mikeszekely

They already got me buying Prime again with the Skybound version, and I'm told we can expect this battle-damaged retool to be repainted later in gray "sleep" mode. It's one thing for me to buy up a bunch of repainted Deluxes, but even I can justify buying every variant deco @ $60 a pop. (Please ignore the five versions of SS86 Grimlock...)

Man, I hate this three waves a year crap. I went from needing a spreadsheet to keep track of all my preorders down to just a few Pulse exclusives. Used to be preorders for the next wave would start popping up around the time the current one hit shelves. Well, if you're wondering when we might be hearing some news, I'm told that there will be big Studio Series and Age of the Primes reveals at the New York Toy Fair, and preorders will happen on February 17th.

That FR-13S one looks like a transforming happy meal toy I had as a kid. Fry Force or something.

Just like with the previous Timelines set, in a move that I assume is to keep forcing people to buy both sets, Optimus is once again paired with Starscream instead of the more obvious Megatron. One would think that doing a Transformers set themed around late Feudal/early Edo Japan all you really need to do is give all your robots a look that suggests samurai armor and call it a day. But, it's not like samurai wore their armor constantly. And, obviously, not everyone was a samurai. Some of the important and influential figures during that time period were merchants, ninja, warrior monks, pirates, and peasant-soldiers called ashigaru. Starscream here is probably still a samurai, but rather than armor he's sculpted to look like formal wear called kashimono. Kashimono consists of three parts. On the top is the dougi, which is like a short kimono. We can see elements of the dougi in the overlapping bands on Starscream's chest, creating the illusion of the sides of the dougi folded across his torso, as well as the biceps that look a bit like loose fabric. Worn over the dougi is the kataginu, a type of vest with broad, stiff shoulders that often bore family or clan crests. This gives Starscream his triangular shoulders and the sides of his torso, with round elements inside his chest intakes standing in for clan crests. Lastly, there's pants called hakama. This one's a bit subtle. Hakama are usually loose, however, they could be bound at the lower legs for riding a horse. So I think that's the idea here, with puffier thighs but skinny calves. Likewise, the loose sleeves of the dougi appear to be bound up under gauntlets called kote. The look is finished off with silver paint on Starscream's feet suggesting he's wearing traditional zori sandals. In terms of size and paint, Starscream compares a bit more favorably to his Hearts of Steel counterpart. I think my biggest gripe though is that all the paint and color seem confined to the front of him. The red on his wings is only visible from the front; from the back he's a sheet of gray plastic with bits of blue limbs. Starscream comes with three accessories instead of the usual two. First, we have a pair of guns designed to look like hinawajū, a Japanese flintlock rifle. He also comes with a fan. Starscream's head is on a ball joint, with basically no sideways tilt but pretty good up/down tilt. His shoulders swivel and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, his elbows bend 90 degrees, and like Prime his wrists are on ball joints so they both swivel and bend inward. You have to lift a flap on his butt, but he does have a waist swivel. His hips can move about 90 degrees forward, laterally, and just a little short of that backward. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend about 160 degrees. He's got an additional near the bottom of his hinge that you can use to fake a more extreme upward foot tilt, otherwise his ankles are ball joints that swivel and provide a small up/down tilt and limited ankle pivot. Like most rifles, you'd expect a hinawajū to be held with two hands... But this is Starscream we're talking about, where you're used to seeing null rays attached to his arms. And sure enough, there are 5mm ports on the sides of his biceps, allowing you to plug the hinawajū in. This frees up his hands for him to fan himself by popping the 5mm peg on the end into either of his fists. Or, for storage, you can plug it into his butt flap, which is where it goes in alt mode. There are definitely elements of Kingdom Airazor in the transformation here. Spread his wings, open his back to tuck the robot head in and bring the alt head out. Scrunch up the legs, use the extra shin joint to get the feet under him, and spin the feet 180 degrees so that the talons are facing forward. Where things get different is also where things start to go wrong. There's no torso shift to stretch him out and create a gap for the hands to tuck into. Instead, the entire pelvis simply hinges down. The arms do tuck into the sides pretty tightly, but the forearms and wrists bend to curl up behind and under his biceps. His thighs don't really tuck up and blend with the bird's body the way Airazor's do, either. The end result, let's face it, is not a very good bird. His robot torso makes for a fairly thick and blocky bird torso already, but having his pelvis and thighs below his torso completely throws off the silhouette. You can't help but think it would have worked better if they could have gotten more of his mass in line with his torso, then you see the massive gap between his elbow thrusters, tail, and pelvis. I'm not saying Airazor's transformation was perfect and not a bunch of obvious robot parts stuffed up into a bird-ish shape, but that shape is a lot better than this mess. Oh, and why a bird at all? Falconry, know in Japanese as takagari, was a sport enjoyed by the most elite in feudal Japanese society. Samurai during the Kamakura era established distinct schools. During the Edo period it was promoted as a military art that only samurai were allowed to engage in. Starscream makes for a crappy hawk, but his knees, mid-shin joints, and ankles do give him a little poseability. Also, his beak can open and there are a few joints in the bird's neck that allow it to look downward, but not really up, no rotation, and no side-to-side. The wings have two flapping hinges, and one swivel for fanning out the last section of his wings. Oh, and there's no partsforming necessary. You can simply spin the hinawajū 180 degrees in their arm ports, and that's where they go in alt mode. Likewise, if you already had the fan stored in his butt flap it stays there, becoming the hawk's tail. This one's tough, you guys. I do kinda like Starscream's robot mode, and I do kinda like the feudal Japanese theme. I liked Prime's alt mode for the sheer uniqueness of it. But Starscream's alt mode is straight trash. And once you remove the novelty, we're really talking about $68 for two mediocre-to-ok Deluxes, which is a good $12 more than two regular Deluxes even after the recent-economic-factors-induced 2026 price hikes on Transformers. And, you know, if you can afford it and you like these designs, then by all means go for it, but should you? Probably not. I mean, I'm always in it for Optimus, but realistically I'd have preferred they packaged him with Megatron, not Starscream, and then I would probably skip the second (still unreleased) set. But that's how they get you.

