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  2. I wasn't too far off, then! I'll give it a go next time I transform him. I have him and Deletus in bot mode right now, and they look good together.
  3. @mikeszekely Paik4Life showed in his video about Demolitor that you can store the silver nozzles sideways inside the mixing drum. There are two small nubs on each side and the nozzles are meant to peg in between.
  4. Today
  5. Well that sucks, good to know though. I was planning on getting some pilots for the Battle Pod but it seems pointless now if it'll just get ruined.
  6. Cool, I'll check this out. I've wanted to cancel Netflix for years, but for some reason my wife can't seem to grasp the idea that we have other apps. Like, if we're watching something together, I can show her something on Hulu or HBO or something, but if I'm not around and it's not on Netflix it's like it doesn't exist in her world.
  7. Seth Bros.... These were difficult to stand on their own....the boots do not position easily so they are flat to the ground....
  8. I'd like to see more details on the actual Overgear toys. I'm not sold on Ironhide (especially with the Overgear trailer giving me more Energon Ironhide vibes than G1/Bayverse). But if Blackout is, say, no bigger than SS86 Megatron, then I could be tempted to pick him up as a sort of G1-ified, Generations-esque Blackout.
  9. I like the new shoebox style packaging.... VF-1J "head".... A extra VF-1A head would have been nice too....
  10. I know it's only been a week since I posted a review for MMC's Deletus, their MP Scrapper, but honestly it seemed like I was the last guy to get his copy. So I decided to try a different store for the next one, and guess what? Now I've already got Demolitor, MMC's MP Mixmaster. This time I don't have a bunch of other Mixmasters to compare with, as Fans Toys' isn't out (and I won't be buying it anyway), and I don't think we've even seen X-Transbots' yet. So, we'll fall back to the guy who was everyone's stand-in for Mixmaster for years, ToyWorld's Concrete. And boy is the difference stark, with MMC leaning hard into the cartoon. His biceps and forearms have the bumps where the animators didn't feel like drawing the actual wheels. His torso and thighs are a slab of purple, broken up by cartoon accurate lines on the thighs and some details on his torso. His knees are green boxes stacked on the larger green boxes of his lower legs, complete with lack of feet. As had as MMC is going on Sunbow, there are some concessions to his alt mode. His actual arm wheels are tucked in an under. And rather than plain green slabs with octagons on the back, Demolitor's lower legs have visible windows and side mirrors. The bump outs on his hips are minimal. I really do like how MMC compacted the mixing drum on his back. Demolitor comes with a bugle that's identical to the one that came with Deletus, near as I can tell, and a simple but cartoon-accurate gun. We also get two silver nozzles and a pair of alternate faces the stoic one is stock, and the others are a happy open mouth and a yelling open mouth. Mixmaster gave off sort of manic vibes in the cartoon, so I think I'll be using the happy face, personally. Demolitor's head is on a double-hinged swivel. So he can turn his head, but also crane it forward. This allows him to look up nearly 90 degrees and down at least a little. His shoulders swivel and move 90 degrees laterally. His biceps swivel, and his double-jointed elbows bend about 120 degrees. His wrists swivel, and they can also bend outward due to his transformation. His thumb is on a ball joint. His other fingers are all individual parts and they're all hinged at the base. However, only they index finger has two additional hinged knuckles. The other three are molded into permanent curls. He has a ratcheted waist swivel, and 90 degrees of ratcheted ab crunch. His hips can go 90 degrees forward and 90 degrees backward on ratchets (though you'll have to spread his legs a little to clear the butt plate), and 90 degrees laterally. His thighs swivel. His knees bend about 120 degrees on a double hinge. And flaps under his leg stumps are hinged like ankles, giving him a flat surface to stand on. Actually, for those that think the entirely footless look is a bit silly, there are toes that can fold out of those flaps. Demolitor can hold his gun and bugle exactly like Deletus, by plugging tabs on the handles into his palms. The silver nozzles, which I believe are meant to look a bit like the toy's rockets, can plug on top of the cartoon-accurate nozzles above his head. Demolitor's