So here's my bit of fanon.  In Robots in Disguise, the Commandos (who combine into Ruination) are reprogrammed Autobot protoforms, just like the Predacons did to Maximal protoforms in Beast Wars.  But who were these Commandos before they got Decepticonned?  Because of this new Ruination, I've decided that the Commandos used to be the RIDverse iterations of Impactor, Whirl, Roadbuster, Topspin, and Twintwist.  Man, RID Topspin's gotta be pissed his name is Movor now.

But seriously, guys, WRECKERS COMBINER DUDE.  This is usually the stuff of bad fanfic, but I'm allowing it.  For one, there's no accompanying fiction to remind us all of The Beast Within.  (No, that job's being filled by the current Monstrosity digital miniseries.)  And technically these guys are all from the Aligned continuity family, and those versions of the Wreckers can combine if they wanna.  They can even combine into a weird homage to RID Ruination, apparently.  Roadbuster can be a green and orange offroad vehicle like Rollbar, Topspin can be a white and orange shuttle like Movor, Twintwist can be a blue tank like (America's) Armorhide, and Whirl can be a dark blue and orange helicopter like Ro-Tor.  Impactor does his own thing.  He's like the wind, baby.

(Sorry about the comparison photo -- I only have the Japanese-version Baldigus, who has some color differences with our Ruination.)

The individual guys all come with additional weapons, with one or two based on real weapons from the Fall of Cybertron game.  Everyone also comes with the weapons that came with the original versions of the molds, and there aren't really any good ways to integrate both sets of weapons into any mode.  And unlike the first set of weapons, the new set of weapons don't combine.  They're just there to be value-adding and package-filling, I guess.  The newer weapons are all pretty hefty, too, which is unfortunate due to the weak balljoints of most of these dudes' arms.  Dang.

And, hey, good news!  Apparently the Transformers Collectors' Club wants to redeco Roadbuster as Ironfist as one of next year's Subscription Service guys, so, hey, later you can have a slightly different line-up of Wreckers to combine into Ruination if you want.  And who knows, maybe we'll get Whirl done as Rotorstorm or Twintwist done as Guzzle or Topspin done as... uh...Verity Carlo?

Anyway.  Wreck and rule.

I've nurtured a boner for these guys as soon as we learned about them from last year's Comic-Con.  I'd expected them to come out last spring, but after a few-months delay instead they arrived on my doorstep (via BBTS) the afternoon after I left for BotCon.  THE AGONY!  And I've really wanted to talk about them since, but I made myself go through a bunch of BotCon stuff first.

I'm gonna focus mostly on Impactor today.  He's the first toy we've gotten of the character since he debuted in the pages of Marvel UK's Transformers comic over 25 years ago as the soon-to-be-late leader of the Wreckers.  He was more of a tough-but-noble guy then, mostly because it supplied an impossible standard to live up to for the next Wreckers leader, Springer.  Like Dinobot, he came back as a shadow of his former self while still managing to save the day one more time with yet one more sacrifice.  Again.  Impossible standard.  Sorry, Springer!  He was reintroduced to Transformers in Last Stand of the Wreckers, where he was recast as an example of what millions of years of war can really do to a guy, especially one charged with leading a bunch of violent under-the-radar misfits like the Wreckers.  He's a stubborn and broken dude, having snapped, committed a war crime, and landed himself in Prison For Super Evil People.  He's supplies a different standard for that continuity's Springer to measure himself up against.

One of the reasons we haven't gotten an Impactor over the years is that he's a purple Autobot.  Hasbro's not big on purple Autobots.  So I guess this one's orange and dark blue!  Problem solved?  He's also a retool of FOC Onslaught, which is a double-edged sword.  It means his arms are kind of meh (the ball-joints are weak) and his alt-mode is double-meh (just meh all over) but it does mean that he forms the torso of a super Wreckers combiner.  Oh baby.  Seriously, he's the center of a fangasm made plastic.  Impactor has a trademark weapon arm (usually a harpoon), and this toy tries to duplicate that best it can with the materials provided.  Without any weapons attached, he's just got two normal arms.  He comes with a giant harpoon missile launcher weapon which he can hold, but that's not quite there yet.  HOWEVER, you can snap Onslaught's gun and the harpoon weapon together around the fist, concealing it, giving an impression that he does have an arm that ends in a weapon, albeit a very large one.