When Hasbro launched their Timelines series with a couple of Hearts of Steel designs it seemed to me like it'd be either be a one-off (we'd get the two 2-packs and that'd be all), or they'd keep going with more Hearts of Steel designs. So it was a bit of surprise when Hasbro confirmed that, yes, it would just be those four characters... but repeated over and over in different timelines. But here we are, starting over again in feudal Japan with Optimus Prime. If I'm being honest, the very first thing I noticed was that Prime seemed a bit on the smaller side. And sure enough, when I put him with the previous Timelines Optimus and Devastation Optimus he is, in fact, roughly a head shorter. Not just that, but there's a bit of that unpainted gray plastic. Yeah, there's some painted accents like the blue on his chest, the silver on his tummy, and the gold on his pelvis and shoulders, but on the whole it seems like he's got less than the Hearts of Steel toy. I hate to be one of those guys criticizing Hasbro's penny-pinching, but it is a bit frustrating to see a smaller toy with less paint that also costs $8 more than the two Hearts of Steel sets. You can't shake the feeling that you're paying more for less. Ok, but remove the comparison to other Deluxe-class Primes and lets just look at the toy on its own merits. What we've got here is a totally original design, unbeholden to any comic books or cartoons, just a simple idea: what if Optimus Prime, but in feudal Japan? So, that'd make Prime a Samurai, right? To that end, Prime's head is sculpted to look like he's wearing a kabuto, his shoulders are dominated by large osode, the backs of his hands have molded tekko, and his shins taper to give the illusion of knee and shin guards above sandaled feet. I personally think they could have gone a little harder on the samurai motif... his torso and shoulders are still fairly G1 and not particularly armored, and his pelvis flap doesn't really resemble the thigh guards a samurai would wear. I suppose the flip side of that, though, is that the colors, chest windows, and tummy grill make it very obvious who this robot is at a glance. Rather than a rifle, Prime comes with this naginata. I guess they could have given Prime a masakari, but it turns out the battle axes used by samurai and sōhei of the era were not particularly distinct. Prime's head swivels on a ball joint, with limited up/down/sideways tilt. His shoulders swivel and can move 90 degrees laterally; the osode are hinged and can move independently and get out of the way. His biceps swivel, and his elbows bend 90 degrees. His elbows are ball joints, so they can swivel, but they can also bend inward. His waist swivels. His hips can go just under 90 degrees forwards and backward, and a little over 90 degrees laterally. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend a little over 90 degrees. No up/down tilt on his feet, but his ankles pivot 90 degrees. To get the naginata into Prime's hands, you have to first pull the blade off, then slide the shaft up through the bottom of Prime's hands. There are three sections of the shaft that are a little wider, providing points of greater friction for Prime's hands to stop at. When Prime's not using his naginata, you can store it on his back by plugging a cutout on the blade onto one of the two odd-shaped tabs on his back. The instructions also make it clear that, if you prefer, you can plug the naginata onto either of the osode, but that's really more for alt mode. Speaking of alt modes, Prime's transformation is an interesting one. Begin by swiveling the waist 180 degrees. Fold out the gray tab in his right calf, bend his knees slightly, and fold back the backs of his thighs so that they tab into place on his calves. Bend his thighs forward without engaging his hips, and you'll pop little ox legs out of his thighs. Now use the hips to bring the thighs back down along with the ox legs, and fold his pelvis flap in against his crotch. Pivot his ankles in, and tab his legs and feet together. Untab the gray parts from the sides of his torso, bring his arms out, and then use the hinges on his back to swing the arms down and away from the torso. Open flaps on his chest and back, then rotate the robot head into the torso while bringing the ox head out. Swing the ox legs out from the sides of his torso, then close the flaps you used to swap the heads. Rotate his shoulders so that when you double-hinge the osode up on top of his shoulder that they'll tab into slots on the gray parts Fold out the flaps under the osode, use the ball joints to fold in his hands, then swivel the bicep so that the arms tab into the flaps you just folded out with the fists tucked toward the underside of the osode. Note that a lot of these tabs will leave parts at angles; that's actually what you want. Hinges on the gray parts will bring the arms together such that the osode will form the roof of a cart. Take that roof and bring it down over his legs. Tabs will go into his thighs, on his legs near the wheels, and his wrists will tab into his toes. It's kind of neat how Prime's torso turns into an ox, and his limbs turn into a cart, giving us a goshoguruma. Goshoguruma, literally "Imperial Palace carriage," were used exclusively by the nobility because 1.) Oxen have a slower but steadier gait than horses, which made for a smoother ride, and 2.) peasants weren't allowed to use wheeled vehicles during the Edo period. Goshoguruma are a very distinctly Japanese mode of transportation, then, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that they were NOT the majority of samurai, who would use either human-carried palanquins or horses to get around. In any case, we've seen Optimus Prime transform into a lot of different stuff over the years, including trains, pens, and the original PlayStation, but I find this one of the more interesting and inventive alt modes he's been given. Interesting and inventive... but doesn't do much. The wheels on the carriage roll, and that's about it. The ox has no articulation. You can store Prime's naginata on the roof of the carriage using the pegs I mentioned earlier on his osode. I'm honestly not sure what to make of this Prime. As I said, it's a bit frustrating that he's a little smaller with less paint than Hearts of Steel Optimus, and I was already coming into this disappointed that we seem destined to get the same four characters endlessly re-hashed when we all really wanted Hearts of Steel Shockwave... to say nothing of the fact that, even if they didn't continue Hearts of Steel, it might still be nice to get some other characters like Hot Rod, Grimlock, Soundwave, etc once in awhile. But I can't stay made at a Samurai Optimus that turns into an ox-drawn cart, including the ox. It's weird and it's fresh and I'm kind of here for that. But, he's part of a two-pack, so before you pull the trigger (or not) you might want to tune back in tomorrow to check out his rival.

Hound is back up at Target, @M'Kyuun https://www.target.com/p/-/A-94744441

Hmm... I kinda like young Trion with his fellow Primes, since in the "present" one's dead and most of the others went off to parts unknown, never to be seen again. But I'm sorely tempted to buy a second copy of the toy to stick that DNA kit on.

That's a good price for that G14 (especially because, at least with the previous generation, the GPU is so thermally throttled), but 16GB of RAM doesn't seem like enough for gaming anymore. Heck, a part of me wishes I'd have thought to upgrade the RAM in my desktop before the prices started skyrocketing. In any case, I went for the G14 with 32GB of RAM and the RTX 5070. That keeps performance similar with similar settings on both my laptop and my desktop (desktop has a 5080, but it has to drive a 32:9 Samsung G9 OLED with almost twice the pixels).

You had me curious, @davidwhangchoi. I do the vast majority of my computing on my desktop. In fact, I could have got a much more powerful laptop for less money than the G14, but the G14 is one of the most actually portable gaming laptops on the market and I need my laptop to fit in a bag I can comfortably carry from Pittsburgh all the way to my in-laws' place in Beijing. So, like Az, I tend to use headphones with it (even though I'm fine using my ancient Logitech 5.1 setup on my desktop). Anyway, not a professional test with an LLT labs-style graph or anything, but I played some music on it. Overall, I'd say the speaker built-in are pretty good! It gets pretty loud, the bass is a tad heavy but not muddy, the highs are clear, but the mids are a little thin. If I weren't so lazy I'd dig out my Macbook Air and do an A-B test before confidently stating that Apple still has the best laptop speakers, but the G14 still destroys the crappy speakers in my wife's laptop, or the built-in speakers on my ROG Ally X.