transformation is interesting. I wouldn't say it's intuitive... you're probably going to want to read the instructions or watch a video for your first time. There's a lot of parts that slide, a lot of small locking flaps, and a lot of parts that rotate around other parts. I wouldn't necessarily say it's difficult, though. Actually, I think it's pretty easy, maybe moreso than Deletus, once you learn how things are supposed to move. And the truck mode is pretty good! Again, MMC is walking a fine line between realism and cartoon accuracy. So the grill and front bumper are pretty cartoon/toy accurate, but with more realistic headlights and some marker lights picked out in white. You can see where they've molded doors onto the sides, with silver-painted door handles and a handrail. The windows are translucent purple to match the cartoon, but MMC added the trio of windshield wipers and the side mirrors. Coming around tot he back the back of the truck has more details than the cartoon, but less than a real mixer. The one thing that does sort of stick out is that both the cartoon and the toy had the rear of the truck entirely green, save for the mixing drum on the cartoon. It's a concession to his robot mode, but Demolitor has a lot of purple under the drum, and not just on the drum itself. Demolitor's cab can turn very slightly, and he rolls on rubber tires. The mixing drum doesn't have a wind-up gimmick like ToyWorld's, but it does spin, and the pouring spout can swivel as well. As far as accessory storage goes, the tab that plugs into Demolitor's hand can plug into a slot in what is actually his robot butt, between his legs under the cab. Like Deletus, the bugle doesn't really have any storage. But the nozzles... I don't think it was necessarily intentional on MMC's part, but you can clip them together, and there's room for them to fit inside the mixing drum. They don't lock in place, so they'll just rattle around in there, but it's better than nothing. Of course, there's one other way that Demolitor is like Deletus, and that's that he turns into a leg that goes the whole way up to the thigh. Once again the realistic alt mode details leave things like visible tires, windows, and side mirrors on Devastator's foot, as well as wheels on the sides of the legs. However, MMC did try to copy the front of the Sunbow foot, with a vanishing grill and the appearance of a toe. The leg mode articulation looks to be pretty good again. We've got about 45 degrees of ankle pivot, and a ratcheted double-jointed knee that gets just a little short of a full 180 degrees. Like Deletus the foot can also tilt up. I know it was a bit of a concern on Deletus, being just a friction joint, but Demolitor actually has a mechanism that uses the unfolded butt-flap linked to small pegs on his arms to create a slider that helps stabilize the foot. Demolitor's gun moves to a different spot in combined mode... there's a little cubby for it inside of Devastator's thigh, which I probably think is cooler than it actually is, but I like how totally out of the way and out of sight it is. As for the silver nozzles, again there's no dedicated storage, but there's plenty of room in the mixing drum. Demolitor is, in my book, another win for MMC. He and Deletus are as much of an improvement over their Protectobots as their Protectobots were over their Combaticons. While no single mode is 100% perfect, I think MMC was very considerate about where compromises were made to ensure that all three modes are still very good instead of absolutely nailing one mode and leaving the other mode or modes to suffer greater compromises. It does remain to be seen how much the all-built-in gimmick will affect the other four, but so far I can safely say that Demolitor is, like Deletus, just a great toy well worth a look.
  11. Man, now I'm just upset again that Bandai so completely abandoned their 1/72 kit line. I've got at least three or four of every fighter they made because they're just so fun to build, but they never made a bomber, and I'm still really wishing anyone would make a good shuttle kit. Wouldn't mind a couple others either, but those are the main two I've been waiting for. Aside from, you know, 1/48 kits of the rest of the fighters to match the limited X-Wing they did (and the A-Wing they mis-scaled ).
  12. "Highly realistic" is a nice way of saying fake.
  13. It's possible....all I know is that each time I placed the pilot figure inside the Regult cockpit it would get "decapitated" when I would open it back up.....I just used the sparkly painted fig to test as I didn't care what happened to it...
