I am dipping my toes back into the vintage G1 aftermarket again. Last year I managed to pick up two of the Deluxe Insecticons, but I've been longing to complete the team. I hate having unfinished sets!

I managed to get these guys from the same seller, as his auctions were ending only about a minute apart, and I set my maximum bid high enough to deter the competition. I only had to pay shipping once, which was nice.

RANSACK

Like the other Deluxe Insecticons, Ransack was originally designed by TakaToku Toys, who went bankrupt and was quickly gobbled up by Bandai. People claim that the pre-Transformers version of Ransack was unreleased (including the Transformers wiki) but in fact he did make it to market at the tail end of Takatoku's life cycle before they went belly-up as part of the Armored Insect Corps Beetras assortment. The original release, named Beet Vadam, was a green color with grey parts, and honestly looked a bit more like an authentic grasshopper.

A toy of similar, but not identical design, was also sold as part of the Convertors line by Select, as part of their Insectors assortment. This version of the toy had the same basic transformation ideas but realized in a low-budget version named Morphus, produced in a weird metallic copper color.

The Hasbro version, licensed by Bandai, is predominantly black with yellow parts, and blood red eyes. He's like an evil Bumblebee.

In grasshopper mode, Ransack is four to five inches long, depending on how you want to measure his antennae and position his legs. The rear legs are on a metal ball joint, a rarity for G1, which allows a fairly wide range of movement. The rear knees and ankles are articulated. The remaining legs are largely immobile, and can rotate at the base but do not move individually. The wings can be positioned in a resting or flying state, and the antennae can individually rotate so they can be positioned forwards or swept back. Just like Kickback, his robot face isn't really hidden well, and it's obvious if you take a peek under the insect head.

His transformation is not too dissimilar from Kickback, in that the grasshopper rear legs become the robot legs, and the grasshopper head becomes the robot head. The insect abdomen slides up and serves double duty as the robot pelvis, such as it is. (The internal skeleton to which the abdomen is attached is all unpainted die-cast metal.) The robot arms are recessed into the body, and he's got the same instamatic pop-out spring-loaded fists as Chop Shop and Barrage. The robot side panels swing towards each other to form the robot chest (the rub symbol is on the right breast plate). It's possible to do things badly and attempt to pop his arms out before moving the chest pieces, which is probably why there are so many examples on eBay that are missing the broken-off chest panels.

In robot mode, he's about five inches in height. He's got a Roadbuster-like face—just a mask and a slit for the eyes. The hips are articulated, as are the knees and ankles, but the hip joint is really designed for insect mode, so you can't get a lot of movement in this form. Also, the robot head doesn't move at all, and the robot arms only swing out to the sides.. He can't bring his arms forward at all, which means he can't even aim his weapons at the Autobots. He carries a yellow reflector shield (no, not THAT Reflector) and a black concussion blaster gun (no, not THAT Blaster), which you can stuff into his fists, but don't expect him to do much with them. They're just for showin', not for blowin' away. (The tiny black tip tends to break off the gun, so having an intact rifle and shield tend to drive up his price quite a bit on the secondary market.)

I actually owned Ransack very briefly in 1996, having picked him up at BotCon because I was thinking he might be the same character as G2 Ransack. But, that was back when there were only a handful of recycled G2 names, and it was theoretically possible to connect every single character together. Then Beast Wars happened and it became impossible to reconcile all the reused names, and I eventually sold him off.

So I paid $64 for him, which is slightly below market price as of this writing. A complete Ransack tends to go anywhere from $70 to over $100, so I feel like I did okay. (I got a sample without stickers, though, so I'm going to need to remedy that at some point.)

Ransack recently enjoyed a resurrection as part of the Target-exclusive "Creatures Collide" four-pack, a redeco of the Legacy Kickback toy. One hopes new versions of the other Deluxe Insecticons are on the way as well, eventually!

VENOM

I've studied pictures and catalog photos, but I've never actually held a G1 Venom in my hands until today!

Released in Japan in 1984, the original Beet-Zeguna was a dark blue-grey with brown parts, far less Halloween-themed than the eventual Transformers version of Venom sold in America in 1985. (Incidentally, he predates the Marvel Comics character from Spider-Man named Venom, who wasn't officially introduced until 1988.)