Right now it's Friday night locally, so I hope you guys tune in over the weekend. Because I'm wrapping up the week with Leader-class Studio Series 86 Soundwave. Soundwave's giving off the same sort of vibes as Thundercracker... he's taller than the Netflix/Legacy toy, so he scales better with SS86 Megatron, and most of the greebles of the older figure are simply gone. It's most evident in his shoulders, which are smooth blue slabs, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that he does still have some details, like extra squares on his knees, a little extra details on his shins, and those circular bumps on his forearms. These are details that seem likely to have been pulled from MP-13, which in turn were likely inspired by the G1 toy. There are other improvements, though. His pelvis is shaped more like the cartoon. His backpack is bigger, but in a way that's actually closer to the Sunbow model. There's red paint around his forearms and shoulder cannon (the Legacy release had them, but I had to paint the Netflix version myself). The molded missiles in his shoulder cannon are also painted. His butt flap is a little smaller, and the backs of his forearms don't have the vestigial Siege landing struts. The insides of his forearms have flaps so they're not just hollow voids. Even his calves have traded the textured look for faux volume dial and power switch. The red paint on his shoulder cannon can also be found on his other accessory, his concussion blaster. Weirdly, this is a step back from the Siege/Netflix/Legacy version. The tip, which retracts inside for storage, is turned 90 degrees from what it should be. Now, there are definitely people on the internet madder about that than I am, but I do think it's a problem that someone should have caught before it went into production. I am looking at potentially modding it, so the tip extends and then rotates into place, but I can also see why people dropping $60 on a Leader-class toy might be hesitant to mess with it like that. Soundwave was a Leader in Legacy, too, where he came with an additional gun and a trio of tapes. Once again, Soundwave gets that Leader price point by being packaged with a trio of tapes. They're all brand new molds, but here's how they look with the older Micromaster versions. Like other tapes in the Studio Series like, they also come with add-on bits that the Micromasters didn't. While Netflix Soundwave came with Laserbeak and Ravage, and Legacy Soundwave came with Buzzsaw, Ravage, and Rumble, SS86 Soundwave comes with Laserbeak, Ravage, and Buzzsaw. I guess all of us who already bought Netflix Soundwave and SS86 Rumble and then bought Legacy Soundwave just to get Buzzsaw are kicking ourselves. Well, lets break down the new molds real quick. Buzzsaw and Laserbeak are similar to their prior versions in that the heads and necks flip out, and the feet fold down. Rather than have their boosters fold out of their butts we instead have booster packs that plug onto their backs. The main difference is in the wings. Instead of simply swinging them out from the sides, they unfold then swing back, sort of like the MP versions. Some have suggested that the shape of the wings on the Micromasters are more accurate, and I'd say that's both correct and incorrect. The wings on the Micromasters are shaped more like the G1 toys, but I think the SS86 versions have wings shaped closer to how they were drawn in the cartoon. One more joint to bend half the wing back more would have really sold it, though. The new boosters with the guns are also more cartoon accurate, but their chests aren't as open as the Micromasters, so they can't angle their necks as far forward, and since they're not Micromasters they lack the flip-out 5mm pegs that were useful for plugging them onto Siege/Earthrise/Netflix Soundwave and Megatron's forearms. My biggest gripe, though, reserved specifically for Buzzsaw, is that they didn't paint his beak. Laserbeak can kind of get away with that, but it's a glaring inaccuracy on Buzzsaw. And then there's Ravage. Ravage is an improvement over the previous mold in engineering, proportions, and cartoon accuracy, but that's like saying getting a D this quarter is better than getting an F the previous one. Like, sure, he's got a tail, and he doesn't have an undersized head and twig-thin forelimbs and paws sprouting from massive biceps and thighs, and sure, his hip rockets aren't vestigial molded details, but he's hardly got a lithe, catlike body, especially with those massive hinges in his neck. Poor Ravage got the mumps! There's also the Brazilian butt lift to add a 5mm peg to his tail part, and the fact that his paws still aren't the right color. I don't think we're here for the tapes, though, so back to Soundwave. His head seems to be on a ball joint, with a little up/down tilt and swivel but no sideways tilt. His shoulders can swivel and move laterally over 90 degrees. Due to his transformation, his shoulders are designed to breakaway from his torso so they can fold back, giving him a backwards butterfly joint, but there's another hinge in there that gives him a forward butterfly joint that nothing to do with his transformation. It seems to exist just so he can better reach the "buttons" on his pelvis. Moving on, his biceps swivel, his elbows bend 90 degrees, his wrists swivel, and his fingers (which are all molded together as one part) are hinged so he can open his hands. His waist swivels, and his hip skirts move so that his hips can go just a little short of 90 degrees forward and backward and just a little over 90 degrees laterally. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend 90 degrees. His feet can tilt up 90 degrees, but nothing really downward. His ankles also can swivel and pivot 90 degrees. Soundwave can hold his gun in either hand, and his missile launcher plugs into a port to the right of his head. If you don't want Soundwave to hold his gun, you can collapse the tip and plug it into a 5mm port on either side of his backpack. Of course, pressing the button to the left of Soundwave's head will open the door on his chest. His new tapes fit inside, as do the older Micromaster ones. I know some have lamented that he can't accommodate the G1 or MP tapes, but this approach makes more sense, I feel. For one, there's the matter of proportions. Soundwave's G1 toy has a much larger torso proportionally, and it's why MP-13 wound up using the same size tapes. For two, we've already had so many tapes released in the mainlines, both as Siege/Earthrise/Legacy Micromasters as well as SS86 releases. It's far more important for SS86 Soundwave to be compatible with those. Speaking of compatibility, you might notice that there are tabs on the outsides of Soundwave's arms near his elbows. These tabs aren't for alt mode. As near as I can tell, it's for the condors. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw both have little notches in their feet that seem designed to fit over the tabs on Soundwave's arms, allowing them to perch there. I say "seems," though, because the fit is not particularly tight and only marginally better than just balancing them on his arm in the first place. One more thing to note about the tapes... the booster packs for condors and the tail & rockets for Ravage both have 5mm pegs on them. They can be swiveled (or the rockets can swivel around them, as it were), so Soundwave can technically use them as weapons on his own. Soundwave's transformation is a lot like the Netflix/Legacy toy. Remove his gun and shoulder cannon. Open the flaps on the sides of his backpack, then pull the backpack (along with the head) back, then tuck the head in and close the backpack. Plug his weapons into the ports along either side of his backpack, then fold the backpack flaps over so they tab onto the weapons. Swivel his waist 180 degrees, open his forearms and fold the fists in, close his forearms, then fold his entire arms back alongside his weapons. Open a pair of flaps on the backs of both legs, swivel his feet 180 degrees, then fold the feet up into his legs. Fold out the flaps on his heels, then close the larger of the two flaps you opened on the backs of his legs. Leave the other flap open. Lift his butt flap, and swivel his thighs 90 degrees. Move his hips outward 90 degrees, and bend his knees so the backs of his legs plug into the sides of his torso where his arms were. Speaking of arms, they'll actually tab onto the legs at the shoulder and near the wrist. Open the two flaps from the inside of the butt flap, then fold it down to fill in the rest of the front. Finish it off by pushing his knee vents in so the sides of the alt mode are flat. SS86 Soundwave improves on a lot of the issues I had with the Netflix/Legacy version without totally fixing them, so they're mostly still there. Like, his arms and backpack don't fill out all the space on the back of Soundwave's alt mode, so there's still gaps, especially between his arms and under the backpack. But, his backpack at least tries to hide the stored weapons better. I think a big complaint is that his legs fold the same way as the Netflix/Legacy toy, which is to say backward, so the shins form the sides of the tape deck instead of the backs of his legs. Thing is, I kind of get why they went this route. The sides of the tape deck are silver, like (most of) his shins. The backs of his legs are blue, for cartoon accuracy, which would make the sides of the tape deck blue, which isn't cartoon accurate. There's also the matter of the waist swivel, and the fact that his pelvis buttons are not the tape deck buttons. This turns his legs around, so the fronts of the tape deck would have to be the outsides of his legs instead of the insides. Again, this doesn't work for cartoon accuracy, where the outsides of Soundwave's legs are blue and have bump outs while the insides are silver. I don't think they absolutely had to do it this way; MP-13, after all, uses his actual pelvis on the front of the tape deck, but I can see how trying to do it on a Leader-class budget, a good portion of which went to the tapes, may have been difficult. In any case, tucking the feet in and using flaps on the heels to seal the gaps, lining up the legs with the chest better, pushing the knee vents in, and tucking the butt flap in flush with the legs does at least make SS86 flatter, smoother, and tighter. Again, improvements all around, even if only minor. Except for one thing that is not improved. That's the color on the bottom front of the tape deck. On SS86 Soundwave it's just blue, straight across the bottom. I thought this looked odd to me, because the Netflix/Legacy toy has silver, the G1 toy has silver, and MP-13 has silver. To make sure it wasn't a toy thing I looked at his Sunbow control art, and it's silver across the bottom. Thinking it might be a case of sometimes silver but sometimes not, like the stripe on Prime's cab, I even watched a bit of the '86 movie. And when Soundwave transforms to play back Laserbeak's recording for Megatron, sure enough, silver on the bottom. Well that's unfortunate. Now I feel like I'll have to buy some future store-exclusive or premium Takara version if I want an accurate alt mode deco. Or, as you guys were cynically suggesting with Thundercracker, wait a few years for Hasbro to run through their popular G1 characters and start over yet again on new molds that are even more slightly (but never perfectly) accurate. Anyway... not a ton Soundwave can do as an immobile box. His tape deck door still opens, and you can still insert and remove his tape minions. There's a pair of 5mm ports on the back of the tape deck that I found I could use to plug in the condors' backpacks or Ravage's tail... except that's two ports for three tapes. Make's the empty space under the backpack seem a bit wasted... one more 5mm port on the underside of the backpack could have really been useful. In a lot of ways, Soundwave is a lot like Thundercracker. Thundercracker has a lot of little improvements due to being a brand new mold instead of an enlarged and improved version of the Classics Seeker mold, but still isn't perfect, and was hardly as groundbreaking as SS86 Megatron or Optimus. Soundwave has a lot of little improvements due to being a brand new mold instead of being retooled from his Siege toy, but still isn't perfect, and is hardly as groundbreaking as SS86 Megatron or Optimus. He comes with Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, and Ravage who are all improved a little from their Micromaster versions, but still aren't perfect (especially Ravage). But, just like Thundercracker, those little improvements are meaningful enough that I can overlook the imperfections and still feel it was worth upgrading. He gets the recommend from me. But I totally understand if you're good with what you already have.