  14. New episode's out. "Series Acclimation Mil". Guess we're getting a Sam-focused episode. We get one interesting piece of trivia out of the opening narration. "In the last thousand years, the Federation has encountered 4,633 sentient species." The episode opens with Sam narrating over herself walking through a corridor on the USS Athena, and I am once again struck by the thought... Does nobody go to class at this Starfleet Academy? This whole scene is shot the same way you'd shoot a scene of someone walking down the hall of a high school on the way to their locker between classes. Complete with some very modern, very out-of-place pop music. There's also a lot of that same "scene from a college applications brochure" going on. We see a group of girls sitting and chatting by a sofa, with half of them sitting on the floor for some reason. They've carrying potted plants around with them. There's a bunch of students wearing totally unmodified modern backpacks looking as out of place as you'd expect on a spaceship 1,000 years into the future. A bunch of other students are carrying rolled-up yoga mats for reasons unclear. There's a bunch of cadets holding sports equipment too, including several basketballs. Was a dance segment with a hip-hop beat really required here? Sure, Kerrice Brooks is a black actress but is there a reason to treat Series Acclimation Mil like a stereotypical token black character on a sitcom? She's playing a sentient hologram from a planet populated by AIs who haven't seen a human in generations. It feels weird in a subtly racist way, like how they had to make Michael Burnham an ex-convict. There's another easter egg or two in her introduction. When she introduces her homeworld of Kasq, the other worlds listed in the "Holo Matrix Specs" dropdown menu that shows up on the right side of the screen are: Earth, Vulcan (not Ni'Var!), Orion, Denoblia (misspelled Denobula!), Andoria, Bajor, Delta, Ferengar (misspelled Ferenginar?), Hirogen Prime, Kazon Prime, Risa, and Betazed. Most of those were already Federation members or, in the case of Ferenginar, in the process of applying to join the Federation as far back as 2381 (LDS: "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place")... but the implication that somewhere along the way the Hirogen and Kazon got their sh*t together enough to join the Federation is WAY more interesting than whatever's going on here. Sam is apparently just 217 days old at the time of this story. And we're treated to a rather cringeworthy montage of her various nicknames bestowed by other cadets. Honestly though, what's worse is the constant condescending childishness of her explanation. She has to explain, via infographics with childish handwriting, that she's meant to be her people's emissary to the Federation... which makes her a diplomat and is therefore a "big job". The audience aren't Pakleds, please assume a bit more intelligence than that. OK, having looked at the daily news some audience members might be Pakleds but let's assume they're at least more intelligent than the average Pakled. The idea of a sentient AI needing to explain organic behavior to her creators is itself a fascinating premise I hope they actually DO something with. Sadly, it seems to be limited to explaining basic biology, the very concept of Starfleet, and pranks? You are NOT hurting my feelings with the constant lore dumps though. We get to see a Kasqian in its "natural" state... which is a wholly non-humanoid mess of energy strands that hovers in the middle of the room. (One has to wonder why Sam is taking personal calls in the middle of the atrium instead of in her quarters, but whatever.) More childish generic school drama antics ensue... like a "turf war" over the atrium between the War College and Academy... incited because the War College is now forced to use the Academy's classrooms due to the "stupid talking plants" infesting the war college grounds. Honestly, viewing it through the warped lens of a not-all-there AI attempting to understand and, worse, explain Human behavior to another AI that has never even seen humans does make the show's rampant stupidity a bit easier to tolerate. Played for laughs in Sam's observations of Caleb lusting over the Betazoid president's daughter still. Sam has a great deal of that early TNG Data level bluntness going on... but it doesn't land quite as effectively without the studied neutrality of Data's every remark. Sam is... too human? Really getting a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe from this episode, and the Kasqians in particular. Particularly its fondness for overlaying infographics and emojis. The seminar for "Confronting the Unexplainable" has a bunch of easter eggs hiding in it too. The Guardian of Forever is one of the items on display. Another is the Ben Sisko thing from the series teaser trailer. The class is taught by a new character played by Tawny Newsome (LDS: Beckett Mariner). Apparently even now, eight centuries after the fact, the Bajorans still haven't made peace with the fact that Ben Sisko thought the emissary role was bullsh*t for most of his time in their space and venerate him as one of the Prophets now. The idea of a Cardassian Starfleet officer with strongly held opinions on the subject of tomato in gumbo recipes is... something. Sam is winning points with me for being mildly put off by the idea of just biting into a raw tomato like it's an apple despite being a noncorporeal piece of software that does not eat. A tomato is not a handfruit, people! The line must be drawn here! This far! And no further!😅 Honestly, the less we have of Captain Ake and the professors in this series the better it seems to get. Which is funny, given that they were leaning REALLY hard on having the Doctor, Jett Reno, etc. as a main draw for the series. Bad decisions seems to be a theme here... The B-plot rears its ugly head again at that point... feeling increasingly like Kelrec is being pranked, and even Reno seems put off... Once again, the feet thing. I keep having to check and see if Quentin Tarantino has died, because he seems to be haunting this series. All in all, not a bad episode despite a rough start... it feels like the writers are gradually inching closer to understanding what Star Trek is. This one just leans way too heavily on the DS9 references to be accessible to a new viewer and doesn't go far enough into them to have much for the long-time fan.
  15. VF-27 revival $223 on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DRN91X6D?psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&ref_=chk_typ_quicklook_imgToDp
  16. "Featuring highly realistic vehicle modes and intricately detailed robot modes, this line pursues a weapons‑grade mechanical aesthetic." I don 't know how realistic a truck carrying a big ass gatling gun on its roof is, but that helicopter looks pretty damn cool. It looks like it might be flimsy though.
  17. The Overgear teaser video was posted on the previous page.
  18. There has been a teaser video for the Overgear line today! https://youtu.be/Gts_XYqJAvg?si=IzGHywwK5hAPBTfm
  19. Disney Store Droid Factory Build a Droid.
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