I'm not completely sure what kind of insect Venom is supposed to be. I've seen people refer to him as a bee, but I think he's actually meant to be a cicada. (The Hasbro retail box is no help, as it identifies him only as an "insect.") In bug mode, he's about four inches in length at the head, but closer to 4.75" with the stinger. Each of his six insect legs can swing forwards or backwards, and his wings are articulated both at a swivel base as well as a hinge. The wings are a bit fragile, and there are plenty of copies of Venom on eBay that are missing the wings entirely.

His insect head is designed so that you can position the stinger facing forwards or tucked away under his body. The bulbous insect eyes help to hide the hinge on which the head is mounted. When the stinger is tucked away, the gap for the robot eyes sort of doubles as the insect "mouth," and the result is a mildly comical Venom who's smirking happily at you. Bring the stinger forwards, and now he's a bug who's ready to bite. (Hasbro neutered the pointed stinger a bit for the Transformers release, making it shorter and rounder.)

To transform him to robot mode, you have to split the insect abdomen in half and unfold it so that the pieces become the robot legs. His hips can slide apart to space his legs apart a bit better. The robot arms are tucked away in a recessed cavity. Both the fists and forearms are spring-loaded, so they're designed to pop open as soon as you slide the arms out. The entire front of the robot torso is green-painted die-cast metal.

As a robot, he's about 4.5" tall at the head, but the stinger puts him well over five inches. His articulation would be pretty standard nowadays, but it's above and beyond anything we usually got during G1. He's got working hips, knees, ankles, and even a mid-thigh swivel, which was just about unheard of in 1985. His shoulders are on a limited ball joint so they have slightly better range of movement than just a standard swivel. The robot head can pivot up and down as dictated by the transformation.

The toy is shockingly bright in color. He's a vibrant lime green, what I used to call Raphael green, with orange as a secondary color. He sure doesn't look like a Decepticon. He's much too bright and cheery for that. His round, bulbous orange head and the green "stem" on top makes him look like a robotic pumpkin. I didn't buy any of the Deluxe Insecticons as a kid, but I remember always being vaguely repulsed by how positively cheery Venom looked, especially when compared to the muted purple-and-black look for the original Insecticons.

Where Ransack can't raise his arms at all, a properly-configured Venom can't lower his arms. He does have the articulation, but the Hasbro instructions call for his insect wings to be tucked behind his arms, which impedes their movement somewhat. You can ignore the instructions and do other things with the wings, like just position them in front of the robot arms (which is what I see a lot of eBay sellers do). The wing placement on this toy is just weird.

Venom carries a grey battle ax and a green weapon that is described as both an electric-blaster gun (in his instructions) and an electro-blaster gun (his tech specs and Hasbro retail box). I lean more towards electro-blaster as being correct, because that sounds more like the type of weapon name Bob Budiansky would invent. Just like with Ransack, the tiny green tip on his rifle does tend to break off. Venom is fairly easy to find on eBay broken and/or incomplete, but it's tough to find a good sample with no stress marks to the wings and no paint chipping off the die-cast metal. The axe or gun alone can sell for $25 apiece, so piecing together a complete unit can be an expensive proposition.

I paid $64.77 for Venom, which isn't awful. He seems to sell anywhere from $70 to $100 (there was another Venom auction that came with unapplied stickers for $120, but then I remembered I had stickers already and didn't need to pay a premium). I'll strip the old stickers off this toy and apply the ones I bought last year, and I'll have a nice, minty sample. (The instructions want you to slap his Decepticon symbol right in the center of his chest, directly over top the surface details, and right over the division between his pectoral panels and his abdomen. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.)

These are fantastic toys, honestly. The ingenuity that came out of this era of early Japanese engineering really shines through. The toys mix design flair with practicality in a way that you really don't see much nowadays, especially when they're trying to make the toys resemble the cartoon models, which frequently stripped away a lot of the design details for the sake of being able to draw the characters. (A theoretical cartoon version of Venom or Ransack would be a dumbed-down, bare-bones version of these toys, and something would certainly be lost in translation.) There's something really appealing about the irregular angles, on Venom in particular, that is like 1980's eye candy to me. These guys were designed during a time when transformable robots was a fresh and exciting concept, and anything was possible. Deluxe Insecticons for the win!

On Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 8:47:27 PM UTC-8, Zobovor wrote:
> I am dipping my toes back into the vintage G1 aftermarket again. Last year I managed to pick up two of the Deluxe Insecticons, but I've been longing to complete the team. I hate having unfinished sets!
>
> I managed to get these guys from the same seller, as his auctions were ending only about a minute apart, and I set my maximum bid high enough to deter the competition. I only had to pay shipping once, which was nice.
>
> RANSACK
>
> Like the other Deluxe Insecticons, Ransack was originally designed by TakaToku Toys, who went bankrupt and was quickly gobbled up by Bandai. People claim that the pre-Transformers version of Ransack was unreleased (including the Transformers wiki) but in fact he did make it to market at the tail end of Takatoku's life cycle before they went belly-up as part of the Armored Insect Corps Beetras assortment. The original release, named Beet Vadam, was a green color with grey parts, and honestly looked a bit more like an authentic grasshopper.
>
> A toy of similar, but not identical design, was also sold as part of the Convertors line by Select, as part of their Insectors assortment. This version of the toy had the same basic transformation ideas but realized in a low-budget version named Morphus, produced in a weird metallic copper color.
>
> The Hasbro version, licensed by Bandai, is predominantly black with yellow parts, and blood red eyes. He's like an evil Bumblebee.
>
> In grasshopper mode, Ransack is four to five inches long, depending on how you want to measure his antennae and position his legs. The rear legs are on a metal ball joint, a rarity for G1, which allows a fairly wide range of movement. The rear knees and ankles are articulated. The remaining legs are largely immobile, and can rotate at the base but do not move individually. The wings can be positioned in a resting or flying state, and the antennae can individually rotate so they can be positioned forwards or swept back.. Just like Kickback, his robot face isn't really hidden well, and it's obvious if you take a peek under the insect head.
>
> His transformation is not too dissimilar from Kickback, in that the grasshopper rear legs become the robot legs, and the grasshopper head becomes the robot head. The insect abdomen slides up and serves double duty as the robot pelvis, such as it is. (The internal skeleton to which the abdomen is attached is all unpainted die-cast metal.) The robot arms are recessed into the body, and he's got the same instamatic pop-out spring-loaded fists as Chop Shop and Barrage. The robot side panels swing towards each other to form the robot chest (the rub symbol is on the right breast plate). It's possible to do things badly and attempt to pop his arms out before moving the chest pieces, which is probably why there are so many examples on eBay that are missing the broken-off chest panels.
>
> In robot mode, he's about five inches in height. He's got a Roadbuster-like face—just a mask and a slit for the eyes. The hips are articulated, as are the knees and ankles, but the hip joint is really designed for insect mode, so you can't get a lot of movement in this form. Also, the robot head doesn't move at all, and the robot arms only swing out to the sides. He can't bring his arms forward at all, which means he can't even aim his weapons at the Autobots. He carries a yellow reflector shield (no, not THAT Reflector) and a black concussion blaster gun (no, not THAT Blaster), which you can stuff into his fists, but don't expect him to do much with them. They're just for showin', not for blowin' away. (The tiny black tip tends to break off the gun, so having an intact rifle and shield tend to drive up his price quite a bit on the secondary market.)
>
> I actually owned Ransack very briefly in 1996, having picked him up at BotCon because I was thinking he might be the same character as G2 Ransack. But, that was back when there were only a handful of recycled G2 names, and it was theoretically possible to connect every single character together. Then Beast Wars happened and it became impossible to reconcile all the reused names, and I eventually sold him off.
>
> So I paid $64 for him, which is slightly below market price as of this writing. A complete Ransack tends to go anywhere from $70 to over $100, so I feel like I did okay. (I got a sample without stickers, though, so I'm going to need to remedy that at some point.)
>
> Ransack recently enjoyed a resurrection as part of the Target-exclusive "Creatures Collide" four-pack, a redeco of the Legacy Kickback toy. One hopes new versions of the other Deluxe Insecticons are on the way as well, eventually!
>
> VENOM
>
> I've studied pictures and catalog photos, but I've never actually held a G1 Venom in my hands until today!
>
> Released in Japan in 1984, the original Beet-Zeguna was a dark blue-grey with brown parts, far less Halloween-themed than the eventual Transformers version of Venom sold in America in 1985. (Incidentally, he predates the Marvel Comics character from Spider-Man named Venom, who wasn't officially introduced until 1988.)
>