As a special and sort of weird bonus, the head of the combiner is based on Emirate Xaaron, the diminutive former politician and Autobot Underground Resistance Movement Figurehead who advised the Wreckers in the Marvel UK stuff.  So... if you waaaaaaant to, you could pull out that head while Impactor is in robot mode and pretend you have a big-noggined Xaaron toy with scoliosis.  You could!  If you wanted to!  Two former toyless guys get a toy all in one go!

Also of special note is the Wreckers faction symbol on the combiner mode's chest.  The blue hammer-headed Autobot logo hasn't seen the light of day since 3H's Wreckers comics over a decade ago.  You have no idea how happy its resurgence makes me.

Man, why didn't this head option for the Inferno mold exist back in 2010?  It's perfect for Pyro.  Instead, we got Inferno's head in blue because all of the slots for head retools were used up on other figures in the BotCon 2010 set.  Back then, I figured I'd get home with my set and  immediately tape over the mouth and then paint the tape silver or something.  That mouth had to go, man.  It just did.  But I never got around to doing that.  I'm pretty lazy.

So anyway, now Hot Spot is a thing that exists, and he has a head that's pretty Pyro-y.  It's probably more Pyro-y than Hot Spot-y.  And so I waited until our stores started getting piles of Hot Spots and grabbed an extra one to steal a head from.  I got some Cobalt Blue and mixed in a bit of Napoleonic Violet, and apparently that matches Pyro's blue pretty damn well.

I could have made his faceplate gold or yellow, to match the head this head's replacing, but I have never ever ever painted yellow or gold without it looking like utter crap.  And so I left him with a silver faceplate, which happily matches the original Pyro toy.  Huzzah.

Ultra Magnus and Ironhide seem to be two characters in the Transformers Prime toyline who weren't slotted to appear in the television show, but got multiple toys as if they were important characters anyway.  (Well, okay, we didn't get Ironhide's larger toy as himself, but as Kup, but the concept still stands.)  That Ultra Magnus got two toys caused some folks to speculate that he'd show up in Season 2, but SPOILERS: he did not.

Now that I have Ultra Magnus's Voyager Class toy, I dunno if I'm sad that this awesome design isn't in the show or grateful that a non-show character has a toy strong enough to make me like it this much.  'Cuz I do.  Like it this much, that is.  It's a charismatic chunk of fossil fuels.  If he were real, I'd follow him anywhere.  It doesn't hurt that Ultra Magnus borrows pretty heavily from the Animated version of the character, with his big truck-front shoulderpads and the massive hammer.  And it super-doesn't hurt that this Ultra Magnus is founder of the Wreckers, and you know me and my Wreckers.  (The massive hammer really helps him fit in with the iconography of that group.)

His transformation is pretty simple, but clever enough that Magnus doesn't look simple.  Magnus basically lies down and stuff folds around his robot parts to form a truck.  My favorite part is the two pairs of rear wheels which unfold from vehicle mode to wrap around his shins.  The only annoying part are his fairly loose shoulders.  They're not quite stiff enough, and so they easily sag under the weight of his large weapon.

His large weapon, as I mentioned, is a giant hammer, but its default mode is an equally-large gun.  Like the other electronic-light-up weapons of the Transformers Prime Voyager Class toys, one mode is transformed into the other through spring-lever action.  Unlike the other weapons, though, Magnus has a latch that locks the weapon into his ax mode so it can stay there without you having to hold it in place with your fingers.  This is very good, 'cuz Magnus needs his friggin' hammer and I care much less about the gun.  It can also stow on his back if you want to keep his hands free.

There's a second accessory, a missile launcher with a red missile that looks like a call-out to the missile launchers of the original Ultra Magnus.  You can peg it wherever.

I imagine Magnus knows Bulkhead, the former Wrecker.  I wanna know more details of their shared history, though I doubt we'll get any anytime soon.  We're also expecting a whole combiner team of Wreckers soon, too, so Magnus won't always be so lonely.  (Of course, before then we'll get a Fall of Cybertron Magnus toy which will probably work better aesthetically with them, but meh.)