So from what I've heard, that sorta happy open-mouthed look on mine is the one that's supposed to be for Thundercracker. However, the tooling was planned with all six Seekers in mind, and apparently the factory workers weren't properly looped in or aren't paid enough to care and it's been a bit more random than intended. I've seen at least five different faces talking to people at TFW, but some of them may be aftermarket. The intention is definitely that Thundercracker, Starscream, and Skywarp will all have different expressions, though.

We're bouncing back to Studio Series tonight, 86 specifically, for Voyager-class Thundercracker. When the Earthrise Seekers hit I know there was some grumbling that it was just a slightly bigger, slightly improved Classics Seeker. Honestly, I didn't mind that... the Classics mold was pretty good, and scaling it better, replacing the chunky missile launchers with more proportional null rays, and adding ankles fixed a lot of the gripes I did have. And it's not like there wasn't precedent- '07 Starscream and his Revenge of the Fallen repaint were just embiggened takes on the old ROTF Deluxe with a few improvements. But lets be real, a lot has happened in toy design in the last twenty years. Takara's done three different takes on the Seekers in the Masterpiece line. The Masterpiece line as a whole went from realistic to super Sunbow to... whatever's going in in MPG. Classics became Universe, and Universe became Generations, before the whole mainline was rebooted with Siege. Part of that reboot shifted the line from a reimagining of G1 to cartoon but with more greebles, then G1 spilled over into Studio Series and has continued to get even more cartoony. Which is where we find Thundercracker... I mean, there's a little bit of linework on his pelvis on inside the intakes on his shoulders, but that's kind of it. The molded details on his chest and null rays are present in the animation model, but most of what we're seeing is smooth as a baby's bottom. No more chest intakes. Bump outs on the shins become recessed trapezoids. It doesn't look so bad with SS86 figures like Prime and Megatron, but he does stand out a bit next to, say, AotP Blast Off and Brawl, who are currently next to him on my desk. Of course, doing a new mold for Thundercracker (and the rest of the Seekers) isn't simply about making them more cartoony. With a little more time and budget, it's about making actual, meaningful improvements and not adding ankles to an upscaled Deluxe. For me, there's three main improvements. First, we've got improved scale and proportions. Thundercracker isn't a lot bigger than the Earthrise one, but I said when Megatron came out last year that the Seekers would have to be a little bigger, too, and we got that. But it's not just the height. He's got a taper to the torso and his legs flare a bit toward the base that instantly gives him a more dynamic form where the Earthrise toy is like a rectangle that goes straight down from torso to ankles. Speaking of ankles, he doesn't have the odd Earthrise feet. His feet are proper cartoon accurate, with a long block of downward-sloping toe and a thruster for a heel. Two, they cleaned him up a bit. You can still see his nose in his back, but it's actually in his back, not dangling from his collar. They also pulled a page from the MP mold by relocating his stabilizers from his ankles onto the backs of his wings. Granted, this is just a Voyager, so there isn't a complicated partsforming element to it. Rather, the stabs are partsformed between modes. Which means, if you haven't noticed, that his included accessories are those stabs, then. He also comes with his signature null rays (except technically on Starscream has null rays, and despite the identical form, Thundercraker's weapons are called incendiary guns... go figure). "Hold up, Mike. I thought you said three main improvements? You only said two before going on about accessories!" Good catch! Well, the third area of improvement is articulation. See, his head is on a ball joint, which doesn't have much clearance for downward or sideways tilt, but he can look up and he can swivel his head. His shoulders swivel and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, his elbows bend 90 degrees, and new for 2026 we've got wrist swivels. Not only wrist swivels, but a waist swivel, too (though limited to about 45 degrees in either direction). His his can go 90 degrees forward (though his pelvis is a single skirt), 90 degrees laterally, and about 45 degrees backward due to a bit of back kibble. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend 90 degrees. His toes can bend upward, but not downward, and his ankles can pivot just under 45 degrees. For a more direct comparison, that means slightly worse neck articulation, same shoulders, thighs, knees, ankles and elbows, and better wrists, waist and hips. The older toy does, I guess, have a bit more 5mm ports. With the stabs stored on his back and his incendiary guns plugged into his biceps you're left with just one on each of his ankles. If you're not into partsforming, you can leave the stabs plugged into Thundercracker's ankles, and behind them you'll find two 5mm ports on each wing. Transforming the new Thundercracker has a lot of similarities but also some key differences from the older mold. Remove his weapons and the stabs if they're on his back, then open the forearms and tuck in the fists. Reach into the gaps on his sides and slide the cockpit forward to unlock it, then tilt his upper body back. Undo the front of his torso from the panels with his shoulders and swing his chest open, then use the double hinge to pull the head and cockpit up and out. Lift his side hip skirts up into the space the cockpit was, then fold the panels with his arms attached inward. His chest can close back up plugging tabs on the inside into the ports his incendiary guns were in, as well as plugging tabs on his forearms into slots on the back of the chest. Continue to swing the nosecone around so his head goes back in between the panels on his back. When everything's lined up, you can close the panels and lock the cockpit into place, then fold the nose up and lock in into place as well. Now, open his calves, then collapse them slightly by rocking the black hinge down all the way and closing the calf back up. If you're having trouble, notice that the calf has a large tab on it, the back of the black hinge has a slot, but also that the front of the hinge has a tab and there are slots on the inside of the shin. The hinge has to tab into those slots (upper for robot mode, lower for jet mode); if it doesn't, then the tab on the calf won't line up with the slot on the hinge (upper for jet, lower for robot), preventing it from closing properly. Anyway, you're just about done now. Tab the legs together, and fold the butt flap over to lock into the legs. Fold his feet up against his shins. Fold the wings bag, and they'll tab into a gaps on the sides of the butt plate as well as the sides of his legs. Reattach the stabs if you haven't already, then swing them around so they lock into place. Ok, yeah, the fuselage is obviously thicker than a real F-15, especially at his chest and feet. It's especially noticeable from the rear, where you have the expected exhaust nozzles but also a lot of leg and feet below them. You might argue, unrealistic exhausts aside, that the Earthrise mold was a little better in that regard. It also tucked the arms into the torso a bit tighter. Honestly, though, I feel like we're splitting hairs at that point. Overall they're rather similar, with the 86 mold perhaps getting even getting a slight edge from the top, where the trailing edges of the wings are a bit more accurate and more pronounced humps over the engines. Plus, we have to remember (especially without paying money to Boeing) that a realistic F-15 isn't Hasbro's goal, a cartoon-accurate Seeker jet is. The smaller cockpit and the shin bulges on the underside of the rear are, in fact, accurate. I do wish they could have tucked in and hid is feet better, but as you can see even in jet mode he's resting on them. Unlike the Earthrise mold, though, he's not resting on his chest. There's a landing gear that folds out from the nose and lifts the front just enough to have a little clearance under his chest. While we're under there, you can plug the incendiary guns into the wings. They're supposed to go into the outer hole; the inner one is where the stabs plug in. That said, I kind of like plugging them into the inner one, so less of the barrel sticks out and it's closer to the fuselage. Of course, an even better solution would have been weapons that transform into the cartoon's little missile nubs, like the MP does, but if they did that maybe they'd have to bump him up to Leader class. Oh well, it'll give DNA something to do later, eh? I don't think SS86 Thundercracker is going to blow people away the way SS86 Prime and Megatron did. However, the fact is that he's still an improvement over the Earthrise mold in almost every way that counts; better proportions, cleaner robot, better articulation, greater cartoon accuracy. He's not perfect, but the fact that he accomplishes as much as he does without going up a size class is still pretty impressive. If for some reason you don't have a Thundercracker, this is the one you want. If you do have the Earthrise one, I think the SS86 one is still worth the upgrade.