> I'm not completely sure what kind of insect Venom is supposed to be. I've seen people refer to him as a bee, but I think he's actually meant to be a cicada. (The Hasbro retail box is no help, as it identifies him only as an "insect.") In bug mode, he's about four inches in length at the head, but closer to 4.75" with the stinger. Each of his six insect legs can swing forwards or backwards, and his wings are articulated both at a swivel base as well as a hinge. The wings are a bit fragile, and there are plenty of copies of Venom on eBay that are missing the wings entirely.
>
> His insect head is designed so that you can position the stinger facing forwards or tucked away under his body. The bulbous insect eyes help to hide the hinge on which the head is mounted. When the stinger is tucked away, the gap for the robot eyes sort of doubles as the insect "mouth," and the result is a mildly comical Venom who's smirking happily at you. Bring the stinger forwards, and now he's a bug who's ready to bite. (Hasbro neutered the pointed stinger a bit for the Transformers release, making it shorter and rounder.)
>
> To transform him to robot mode, you have to split the insect abdomen in half and unfold it so that the pieces become the robot legs. His hips can slide apart to space his legs apart a bit better. The robot arms are tucked away in a recessed cavity. Both the fists and forearms are spring-loaded, so they're designed to pop open as soon as you slide the arms out. The entire front of the robot torso is green-painted die-cast metal.
>
> As a robot, he's about 4.5" tall at the head, but the stinger puts him well over five inches. His articulation would be pretty standard nowadays, but it's above and beyond anything we usually got during G1. He's got working hips, knees, ankles, and even a mid-thigh swivel, which was just about unheard of in 1985. His shoulders are on a limited ball joint so they have slightly better range of movement than just a standard swivel. The robot head can pivot up and down as dictated by the transformation.
>
> The toy is shockingly bright in color. He's a vibrant lime green, what I used to call Raphael green, with orange as a secondary color. He sure doesn't look like a Decepticon. He's much too bright and cheery for that. His round, bulbous orange head and the green "stem" on top makes him look like a robotic pumpkin. I didn't buy any of the Deluxe Insecticons as a kid, but I remember always being vaguely repulsed by how positively cheery Venom looked, especially when compared to the muted purple-and-black look for the original Insecticons.
>
> Where Ransack can't raise his arms at all, a properly-configured Venom can't lower his arms. He does have the articulation, but the Hasbro instructions call for his insect wings to be tucked behind his arms, which impedes their movement somewhat. You can ignore the instructions and do other things with the wings, like just position them in front of the robot arms (which is what I see a lot of eBay sellers do). The wing placement on this toy is just weird.
>
> Venom carries a grey battle ax and a green weapon that is described as both an electric-blaster gun (in his instructions) and an electro-blaster gun (his tech specs and Hasbro retail box). I lean more towards electro-blaster as being correct, because that sounds more like the type of weapon name Bob Budiansky would invent. Just like with Ransack, the tiny green tip on his rifle does tend to break off. Venom is fairly easy to find on eBay broken and/or incomplete, but it's tough to find a good sample with no stress marks to the wings and no paint chipping off the die-cast metal. The axe or gun alone can sell for $25 apiece, so piecing together a complete unit can be an expensive proposition.
>
> I paid $64.77 for Venom, which isn't awful. He seems to sell anywhere from $70 to $100 (there was another Venom auction that came with unapplied stickers for $120, but then I remembered I had stickers already and didn't need to pay a premium). I'll strip the old stickers off this toy and apply the ones I bought last year, and I'll have a nice, minty sample. (The instructions want you to slap his Decepticon symbol right in the center of his chest, directly over top the surface details, and right over the division between his pectoral panels and his abdomen. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.)
>
> These are fantastic toys, honestly. The ingenuity that came out of this era of early Japanese engineering really shines through. The toys mix design flair with practicality in a way that you really don't see much nowadays, especially when they're trying to make the toys resemble the cartoon models, which frequently stripped away a lot of the design details for the sake of being able to draw the characters. (A theoretical cartoon version of Venom or Ransack would be a dumbed-down, bare-bones version of these toys, and something would certainly be lost in translation.) There's something really appealing about the irregular angles, on Venom in particular, that is like 1980's eye candy to me. These guys were designed during a time when transformable robots was a fresh and exciting concept, and anything was possible. Deluxe Insecticons for the win!
>
>
> Zob (the number of G1 toys I've never handled or experienced grows shockingly small)