Look, I have a lot of toys to talk about, but we have to get this little thing out of the way first.  In the "Are We Sure This Isn't A BotCon Exclusive Idea?" Department, Hasbro's retooling Fall of Cybertron Bruticus as, well, the Wreckers.  The torso is now Impactor, with a new Impactor head and a new handheld harpoon gun.  Impactor's never gotten a toy before.  He was a Marvel UK-only character that recently got new exposure in Last Stand of the Wreckers.  The limbs are the Jumpstarters and the Deluxe Autobots.  Topspin and Twintwist haven't gotten new toys since 1985.  Roadbuster and Whirl have had plenty of new toys since then, but none with their actual heads.

And the head of this combiner, dubbed Ruination, is based on Emirate Xaaron, another previously non-toy guy.

And and the chest of Ruination has the old BotCon Wreckers logo, the blue Autobot symbol with the hammer forehead.
Plus with a dark blue helicopter, a green jeep, a light blue tank, and a white shuttle, the toy seems to serve as an homage to Robots in Disguise Ruination as well, with the orange/golden chest of the Car Robots version seen in the animation.  This thing is an homage within an homage baked inside another  homage.  An homage turducken.

Seriously, what in the hell.  Mind, this is a good "what in the hell," but what in the hell regardless.

My only reservations are that Xaaron is not the best head choice for a giant combiner thingy of murder.  He was a politician at worst and a resistance movement figurehead at best.  But still.  Xaaron head.  It's hard to complain.  (Plus no matter what continuity we're talking about, at least two of these guys are dead.)

But, yeah.  I will buy this.  I will lick it.  It makes no sense, but I don't care.  Rule of Cool overrides all else.  Why is it not next spring yet, I put to you folks.  I think TFWiki needs a new category for "Things That Should Not Be Normal Retail Releases Yet Somehow Are."

Once again, you can find me this weekend at Mid-Ohio Con!  I'm going to be somewhere in the Columbus Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday.  It's weird having a convention that's just a few miles downtown.  I swear, I'm gonna leave the convention hall late Saturday and be confused when I step outside and it's not Hartford or Seattle out there.  I will approach the first local I see and ask what a good local joint is, and they will respond "Donatos Pizza."  And there will be this great tumult in my brain.

Tomorrow morning Maggie and I are driving back to Indiana for my grandfather's funeral, and will be returning Thursday afternoon, hopefully in time for Maggie's mom to arrive, for she is visiting!  It is a busy week for us, apparently.   We may or may not still have one hamster left when we return.  Gnngh.

Today I watched the new DC animated direct-to-video thing, Batman: Year One.  Since I've read the comic itself enough times, and this cartoon adaptation was extremely faithful, I was actually pretty damn bored with it.  That story needs a beginning, middle, and an end, am I right?  Bryan Cranston was excellent as James Gordon, but I feel like he was starring in a calendar, not a movie.  But, tell you what, if you like your Frank Millerspeak, this is the movie for you.  And I know some of you do, so that's not intended to be an indictment.  Plus it's very beautifully animated.

Thankfully, Arkham City is here to pick up any batslack.

This here is Fractyl!  His only real toy was from BotCon 1997, the year before I started attending them, so I've never owned a Fractyl.  Now I own a fake Fractyl!  He's the last 3H Wreckers guy I intend to make.  I'm technically missing the Alpha Trion repaint of Beast Machines Snarl, but if I'm gonna waste time and money painting something, I kind of want to direct that effort towards a character appearance that actually has a character appearance.  No, the one blurry two-panel fly-by silhouette doesn't count.

I like Fractyl.  He's a scientist.  He's a nice scientist.  The Botcon 1997 toy theme seemed to be "sympathetic bad guy and a jerky good guy."  Y'know, to mix stuff up a little.  And so he's this awkward antisocial creature who just wants to study some rocks, dammit.  Stop shoving him into his locker, Inferno!  Oh, what a geek.

And the Transmetal toy that they never made would have been beautiful.  Too bad.  My attempt at recreating it kind of sidestepped some of the beauty.  I wasn't able to find the proper greens.  My Fractyl is a reasonable approximation, but it falls short of the ideal.

Yay, Fractyl.

Boo, funerals.