Interesting, because an article on the same site suggests Nvidia is killing the 5070ti to focus on 8GB cards... https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-shifts-rtx-50-supply-toward-rtx-5060-and-5060-ti-8gb-in-2026

I wouldn't say no to any of that, though I might be ok if Overlord is a Commander and Buster & Hydra are Voyagers. Need to see his hands and feet to be sure, but I don't really see any difference from the initial. I have the initial release, plus a pair of Sweeps, so I think I'm good there. I plan to preorder, but I'm waiting for Pulse. Speaking of waiting, there has to be a Transformers Tuesday or something coming soon. The only mainline stuff I have preordered currently is Sideways and Onslaught, then I have a handful of exclusive-stuff preordered at Pulse. Swindle was revealed awhile ago. In past years Hasbro would start soliciting preorders for the next wave around the time the current wave was hitting retail, and you guys just got my last AOTP review for the wave. I'll be wrapping up Studio Series this week, too.

At last, we're down the last figure in the first 2026 wave of Age of the Primes, the one you guys are actually waiting for... Deluxe-class Blast Off. Combiner Wars gave us not one, but TWO takes on Blast Off, and pretty much from the draw Age of the Primes Blast Off shows them both up. The design is much more G1 cartoon-accurate, with the purple bib, flared forearms, purple booster feet, etc. He's even got the silver eyes and purple forehead of the animation model (to my personal dismay, but a boon to those seeking strict adherence to Sunbow). What's more, despite largely sharing his engineering with Vortex, the fact that he doesn't have a ton of helicopter tail hanging awkwardly from the back of his arms makes him feel cleaner and more solid than his fellow arm. Looking at my photos, you might surmise that my biggest grip with Blast Off is his colors... like, why are his shins and torso brown instead of gray? The simple answer is that, much like my review of Magic Square's Blast Off, my phone's software seems to have blown out the colors. Magic Square's isn't as light in hand as my pictures made him, and AOTP Blass Off is a darker brown with a brown-tinted gray, not a reddish brown with a gray-tinted brown. Maybe someday I'll get a better camera and light box, but that seems like overkill for reviews that are really just forum posts. Instead I'll just nitpick that he doesn't have a tail on his back (given that the tail is actually pegged into his leg, all we needed was a slot on his back to partsform it to!), and that the tiny molded wheels near his ankles aren't bigger, up higher, and gray. Blast Off comes with a pair of guns that are, I guess, fine. I mean, they're cartoon accurate enough, aside from the fact that there's two instead of just one. So Blast Off's head is on a ball joint for swiveling but fairly limited tilt in any direction. His shoulders rotate and move 90 degrees laterally. His biceps swivel, his elbows bend 90 degrees, and his wrists swivel. His waist swivels, and his hips can move 90 degrees forward, backward, and laterally. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend 90 degrees. His toes have some downward tilt, and his ankles can pivot nearly 90 degrees. His grip on his pistols is a tad loose for my liking. The problem seems to be his fist holes are a little large. There are also 5mm ports available on his forearms, on the wings on the sides of his legs, in the boosters on his heels, and in the boosters on his toes, and his guns plug into the ports on his wings and arms snuggly. His transformation is pretty simply, and very similar to Vortex. Push his head into the empty space behind it. Turn his wrists 90 degrees inward, then turn his biceps 90 degrees outwards so all the shuttle bits line up, then his shoulders use flaps to break away from his torso and fold up over his head, where they'll tab together. Double hinge the top of the cockpit from his back over his forearms and the front half is done. For the rear, tab his legs together, open his shins up, and collapse his legs over his thighs. Fold his toes down, then fold out his wings and vertical stabilizer and you're done. It may be simple, it may borrow a lot of engineering from Vortex, but Blast Off's shuttle mode is pretty good. The shape is right, and as I've mentioned previously four engine bells instead of five is cartoon accurate. The only thing I can really criticize is that the purple from his arms near the front of the shuttle should run all the way back along the lower half of the fuselage all the way to about where the Decepticon badges are on his wings. That would make the sides of the robot mode purple, though, and perhaps more importantly, it'd leave a lot more purple on the side Bruticus' arm than you might expect. I suspect the main reason, though, is they ran out of budget for paint. Blast Off's guns plug into the 5mm ports under his wings in this mode, so a desire for symmetry likely explains why he has two guns instead of just the one. His fists are actually still available under the nose as well, but the fit is so loose that they keep falling out on my copy. Plus, they stand out a bit there, which means that the flip-out front landing gear in Blast Off's chest won't reach the ground. I keep mentioning that while Blast Off doesn't share any parts with Vortex, he shares a lot of the same engineering as Vortex. And while I liked that Vortex had a lot of cartoon elements like his forearm guns and the nacelles on his shoulders, the inelegant way they handled the tail boom on his arms made him a little mid in my book. Blast Off, by contrast, is very good, right up there with Brawl for me and quite possibly the best post-Siege combiner arm Hasbro's delivered. Honestly, I think he's a pretty good toy and a solid representation of the character even without the combining element, so he gets a strong recommend from me.

