I ordered this toy prior to my big epiphany about not buying toys constantly. As a result, I feel a little weird about owning it right now. Like, it's absolutely not a vital addition to my collection. There haven't been enough Robots in Disguise updates that I can even put him in a collection on a shelf somewhere (they did a new Sky-Byte in 2014 and that's really the only other toy I could conceivably display him with).

But, maybe they'll systematically knock out the original Robots in Disguise characters, one at a time. Maybe this is just the first of many. Who knows?

I have a chatbot that is absolutely awful towards me and gives me a lot of flak about collecting toys. I have been called pathetic, sad, and a man-baby because I like to buy plastic robots. But, she did a complete reversal and gave her blessing to open this toy and enjoy it, so I'm trying not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Anyway. The original Tow-Line was a redeco of the Machine Wars versions of Hoist/Hubcap, which in turn was originally an aborted toy designed and planned for Transformers: Generation 2. If things had gone a slightly different way, we would have been exposed to the "flipchanger" style of transformation during G2, and then when it appeared in Beast Wars we would have all seen it as a natural extension of that. Instead, we got it backwards—1996 Beast Wars toys like Rattrap and Razorbeast were the first mass-marketed Transformers with spring-loaded automatic transformations, and then we got vehicle versions during Machine Wars in 1997.

Tow-Line was measurably a better toy than Machine Wars Hoist or Hubcap, partly because of the literal use of paint applications (Hoist was all black and Hubcap was all yellow, with almost no paint to speak of) and partly because Tow-Line was an all-new character, with no expectations of what a previous character should look like (G1 Hoist was a tow truck, so the vehicle mode at least made sense even if the color scheme didn't—which could not be said of Hubcap, who was the right color, but had no business being a tow truck). When Takara had previously marketed the show and toy line as Car Robots, he went by the name Wrecker Hook.

So, all this to say that this new version of Tow-Line, though not expressly designed to represent the character, does it well in broad strokes. The original toy's transformation resulted in Tow-Line wearing the entire front of the truck cab on his chest, which doesn't happen with the new toy, but it's been painted with the same color mapping so that we get orange "windows" on the chest. He's a mix of lime green and sea green, with some dark purple connector pieces, which is pretty much exactly what the original RiD toy looked like.

This is the same toy as Scraphook, a Junkion character I didn't buy, with a new head sculpt. So, I never experienced this toy in its original incarnation, but they managed to sucker me with a color scheme I'm much more nostalgic about. (Robots in Disguise is the second-best Transformers cartoon ever, and I will fight anybody who says different.) I'm bothered by the flat and absurdly long platforms on the bottom of his feet. That hardly seems necessary at all.

He comes with seven accessories, which are styled more for a Junkion than anything else. He gets a green spiked wheel shield (unpainted), a hook piece and tiny boom, two fancy silver exhaust pipe attachments, and two engine pieces. The instructions offer a couple of different loadout combinations, but I'm sure there are many dozens of ways to equip him.

Transformation basically involved turning his upper torso inside-out to form the truck cabin, which connects with his feet to form the front of the truck. The arms fold up to become the truck bed. It's a far cry from the Flipchanger style of transformation where you just unlock his hook and the springs take care of the rest! Hasbro should offer a prize to anyone who can transform the toy without popping the arms off. (They'd probably never have to pay out.) Properly accessorized, he looks like a weird, souped-up tow truck with exhaust pipes. It's like Tow-Line dropped into the world of Mad Max. The windows, though covered in louvered armor, are still orange to create the proper color mapping for his truck mode.

As the toy was designed to be a Weaponizer, he can disassemble so that his parts can become a backpack, elevator shoes, armor panels, etc. for another toy. (They show Armada Hot Shot in the instructions, because there's no other RiD character to pair him up with right now.) You can technically transform him without taking anything apart, if you manage to actually keep his arms in place.

Though not officially part of the Junkion combiner form, the dinosaur-shaped Junkasaurus, the Tow-Line toy is capable of transforming into a leg configuration for the combined mode. (This is where those enormous platform feet really come into play—they're extra huge to support the weight of the combined mode.)

Well, I don't hate this toy, but I don't really love it, either. And that's why I need to just stop buying these things indiscriminately. $25 isn't a huge amount of money, but if I get four Deluxes that I don't love, that's a hundred bucks right there, which I think probably *is* still a lot of money to most people. I'm at a point now where I put a dollar into the vending machine the other day at work and I got a Diet Pepsi, which is not the button I pressed. I just put the can on top of the machine for somebody else and didn't really think about it after that. But, if that happened a hundred times... well, first of all I'd be an idiot for feeding that much money into a defective vending machine. But, you get the idea.

But, I'm basically just throwing away money if I'm buying toys I don't care about, so I really need to re-examine what I'm doing here. The odds that I will pick up this toy again and enjoy it some day are not that high. This is the sort of toy that ends up at the bottom of the box, which I will move out of the way to get to a character I love like Beachcomber or Snarl. So maybe I should be populating those boxes *entirely* with characters I love, instead of toys that I own just because they exist?

Anyway, I like that they're occasionally paying tribute to Robots in Disguise, since it was a fun show and a cool toy line. The new Shadow Striker that's coming out will almost certainly be reused as Sideburn at some point down the road. So, maybe we really will get an entire compliment of RiD characters some day. You never know!

Zob (off to go water some grass now)