Yay, it's Rotorbolt!  You might be thinking, meh, why should I care about Rotorbolt?  Well, let me tell you.

The premise of the Beast Wars was that there were two camps of Transformers stranded on prehistoric Earth, the Maximals and the Predacons.  But the thing is, the Predacons seen on the show weren't your normal everyday Predacons.  They were criminal outcast Predacons, even among their own kind.  So you really got the impression from the cartoon that all Predacons were all scheming thugs, even if they're not.  Also, that they transform into animals by default.

Enter Rotorbolt.  He's just a normal Predacon!  He's not a criminal or a thug or a warlord or a mad scientist.  He's just a Predacon.  And, as fate would permit,  he's one of the handful of Cybertronians that escaped Megatron's virus.  So he gets to hang around with the Wreckers.  He's got a problem, though, you see.  He's hung up on his reputation that he's stealthy.  And he is!  His rotors are as quiet as a sigh... in vehicle mode.  In robot mode, however, you can't even hear him talking (constantly, about how stealthy he is) over the roar of his rotors.  Why the decibel change?  I don't know, and I don't care.  It's just endearing.

And of course since Rotorbolt was never in the Beast Wars, he doesn't have a beast mode.  He's just a helicopter.

The original plan way way back was that Rotorbolt was gonna be made from the show-accurate Beast Machines Deluxe Class Obsidian.  However, that toy never got close to completion before the line fizzled out, so we're stuck with him being the original slightly-less-show-accurate Basic Class Obsidian.  Later, Obsidian was redecoed for the Universe line in indigo and brown with red rotors, which was veerrrrry close to Rotorbolt's colors.  Close enough that people used Universe Obsidian for their Rotorbolt, anyway, and certainly close enough that it guaranteed a real Rotorbolt would never be made.  Why would you pay buttloads of convention-exclusive cash for something that's 30% different from what you can buy in stores?

So this is my Rotorbolt.  I started with a Universe Obsidian, of course, expecting that I'd just strip the "energon surge" deco from him, paint his brown purple, and be done.  Ha ha ha ha ha no.  Stripping the paint took about 36 hours of soaking the toy in alcohol.  And even then I had to sort of sand what was left away.  Finally, I started painting the guy's legs, but it was then I realized that, wow, U-Obsidian is waaaayyy bluer than I thought he was.  It's hard to tell when he's got silver-and-purple energon surge deco all over his torso, but with that gone, and his legs painted a more vibrant purple, it's way more obvious that the guy's just dark blue.

And so, after having spent 36 hours stripping paint deco from him, I ended up just painting over all that anyway.  Rats.

I'm less satisfied with him than with Devcon.  Devcon's paint application is pretty even, but Rotorbolt looks kind of sloppy to me.  Plus those legs of his just do not want to keep their paint.  And, yikes, a good portion of the front of Rotorbolt's torso is just gearing for his transformation, and painting gearing is just kind of a no-no but it's right in front and a not-small area, so you kind of have to do it.

This is what I was gonna do with that extra Beast Machines Mirage I wanted.  I ordered one off eBay shortly after getting home from Sunday's toy convention, and I realized the next day that, hey, I could proooobably paint the one I have while I wait for the new one to get here.  Plus, well, the roommate who owns the table is getting her own place tomorrow, so it might be a good idea to get him done before then.

So here he is!  Devcon!  Renowned Autobot bounty hunter, temporarily inhabiting a Vehicon body.  I'm going to say an unpopular thing and say that I liked Wreckers Devcon.  Yeah, he was a jerk, and people say he wasn't that jerky in his original cartoon appearances, but if I have to choose between watching The Gambler or reading the 3H Wreckers comic books, I'm gonna choose the latter every time.  The Gambler is a terrible episode.  Terrible.  If I had to live through that episode, like Devcon did, I'd be kind of a jerk, too.  (And I am.)

And, frankly, the common wisdom that Devcon wasn't as big a jerk in The Gambler versus Wreckers is a bit overinflated.  That episode's so uneven, and original Devcon is indeed a  jerk at moments while he's nicer in a sparingly few other moments.  Watch as much as you can stand some time, and you'll see what I mean.