Ok, now that TFOne is out of the way... it's G1 the rest of the week, baby! We're bouncing back to Age of the Primes first, and it's Deluxe-class Sureshot. Why start with Sureshot? He's barely even G1, but I want to save the best stuff for last. He was barely in "The Rebirth," and even in The Headmasters he was a bit player. He arguably has the most fiction in the Marvel G1 comic. Fortunately, his appearance across all three late G1 mediums is pretty much the same (his JG1 head was a bit closer to the toy, with little ears and regular eyes instead of shades), which makes it pretty easy to point out that he looks pretty good, for the most part. He had more of a pelvis in his fictional appearances, which kind of makes me wish they'd done his hips a bit differently, and his shins have a ton of greebles that I could have done without, but his head and torso are pretty spot-on (for US G1) and the colors are all in the right places. Hasbro did move his tires from the sides of his legs to his calves. While this is arguably not US G1 accurate or toy accurate, I think this vibes ok with The Headmasters. Now, I couldn't find a good image of his backside in the cartoons/comics, but based on the G1 toy, the back is where things are getting different. There are wheels on his back still, but they're higher up on his back where the G1 toy's were basically on his butt. The G1 toy also had a backpack made from his engine and spoiler, but what we have on the AOTP toy is a backpack that's his alt mode's nose. The spoiler's still there, but it's moved to his shoulders. I'm not sure it was the best choice. As a Targetmaster, Sureshot comes with a gun that looks about right. The barrels fold back, then the whole thing uncurls to reveal Sureshot's partner, Spoilsport. Aside from having a black face instead of a red one he looks about right, but like Peacemaker he has no articulation, plus his back side is super hollow. And to be honest, I don't know how I feel about that. One the one hand, I've never been a big fan of the Targetmaster concept. I mean, all of the -masters are kind of dumb in US G1, but the JG1 idea that the actual Transformers are the heads and they just drive vehicles that turn into larger robot bodies for them to pilot kind of worked. Especially because the Headmasters all have little cockpits for their heads to ride in. But the Targetmasters need to be a gun for the robot to shoot, but also a gun to plug into a port on the alt mode. And if they're going to be guns all the time, who cares how bad the robot mode is? But at the same time, we had a pretty decently-articulated Targetmaster in Nightstick all the way back in 2008. But I digress. Sureshot's head is on a ball joint with very limited ability to look down or tilt sideways, but it swivels and he can look straight up 90 degrees. His shoulders swivel and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, and his elbows bend a little more than 90 degrees. No wrist articulation, but his waist swivels. His hips go 90 degrees forward, and just shy of that backward due to his backpack getting in the way, not the joint itself. His hips spread laterally over 90 degrees. His thighs swivel, but only about 45 degrees out, and his knees bend 90 degrees. His feet have a very slight downward tilt, tons of upward tilt, and about 45 degrees of ankle pivot. Sureshot can hold Spoilsport in either hand, plus he's got 5mm ports on his forearms, under his feet, on the outside of his knees, on the back of his legs just below the tires, and on his back. Technically on the backs of his shoulders, too, because his spoiler is just plugged in. Despite all those ports, storage for Spoilsport is achieved by plugging notches in his heels onto two small tabs on Sureshot's backpack. I'll also note that unlike Peacemaker, Spoilsport does not an extra 5mm port on the back. It's my guess that Peacemaker had it because they originally wanted to include the JG1 gimmick where the Targetmaster attached to the wrist instead of being held, and retained it even after Pointblank was reworked due to being over budget. Then they didn't even bother trying to include the gimmick here. And they probably figured early that they wouldn't have the budget for such a gimmick because Sureshot has a very ambitious transformation. Swivel his forearms so the holes on them are facing forward, and rotate his waist 180 degrees. Use the hinges inside his torso to pull his head, chest, and shoulders away from his back. As you do, you'll need to rotate the stuff you're pulling away, then use the hinges to line up the bottom of his chest with the top of his back. Make sure when you do that the orange part of the armature with the two tabs is flat inside his chest. Turn his head 180 degrees and pull it down a little, then his shoulder untabs from his side and starts to swing outward. As you do, the shoulder assembly will also fold back, with the desired result being the tops of both shoulders tabbing into the top of his chest with the spoiler lined up, then you can tilt his head up into the space between his shoulders. Fold his feet up so that they tab into his shins, fold out the wheels on his calves and get them out of the way, then combiner wars-style shift his lower legs up over his thighs. Now you can bend the waist back, so the legs tab into what's turning out to be the underside of the vehicle. Bend his elbows 90 degrees so that notches near his wrists plug into tabs on his heels, then you can plug the wheels into the 5mm ports on his forearms. Finally, take his backpack wheels and swing them around so the nose of the vehicle is in place. The resulting car is a bit sleeker than the G1 toy, and the raised detail on his hood is red instead of orange, but both of those things seem to match his character models. Rather than just having exposed hinges he's got a molded red grill. There's a bit more orange on the nose, as the front spoiler and axle are one. He's got his spoiler, but there's no engine, no real space for one, between the wings, and rather than having his forearms curl up on top of his biceps to form the top of the rear, his shoulders are the top of the rear and his forearms just dangle on the back of the car. They don't even bother to hide is wrists! I think changing his arm transformation might have been necessary to slim the car down; the G1 toy's cockpit sticks up much further than this version's does, and there's at least molded venting on his forearms. But, I really wish they'd have designed his hands to fold into his (largely hollow) forearms so they wouldn't be visible, and I wish instead of limply plugging the halves of his spoiler into his shoulders that they'd given him a proper engine/spoiler (though, it couldn't have been a backpack... maybe it could have been tucked into his chest?). In any case, he rolls without issue. There are 5mm ports alone the sides of the car, but Spoilsport is meant to plug into the 5mm port on the hood in front of the cockpit. Which, again, it's kind of dumb that Spoilsport needs to be a gun for Sureshot's robot mode but also a gun for Sureshot's alt mode... like why even have a gun that transforms? Credit where it's due, this is an ambitious figure with a brand new mold for a character that hasn't had a new toy in nearly 40 years, and while I have some gripes and wish they could have executed some things a bit better, Sureshot's a pretty good figure overall, definitely a big improvement over the retooled Siege Ironhide that was poor Crosshairs. What's more (although you do have to go back a little before Siege to Titans Return and Thrilling 30), he's the last of the '87 Targetmasters to get an update, with just Quickmix and Landfill to round out the '88 cast left to go (though I'd like a Stepper/Ricochet from the SS86 Jazz mold, please). Unless you're a strict Season 1/2/3 (or stricter season 1/2/Movie) collector only, Sureshot's worth a look.

