who is a Junkion.  He's not the first non-Wreck-Gar Junkion toy to be made, but he's the second!  The first was Detritus, an e-Hobby redeco of Hound from several years back.  I don't have him.  Though with the potential for an actual Junkion army, I kind of want to now.  Oh well!  No big.  Not like he can ride anybody.  He was, as I noted, a G1 Hound redeco.

Scrapheap's a retool of Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar.  In addition to Wreck-Gar's head, the mold has two other generic Junkion heads, and Scrapheap uses one of them.  There's no plans yet to use the third anywhere, but it'll probably be a long while before that happens, what with the third live-action film imminent.  Scrapheap gets his name from a list of Junkion names that one of the original cartoon model designers came up with for the other Junkions.  The Ark: A Complete Compendium of Character Designs applied the name to a prominently-featured generic Junkion, but this toy's head seems to belong to the guy the Ark book dubbed "Rubbish."  D'oh!

The colors I'm a little lukewarm on.  It's just chocolate brown, bright red, and a few shades of silver.  It's a little boring.  I mean, yeah, Junkions are earthtone colors, but I feel like I would have preferred something a little more vibrant.

Not that it matters too much.  This guy's probably going to be spending a lot of time in motorcycle mode.  The Wreck-Gar/Scrapheap mold is designed to ride itself.  ...if you know what I mean.  There's two pegholes on the motorcycle seat and two corresponding pegs on the underside of the robot mode pelvis.  There's also slots on the side of the motorcycle that can attach to the robot mode legs of the rider.  That's what the main event is.  Scrapheap exists so Wreck-Gar doesn't literally have to ride himself.  He can ride this other guy that looks 90% like him.

I'm tempted to get Takara's version of Wreck-Gar and chop off one of my Wreck-Gar's beards just so I have three distinct Junkions.  Hmmm.

Reprolabels sticker upgrades for Animated Wreck-Gar arrived in the same envelope as my RtS Jazz stickers, but my need for the Wreck-Gar set wasn't nearly as drastic as it was for Jazz's.  The set comes with a lot of stuff, mostly alternate heads and faction logos and such, but I really just wanted the damn toes.  Wreck-Gar has three red toes on each foot on his character design, and the toy's feet are solid black.  It's easy for me to paint black, and I've done that all over Wreck-Gar's body already, where necessary, but painting red is much harder for me to do in a way that doesn't look horribly sloppy.

So, woo, toes!

I did use a few more from the set, but not many.  There are also orange stickers for his heels which I applied, and new orange stripe stickers to go over his preexisting painted orange stripes where his forearms meet his elbow.  The paint doesn't go quite all the way around, which I guess is the reason for the sticker's existence, but it's not something I absolutely needed.  There's also stickers to cover up the orange on the top of the torso, surrounding the head, but you can't see them in any of my photographs because they're really not all that exciting.  Oh, and the Autobot symbol.  I used that.

Stickers I didn't use include the small black stickers to stick up under Wreck-Gar's forehead, but I'd already painted that, so those weren't necessary.  He also comes with a bunch of faces and facial expressions you can paste over his toy's face, but... wow, no.  Never.  That'd be awful.

I'd completely forgotten that I'd gotten Weird Al's signature on my Wreck-Gar.  That was a fun rediscovery.

With my deluge of new toys, it was kind of hard to decide which one to talk about first.  Do I go from least favorite to most favorite, do I go from most favorite to least favorite, do I go randomly, as the wind turns?  Do I say "fuck it" and start a site about stamp collecting?  I ended up going with Wreck-Gar, because he's this month's featured article on TFwiki.net, which meant I felt he needed pictures the most immediately.  There's not many days in this month left!

I've never owned a toy of Generation 1 Wreck-Gar.  My only Wreck-Gar toy is the Animated version, who's a similar but different character.  Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar fills a pretty obvious hole in my collection, because, dude, Wreck-Gar.  He leads the Junkions!  He talks TV!  He sounds like Eric Idle, except when he doesn't!  ...which is truthfully all the time, because Eric Idle's voice was processed so much you couldn't really tell it was him anyway.

Getting him out of the package, my first thoughts were, wow, this is a friggin' huge toy.  Maybe this was because I'd recently opened and played with RtS Laser Optimus Prime, who is a munchkin, but mostly it's because Wreck-Gar is legitimately pretty big for a Deluxe.  ...in vehicle mode, anyway.  He's very tall, since conservation of Deluxe Class mass means a thin altmode is going to be wider in other dimensions.   And as I transformed him and put him on our coffee table, I realized that this was probably going to be my favorite toy of this batch.  I mean, look at him.  Look at that devilish grin.  He just has all this personality.  And something about his visual style just tweaks my nipples or something.

I changed my mind a lot on how much I liked him on the way back into vehicle mode.  He was boggling.  I ended up with a bunched up torso and arms and some flailing legs that refused to fit into where they should go.  It was not a fun time.  Thankfully, it's not the kind of transformation that I hate, with the meticulously interlocking panels.  I was just missing a step somewhere, obviously.  It was murder trying to figure out what that step was, is all.  I think it turned out being something to do with how the upper thigh joints connected into the pelvis.  They unlock further, and doing that gives the bike mode the leeway to fit into itself better.

I really want to get Wreck-Gar's transformation down to a relatively short amount of time.  The Junkions' whole deal is that they ride each other in bike mode, get knocked off each other, then transform and swap places.  If it takes half an hour to get a dude back into bike mode, that's harshing on my playtime.  At this point I should mention how grateful I am that having one Junkion ride another Junkion is even possible.  The original toy was a super-wide bike that transformed into a robot with unarticulated legs.  The cartoon was kind of an asshole, repeatedly showing the Junkions doing shit that their toys could never ever do ever ever.  RtS Wreck-Gar makes up for that in spades.  He is obviously supposed to ride other iterations of his mold.  The underside of his pelvis ends in two square pegs, and there are two square pegholes on the seat of the motorcycle.  His fingers are also molded into a "holding onto handlebars" shape.  So once they redeco this guy into another Junkion, happiness comes to town.

He's really brown.

His rear hubcap and its corresponding exhaust pipe clip off and unfold to become his battle axe weapon.  The hubcap portion also unfolds, going from "fan" to "pinwheel."  Wreck-Gar can hold onto the axe by the handle, or he can stow it on his back using the clip.  Or, of course, any number of other contemporary toys can use the axe, by either the handle or via their own clip joints.  (Lugnut has like 15 million.)

This is the toy Wreck-Gar's deserved for decades.  And it looks like the mold has at least two other possible Junkion heads (e-Hobby uses one, and another is featured in the instructions), so you're probably going to be seeing a lot of it.  What I'm saying, I think, is that I'd better friggin' like this toy, because I aim to own all of them.

I won't have anything new toy-wise to talk about until about Thursday night, if this UPS tracking remains correct, so we'll just have to fill the emptiness with promises of future things to talk about.

Check out the cover of the next Transformers Collectors' Club magazine.  Generations Wreck-Gar is coming!  (Oh, and Perceptor truck, I guess, but meh!)  And check out the pegs under his crotch and the matching peg holes on his motorcycle seat.  If you get more than one, he can ride himself.  I dig the asymmetric stuff going on with his body, plus how they managed to update him while harkening back to the original.  He still rocks the facial hair, plus they kept his gun-tits!  Hooray!

Oh, and the second Recordicons strip should be inside!  Woooo!