I am not a good painter.  In fact, I'm a terrible painter.  But sometimes I luck out.  I think I lucked out as much as I'm able to with Devcon.  He looks pretty okay!  And he's all the right colors, as far as I can discern.  I tell you, the red was a bitch, since it goes over black plastic.  I put a coat of, ahem, silver Sharpie marker on the legs first before painting red over them.  There was kind of a weird chemical reaction in places between the two kinds of coloring, but after going over the bad parts a few times, I was able to get a good smooth, bright red on the black plastic without having to put like fifty layers over everything and burying too much detail.

The ball joints are silver Sharpie, too, though the attached limbs are the proper light gray paint color.  Silver Sharpie coats pretty thinly and fuses almost immediately to the plastic, so I figgered it'd withstand wear and tear better.  And without painting the balljoints, they're kind of obviously Mirage's yellow.  I'd hate to look at the thing.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the results.  And now he can go in my Wreckers display.

Man, I'm intimidated by writing this thing about Masterpiece Rodimus Prime.  He's a Masterpiece, as just noted like five words ago, and so there's a lot of stuff going on with him.

Let's start at the beginning.  Masterpiece Rodimus Prime was first released over in Japan, where he had a billion more paint apps and he came with the trailer to make Rodimus Prime's altmode.  That version transforms into Hot Rod's robot mode, Hot Rod's car mode, Rodimus Prime's robot mode, and Rodimus Prime's truck mode.  It cost $250.  It was kind of a lot, but it was a big trailer, I guess.  I was happy not to buy it.

Our version drops the trailer.  And so you get Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime's robot modes, but only Hot Rod's car mode.  Really, I don't feel like I'm missing much.  You don't really transform Hot Rod's car mode into Rodimus Prime's truck mode so much as you put the trailer around the whole thing like a shell.  There's not much of Hot Rod's car mode visible.  The car just fills in the bottom, supplying wheels and the spoiler.  Meh, I say.

And so I'm happy to get the American version for $60.  Yeah, it's missing one of its four modes, but that mode was formed dumbly and I'm not a huge Rodimus Prime fan anyway.  No, I'm in this for the idea of having a huge Hot Rod toy.  Back in the 2000s, Hot Rod starred in some BotCon fiction set during the Beast Era as one of the leaders of the Wreckers.  And since Maximals and Predacons are tiny dudes compared to Autobots and Decepticons, Hot Rod was a giant among them.  However, his original toy was not very large, and was in fact smaller than most of the Maximal and Predacon toys.  This was annoying.  WELL NO MORE.  I now have a huge Hot Rod to put with my Beast Era Wreckers.  And because Hasbro is clairvoyant about my desires, they even decoed the domestic version to look like Hot Rod's toy, instead of like Hot Rod's animation model like the Japanese version.

Also, because Hasbro knows I love Targetmasters, only the domestic version of Masterpiece Rodimus Prime comes with a new Masterpiece version of his Targetmaster partner.   His name used to be Firebolt, which apparently Hasbro's lost the trademark to, so now he's "Offshoot."  Whatevs.  He's a Masterpiece Nebulan, which is awesome, because now the ranks of the Masterpiece toys are Optimus Prime, Starscream and his redecoes, Megatron, Grimlock, Hot Rod, and... this Nebulan guy.  Ha ha ha ha.

Hot Rod is not fun to get into vehicle mode.  Some Masterpiece toys aren't so bad about this.  Prime, Grimlock, maybe Starscream it's been so long... but Hot Rod is just difficult enough to drive me wild.  It always starts out easy, and as I start plugging along, I start to think maybe I've finally learned how to get him back and forth easy-cheesy and then BAM I hit his legs and I get things as far as they'll go and I have a car mode that's bent at the middle like it melted in the sun.  And I'm sure I'm doing something really tiny and trivial incorrectly, but do I really care?  I'll just put him back in robot mode.  It's not worth the effort to dissect the process.

Which is part of the reason I applied his shoulder stickers.  They're intended to be optional, because putting his original-toy-accurate shoulder stickers on his shoulders means there's shoulder stickers on his car mode.  But I'm not ever gonna keep him in car mode.  I'm really not.  He's gonna stand at the back of my Wreckers display, looking rightfully huge.  So there you go.