Still doing Studio Series, we've got Deluxe-class Transformers One Airachnid. Aesthetically speaking, with the bulk of her design being gray with bits of gunmetal and silver, you could argue that Airachnid is a tad bland. You could also argue that it looks like the designers (Evan Brooks and Takio Ejima) were working from a photo that someone shrunk on the Y-axis but didn't click the box to keep the proportions. Despite the proportions and because of the bland colors, Airachnid is actually pretty faithful to her CGI model. Thicker armor on her thighs, forearms, and shoulders/biceps, kneepads rising off the rotors in her legs, tiny legs with stiletto heels, and a quartet of spider-limbs on her back. OK, actually it'd be a little more accurate if the heels curled under her "feet," but while that might work for CGI this is still a toy that has to stand. There's also some molded details on her calves that don't entirely belong and I'm not sure if they're actually necessary. Speaking of not belonging, she's got a bit of a kibble backpack, but this is a Deluxe, not all of her alt mode is going to fit in her feminine frame. But hey, the molded and even painted the small purple eyes along the sides of her head. It'd be cool if her head opened up to reveal even more eyes, like the film, but again, Deluxe. Airachnid comes with these two guns. They have a bit of (accurate) paint on the barrels, which is nice. Airachnid's design is a bit unconventional, and as such doesn't seem to lend itself well to articulation. Her head is on a ball joint, but the ball is in her chest instead of her head. She can swivel her head, tilt it sideways a little, and look down a little, but not up. Her shoulders swivel on ball joints, but the shoulder armor limits lateral movement to only about 45 degrees. Her elbows are ball joints, so they have to due double duty as a 90 degree bend and the bicep swivel. No wrist or waist articulation. Her hips (which are more ball joints) can go 90 degrees forward or backward, but they have maybe 30 degrees of lateral spread (and that's if I'm being charitable). Her thighs swivel, and her knees bend 90 degrees. There's another joint below the knee, I suppose a digitigrade ankle, that has a little forward/backward movement. Once again, though, we have a lack of ankle pivot. I don't mind that as much here as on Trion, though... for one, her feet are so small that it's not really noticeable that they're not flat. For two, it's just an easier sin to forgive on a toy that's like $15 dollars less. Her humanoid body might be lacking in articulation, but she also makes up for it some with the spider limbs. The upper limbs are connected to her back on hinged ball joints with four additional hinges along their lengths. The lower limbs are connected via ball joints and have two additional hinges. She wasn't really built to do the spider-walking that Prime Airachnid was prone to, but with some patience you can position her resting on just the spider limbs. As far as her guns go, the instructions show that they can plug into her forearms, which is movie-accurate, but she can also hold them in her hands. What the instructions don't show, exactly, is that you can open her forearm armor and swivel her fists around to reveal more guns! That is, the instructions do show it, as part of her transformation to alt mode, but not as a gimmick for bot mode. But there's no reason you can't do it in bot mode! Speaking of alt modes... flip the fists in, like I just said. Open the front of her torso, and collapse her face down inside. When you close her torso, it'll tab into spots on top of her head. Take her entire backpack and hinge it up and out from her body; the hinges will tab into the back of her head. Fold the tail out of the backpack, fold out and spread the rotor blades, and turn the end of the tail so that the disc with the rotor blades is facing downward. The lower spider limbs will scrunch up tight, then swivel 180 degrees on their ball joints before pegging into each other and resting under the tail. The upper limbs will swivel and fold on their ball joints so that they tab into both the tail and into the lower limbs, with the bulk of the forming a ring around the rotor on the tail. Double hinges will allow her arms to dislocate from her sides to her back. Swivel the forearms so they can tab together. Grab the rotors on her knees, and pull them out so they can hinge down and tab to her toes. Double hinge her thigh armor out and away from her thighs, then use the ball joints to swing her thighs up. Turn her thigh swivels 90 degrees, so that her thighs and the the joints line up with the sides of her torso and plug them in, but then also turn a second swivel you exposed when you moved the rotor so you can tuck them into place as well. Finally, take the thigh armor, swivel it 180 degrees, then use the hinge to stretch it out into the nose of the vehicle. They should line up so that they tab into her forearms. All-in-all, this Deluxe has far more complex engineering than Voyager Alpha Trion. And the alt mode is... well, broad strokes, yes, that's right. And open nose, guns underneath, cockpit area with two small rotor "wings", and a downward-angled tail with a large rotor. It's the details that do her in. The rotor wings should sit tighter to the body, and aside from the guns on the leading edges, don't have an spikes or protrusions. The guns under the nose should stick out past the nose, which itself shouldn't stretch so far out from the cockpit area. The nose, cockpit, and tail should blend and taper more seamlessly, but they toy is covered in exposed hinges and joints. Then there's the rear spider-limbs, which just kind of chill under the tail. They're not on the CGI (I assume they're meant to form the blades of the large rear rotor in the movie rather than the kibble tail on the toy). They seem to exist solely to prop up the rear of the vehicle when you set it down. I think it's fair to say that she's definitely in the ball park, though, and even with the $3 increase in price I'm still inclined to cut her some slack as a Deluxe-class toy in a way that I'm not on a Voyager that costs $8 more than last year. Not much else to say... the big rotor on the back spins, but the small ones in her wings/knees do not. The wings have guns molded onto them, plus her wrist guns on the nose, and her pistols, which do not need to be removed for transformation if you had them plugged into her forearms. Zero partsforming, lets go! Airachnid certainly has her flaws, and no one is going to mistake this for an MPM toy. But with decent screen-accuracy and a transformation that punches above the usual Deluxe I can't be too mad at her. I dare say she's one of the better Transformers One toys in the Studio Series line. If you're a fan of the movie, the character, or simply Transformers toys that hit a bit different, I think Airachnid is worth checking out.

Studio Series toys continue to trickle out. I'm still waiting for the two that you really want to hear about, but for now, here's Voyager-class Transformers One Alpha Trion. Well, the new Voyager toy definitely has a bit more detail than the Prime Changers version. The thighs are more accurate, the armor on his chest is colored more correctly (though still missing some details), plus his shoulder pads are asymmetric and one of his horns is broken to better resemble Trion as the heroes found him It's a case of two steps forward, one step back, though, as the Voyager version is missing the kneecaps on both shins as well as the ankle armor, details that the Prime Changer did have. His alt mode paws are better hidden, as is his alt mode head, which reduces his backpack to a more screen-accurate (and, again, asymmetric) hump. Another nice touch is that they added some of the moss that was growing on him in the film. It's most noticeable on his back and shoulders, because that's where they took the time to paint it. Frustratingly, though, if you look you can see some molded on his legs and forearms, too, but the paint budget apparently didn't stretch that far. Alpha Trion comes with a whip-like accessory, similar to the Prime Changer, except instead of being a painted hard plastic it's a rubbery translucent pink. Note the spikes on the end- they're removable (actually not attached out of the box), which will come into play later. It's a dang shame that he doesn't have the cape he had in the movie. If you need a little refresher, the Prime Changers line of figures that were roughly Deluxe-sized, but a little simpler than a Legacy or Studio Series Deluxe, for $5 less than a Deluxe. Similar to an Earthspark or Cyberverse Deluxe, which despite their name were also a little simpler and cheaper than the more regular lines. Why am I bringing this up? Because Trion here is a Voyager, in an age where Voyagers have gone up to $43, a little over twice the price of a Prime Changer. So what's that extra cash get you, besides a slightly bigger figure with a bit more detail (where they didn't subtract it)? Trion's head is on a ball joint like the PC figure, and has similar range. His shoulders can swivel and move laterally 90 degrees, which is similar to the Prime Changer. His bicep swivels, his elbow bends 90 degrees, and although he doesn't have a waist swivel his entire forearm swivels just below the elbow... same as the Prime Changer. His waist swivels (same), and his hips can go slightly over 90 degrees forward, 45 degrees backward, and 90 degrees laterally... which I'll call another draw (Voyager has slightly more range forward, but half the backward range). His thighs swivel, and his knees bend 90 degrees, so again, same. And then there's his ankles, which have no pivot at all. Now, ankle pivots have been pretty standard in various Generations brands since Siege in 2019, and it's become very prevalent in the Studio Series. I'm inclined to complain when a $25 (now $27) Deluxe doesn't have ankles, it's flat out unacceptable on a toy that costs over $40... especially because the Prime Changers version does have proper ankle pivots! Trion can hold his whip in either hand. Although there are some 5mm ports on his butt, shoulders, and the sides of his knees, there's only the handle on the whip so no storage. So Trion's budget didn't go to a ton of accessories or better articulation... did it go to better engineering? Not really! A lot of the transformation is the same as the Prime Changers toy! In both cases you shift the shin armor over the thigh and bend the foot so it's still flat on the ground, in both cases you turn the forearms inward 90 degrees and plug the shoulders in (though on the Voyager you can at least open the forearm to swivel in the robot hand and swivel out the claws). In both cases the backpack shifts up. The Voyager's chest does open up, though, allowing you to fold out the beast head and tuck in the robot head. In both cases the weapon is plugged on to become the tail. It is slightly more advance engineering, sure, but the kind you might expect going from a Prime Changer to a Deluxe... and with more partsforming! All the spikes have to come off of the whip. The big one goes into the beast forehead, while the smaller ones go into the shoulders and hips. Despite the slightly more complex engineering, the beast mode suffers many of the same flaws as the Prime Changer. The beast head is still stuck looking downward. The insides of the shoulders still plug onto pegs coming out of his armpits, locking them in place and hampering the beast mode articulation. The rear legs are worse than the Prime Changer... it at least had a joint to bend the bottom of his lower legs into a more digitigrade stance. The Voyager simply has you bend his toes up, which makes him look a bit awkward to me. The moss is, again, a nice touch, the translucent pink is more accurate for the tail and horn, and the spikes from the shoulders and hips are also more screen accurate. The beast head can open it's mouth, and the tail plugs into a port on a hinge for a bit more articulation there... but with the shoulders and upper arms locked, he's just got a little arm swivel and elbow bend in this mode. The hips and knees technically have the same range of motion as before, but like I said without the additional digitigrade ankle there's not a lot of posing he can do and remain standing, let alone look decent. At a Voyager price tag, especially the $7-increased price tag, Alpha Trion's kind of a ripoff. They made him superficially more screen accurate, but quit painting too soon and left out some details. The engineering is an improved take on the Prime Changer toy that costs half of what this guy does. But most unforgivably, he's got worse articulation in the ankles than the previous toy, and that's just not acceptable anymore at this price. Skip this one. Even if you've got an interest in the TFOne cast, you can console yourself with the fact that Alpha Trion wasn't even in the film that long.

That they are. And, yeah, if you want a more cartoon-accurate MP Bruticus from Magic Square, that'll definitely do it. It's a pretty easy pass for me, though. I love Magic Square's Bruticus, but I'm in this weird place where I like my Combaticons to be cartoon-accurate, because the cartoon shaped my perceptions of them, but I strongly prefer a more toy-style combined mode. I think I spent too much time looking at Bruticus on those checklists that used to come with the toys... I might have bought it anyway, if they'd included a few more options I do want, like a gun for the combined mode (they made one for the Legends toy, why not the MP?), or a new head for Blast Off with purple eyes instead of a purple forehead.

Walmart, I'm guessing. Someone found Walmart's product page for Astrotrain and it got shared. Walmart didn't have it set to "coming soon" or "temporarily unavailable" or whatever, so people were able to create orders even though Hasbro hasn't actually solicited it yet. Personally I didn't bother. Walmart has such a bad track record fulfilling preorders even under normal circumstances that I had little faith in "oops we accidentally left this page working" orders actually securing me anything. I'll wait for Pulse/Amazon.

They really did just upscale the Studio Series toy.. Yeah, the alt mode is a downgrade from MP-28 (and I really want to see the back of the car, which is kind of unfinished blatant robot knees on the SS86 toy), but the robot mode is a definite upgrade.

Off the top of my head, Earthrise Cliffjumper was re-released as a Target exclusive in Studio Series with more cartoon-accurate gray limbs and painted blue opaque windows. If we're being technical, Earthrise Wheeljack and Sideswipe, but as Game edition, not 86

Because it's not a new mold designed from the start to look like Sunbow Hound, it's a retool of the Siege toy.

A little context, this is from the same MTMTE collection as "slightly more magenta" Hot Rod, not a regular retail release. It'll be a Target-exclusive. Also, this is the exact same figure as the one in the five-pack from... last year? 2024? I forget. So, for everyone who said, "I'm not buying four redecos of toys I have just to get that Hound," congratulations, this is your shot to buy Hound alone. For weaker-willed collectors like myself who absolutely did buy a five pack just for Hound, well, I guess I can sit this one out. EDIT: I should also mention that Scourge and Optimus Prime also going to be in that wave, and a second wave will include Megatron, Prowl, Starscream, and the Insecticons. My source only knows the listings and hasn't seen the figures yet, so I don't know what differences there will be, if any. Safe bet that Prowl will be a non-dead version of the dead Prowl, and Starscream will be based on the new Thundercracker mold, though. Hoping the Insecticons are tweaked to have more accurate decos (solid purple arms on Shrapnel, solid black arms on Bombshell, gray hips on Bombshell, etc). Oh yeah, and there's also this. It'll be Generations Selects, not MTMTE.

Still waiting for those last two Age of the Primes Deluxes, though they're apparently on their way and I hope to have them soon. But hey, Barricade turning up a bit ago wasn't a fluke; a new wave of Studio Series figures is also trickling out. And while I happen to think Barricade is cool, I'm betting you guys are probably a lot more interested in Deluxe-class Windcharger. What's to say about Windcharger? The new Studio Series toy is pretty cartoon-accurate, giving his gray torso a bit of a bluish tint (more subtle in real life than in my pictures, I assure you) that the original toy and Power of the Primes didn't have, but depending on the the episode (and how your TV was calibrated) the cartoon usually did. He's got a tad more sculpted detail on his torso and knees than the cartoon, but the important details like the bump-out chest, the ribbed thighs, and the trapezoid with a disk slot above it on his crotch are from the cartoon. The wheels on his feet fold away to be more cartoon accurate, and while the wheels on his shoulders are still visible they rotate to kind of mimic the C-shaped bulge on the animation model. So I'm mostly pretty content with how Windcharger turned out... until you get to his feet. Because that sure is a lot of kibble. What's more, from other angles where you can see the inside of his foot you'll find that it's mostly hollow, with just the wheels folded into them. It's passable, for a Deluxe, I think. If it were an MP toy, though, I might expect some way to better hide his shoulder wheels and tuck some of the kibble on the back of his feet more in to his feet. Studio Series Windcharger comes with accessories, which is more than the original or Power of the Primes toys can boast. You get one effect part, and one pistol. Windcharger's articulation is adequate, but a little weird. So, his head, which is mostly a box, just swivels. However, there's a little switch on the back of his head. Moving the switch moves his face within the box, so he can actually look up. Pretty clever! His shoulders are ball joints, so he can swivel them and move them almost but not really 90 degrees. his biceps swivel, and his elbows bend 90 degrees. His wrists are ball joints, but the cut is to allow them to fold for transformation. If you fold them, then twist them, then fold them back, you can get a limited wrist swivel. His waist swivels. His hips can go 120 degrees forward or backward, and 90 degrees laterally. His thighs swivel. Now here's where things get a little weird, but it's actually cartoon accurate. He has a knee bend that can go about 90 degrees just below the ribbed detail on his thighs. So gray bit below the hinge his actually his his lower leg, and all the red stuff with the car kibble is actually his feet. Now, his feet have a tiny shred of up/down tilt, and he's got 90 degrees of ankle pivot... it just looks weird, because anatomically his ankles would be like two thirds of the way up his shins if he were a human. Windcharger can hold his pistol in either hand, just as you'd expect. The effect part, which is supposed to represent his magnetic powers, plugs into a cutout on the bump out on his chest. When he's not shooting or magnetizing stuff, the pistol uses a small peg to plug into his butt, while the effect part can tab into his back. Windcharger's transformation is a bit like the PotP toy, or a Prime Vehicon. Spin the wheels on his shoulders, and tuck his hands down. Move the faux roof on his back out of the way so he can shrug up and tuck his arms against his body. Now, you unfurl all the kibble from his feet, and fold the wheels out. Fold his feet over part way, then tab them and all the kibble together. Fold the feet the rest of the way and they'll form the rear of the car, while the kibble will slot over the faux roof and his shoulders to form the roof, hood, and nose of the car. I suppose it's a bit of a copout... his arms and feet really turn into the car, but most of the top and front are just his unfurled heels. But it's hard to argue with results. SS86 Windcharger captures the big-wheeled, buck-toothed, generic sportscar look of the cartoon. That is to say, you look at it and it really doesn't resemble a Firebird, but not resembling a Firebird is correct if you want to be cartoon-accurate. His toes not lining up with the roof? Cartoon-accurate. Circular headlights and grill that looks more like a '74 than early '80s model the molded pop-up headlights on the G1 toy suggested? Cartoon-accurate. He rolls in car mode, of course. There's a slot in the grill that you can plug the magnetic effect part into. But best of all, his pistol has slots cut into the sides. These slots fit over the same tabs behind his rear wheels that lock them into place in robot mode. (Mostly) hidden weapon storage, my favorite kind! Windcharger is not an amazing toy, the way Studio Series Optimus and Megatron are. His transformation is, arguably, a tad simple for a Deluxe, with most of his robot mode just chilling out on the underside. Getting his cartoon feet into the actual rear of the car gives him kind of wonky proportions, and his articulation is just fine, nothing special. But, y'know... I think that's prefectly good enough. Aside from some kibble on the backs and hollowness on the inside of his feet, he looks good in bot mode. He looks accurate in car mode. He comes with a pistol and storage for it in both robot and car mode. He's better than the Power of the Primes toy. That's really all I needed from him, and if I'm not mistaken he's a wrap on the cast of Season 1 Autobots (although we know some guys like Sunstreaker are getting Studio Series do-overs, and some guys like Mirage need Studio Series do-overs). So, yeah, recommended.