Getting Hot Rod into Rodimus mode is very easy.  You open up the head and swap faces, and then you finagle his hips down a notch, making him taller.  Oh, and you can spread his spoiler out wider, but that's kind of an imperceptible change anyway.  ...Oh, right, and his two Hot Rod guns combine to form his Rodimus Prime rifle.  That's pretty great.  Almost forgot.

He comes with two Matrixes.  (Matrices?)  One is small enough that it can fit into his chest.  It is ridiculously tiny.  The other Matrix, another accessory that's exclusive to the American release, is one that's scaled large enough for him to hold.  It opens, which is neat.  (It's not the same as Masterpiece Optimus Prime's, which also opened.  This appears to be original tooling.)

Hot Rod also has flip-down binocular shades, a wielding torch hand-replacement and a buzzsaw hand replacement, all things which Hot Rod used in the 1986 animated film.  Those I'm not terribly excited about, but I guess it's nice they exist.

The Japanese release of this toy had the trailer, but apparently it also had a bunch of engineering and quality control problems.  Those have been fixed, so I'm told, for this American release.  They've also been fixed for the Japanese versions going forward, I think, so, uh, if you get a Japanese version, make sure you get a new one.

Man, where'd I put my Wreckers symbol Reprolabels...

Disclaimer #1: This is my second Roadbuster.  First one snapped off its left thigh-mounted wheel when I was trying to transform it.  Be careful with that.

Disclaimer #2: I know nothing about NASCAR.

That said, this is Roadbuster!  He's a NASCAR vehicle.  He's based on a real life one, so far as I know.  Who it belongs to, I could really care less, but his signature is tampoed above the window on each side.  There's a foil sticker on the cardback that identifies this toy as official NASCAR merchandise.  And as NASCAR merchandise, he's got some sponsor logos on him.  ...well, in this toy's case, he's got sponsor logos from exactly two entities, Amp Energy Drinks and the National Guard.  I'm fairly certain, without Googling the thing, that there's probably a lot more sponsor logos filling up the large areas of space left blank on the source material.

While knowing zero about NASCAR, having sponsor logos on a car is cool to me.  Cars can be boring, and they liven up the deco.  I expect Reprolabels, once the movie comes out and we get a better look at Roadbuster, will do some Upgrade Stickers that complete his look, and I'll buy them the heck up.

Roadbuster is a member of the Wreckers!  Roadbuster was a member of the Wreckers back in Generation 1, too, so it's sort of neat that Roadbuster-the-green-Wrecker has continued.  I expect him to last maybe two minutes in the film before gruesomely dying.  Maybe that's what'll happen in the clip they're showing us at BotCon.  I'll try not to get too attached to him.  It's not smart to get emotionally attached to Wreckers anyway, regardless of continuity.  They're there to die.

Short of that stupid wheel that snapped off my first Roadbuster, Roadbuster's a pleasure to transform.  He goes back and forth between robot and vehicle modes without incident, even all of the vehicle panels.  The only possible snag is fitting his head's antenna into the groove carved between his thighs, but that's not really a big deal.  (And, yeah, his head is designed to look like a stereotypical NASCAR fan, with a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a mullet.  The other two Wreckers have similarly-styled heads.)

Roadbuster's MechTech weapon isn't as inane as Sentinel Prime or Bumblebee's, but it's certainly not as cool as Ratchet's.  But then, Ratchet's sawblade kind of sets an unfairly high standard.  Roadbuster has a gun with sawblades on the side that, with the push of a lever, becomes a chainsaw.  Once you stop pressing the lever, the sawblade halves snap right back into place on the sides of the gun.  Fun, but not Ratchet fun.

Another of Roadbuster's interesting features, and one that's shared with a few other DOTM toys, are the "hidden" 5mm peghole ports for the MechTech weapons in vehicle mode.  Instead of having a big unsightly hole in the vehicle mode, that hole is filled in.  When you push the weapon peg into the hole, the filled-in-area is pushed in, and when you remove the weapon, the filled-in-area comes back out again.  If you look closely at the photograph of the vehicle mode, you can see the little circle-shaped indent in the middle of his "88"s.

(Let's see if I get more comments about not caring who the car's driver is or the English error I employ to make the point.)