On Tuesday, October 24, 2023 at 3:15:04 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:

> I'm not dead.

Dude. DUDE. You were gone like eleven months. It's one thing to take a break for a few days or a few weeks. But you're a major contributor here, and the newsgroup is very small, and people noticed when you were gone.

I e-mailed you. I also sent you snail mail. An answer would have been nice!

But I'm glad you're okay.

And I'm sorry for contributing to the factors that made you want to leave. I regret that.
Onto Transformers stuff. I can't tell you how much I missed going through your posts and responding to them point by point. I will not always agree with you, but I will do so respectfully!
> Lots of toys get disqualified for this. Cosmos was never really available.. Crasher. Golden Disk Terrorsaur. Did Minerva even ship?

I forget. I think I got mine from Hasbro Pulse. I have no idea if she ever officially hit Walgreens.
> My rule of thumb for this is a toy has to be in stock somewhere online for two weeks.

I think only the dog items stay in stock for that long. I've seen pre-orders sell out within an hour!

> Skullgrin transforms into a block that doesn’t resemble anything, with treads on the far back.

Skullgrin's vehicle mode is pretty objectively awful.

> Skipping back to Earthrise for examples, Prowl was the first representation of the G1 character design that had knees and wasn’t a complete fucking disaster like the toy from 2008 or whenever. Meanwhile Earthrise Starscream borrows so much from the Classics Starscream design that he just isn’t new — same character, body, transformation, color scheme (there was a second Classics/Whatever Starscream with the G1 color scheme)…

I actually dug through a box of much older toys the other day because I was looking for something. I forget what. But I encountered Classics Starscream after probably five years of being accustomed to the Siege/Earthrise styling, and he's so disappointingly small now. I used to love collecting the Deluxe-class Decepticon jets but now they feel inadequately tiny.

> Toys disqualified for not being new enough: Optimus Prime and Scourge, who update the character design from one of the best toys ever to a pretty decent but decidedly lesser toy; Alpha Trion looks like a miscolored Scourge in vehicle mode and is saddled with an Orion Pax that looks too much like Kup (they don’t quite embody the characters they are meant to be); etc. It’s very subjective.

No attempt at doing a G2 Laser Prime will ever capture the sheer excellence of the 1995 toy. It cannot be surpassed.

Alpha Trion is a relatively unimportant character who probably wouldn't have gotten his own mold. Making him out of Scourge was a sensible move since they both have that rounded Floro Dery body styling. It's not a perfect Alpha Trion, but it's better than the various other versions (Titans Return lion, or the Cyberverse toy). It's close to what I wanted, and it will look good on a shelf populated with other characters.
> Transmetal 2 Megatron is iffy. Not having a floppy neck with a gimmick that never worked well is good, but the colors feel too muted, the head sculpt is bad and we lost the ridiculous drag racer mode. If my TM2 Megatron had flaking chrome, this would definitely be an improvement.

I remember a lot of people complaining about the floppy neck, back in the day. But, yeah, they really dropped the ball with that robot head sculpt. Which is a rare misstep these days, considering how many head sculpts in recent years have been the pinnacle of excellence.
> Budgets are what they are, and there will always be constraints, but when engineering a toy requires cutting a lot of corners it’s time to ask whether the entire design should change. It’s better to make a smaller or simpler toy that works well than a larger toy with a lot of flaws because of cut corners.

I think I agree with that in theory. The premise seems sound.
> Toys have large gaps where years ago they would have had panels covering them. It means that the toy is not as good for display.

There are a LOT of third-party gap-filler kits for a great many toys. But, you shouldn't have to make a third-party purchase to make a toy feel complete.

> Look at Elita-1 and Pointblank. Feel them. Look at the hard, glossy plastic used for Pointblank and the soft, pliable, matte plastic used on Elita-1.. It’s hard to believe that they are from the same toyline. The softer plastic on Elita means things are never quite locked into place, but also, she feels like she came from a discount line.

I know they are experimenting with different textures on the surface of the toys. Maybe they're experimenting with using different grades of plastic as well? I really don't know.

> (Ironically, Pointblank could probably use a more pliable plastic given the design's incredibly tight tolerances. And, of course, rotating wrists to allow his forearms to be positioned to give him better elbows and some re-engineering to not shed the weird bits on the side with ball joints in transformation.)

There was a Nonnef Productions add-on kit that actually replaced the biceps and elbow parts. The trade-off is that he lost that big chunk of the front grill for vehicle mode. I got as far as switching one arm out, decided I liked the stock parts better, and switched it back.

> And a toy must have enough paint deco that it feels like a character. Armada Starscream, for instance, is missing about half the details that make him recognizable.

I never got the Legacy version. My Walmart still has lots of Armada Starscreams and lots of Beast Wars Inferno. Just a sea of red toys.

> And it shouldn’t matter since I throw it out, but the new packaging is terrible.

I am also throwing the packaging out now. The packaging's main job is to a) protect the toy during transit and b) make it look attractive enough on the shelf to make somebody want to buy it. Besides eliminating the plastic window for environmental reasons, studies have shown that if you can physically touch a toy, you're much more likely to buy it.
> If Tarantulas barely holds together now, what is he going to be like in two years as plastics expand and contract? He’s going to be sitting at the bottom of a bin with his arms separated while I play with Transmetal Tarantulas (either original, or formal wear variety). He’s going to be trash that I keep in my home. Might as well be a Movieverse toy.

I don't really have anything to say about this, so I'm just going to mention that if you ask Alexa to set a spaghetti timer for ten minutes, right now since it's October, she will say it in a creepy witch's voice. But if you ask her to set a baby timer, or a children timer, she will not do it. Somebody actually programmed her to not be a creepy Halloween witch if you are cooking children in your kitchen.

(She'll still SAY "baby timer for ten minutes, starting now" but she'll say it in her regular, serious voice. Because cooking babies is serious business. This is no time to mess around and talk in silly voices.)

> Now, this might just be that I am losing interest in Transformers, but I like to use Toy of the Year to look back at what toy from 10 and 20 years ago as well.

We're talking a lot about 2022, but have you bought many toys in 2023?

> 2002 was awesome. The tail end of RID and then Armada. Scourge, Air Attack Optimus Primal, Megabolt Megatron, Supercon Optimus Prime, Cyclonus, Demolisher, Tidal Wave, Megatron, Hot Shot — all very fun toys that hold up 20 years later, and the toys a level below those standouts are also really good.

I had a lot of issues with the Armada-era toys falling apart (especially Red Alert) but I do recall quite liking the Supercon version of Optimus. Having put some distance between us and Armada now, it's amazing that they were only charging $12 for Deluxe-class toys and yet each one was packed with some kind of spring-loaded gimmick... sometimes several of them. Now they charge $25 and you get zero gimmicks.
> 2012 was not as good, as it was the year of The Great Cheapening, but it still gave us TF:Prime with many good toys, along with FOC Starscream, Shockblast and Soundwave. And the GDO redecos and remolds.

I don't have a clear mental capsule of what the 2012 product line was like. There are some years that I find myself frequently referencing (2008 and 2014 in particular) when talking about older toys, but not 2012.

> Ultimately, I think Generations (and Studio Series 86) went in the wrong direction when it began really committing to screen accuracy with Earthrise..

I don't agree with that at all. The screen accuracy is what makes me love pretty much all the modern-era toys from 2019 and onward more than anything else in my collection (except vintage G1 for nostalgic reasons). Like, all the toys I've got from, say, 2006-2014 have been supplanted with better versions of the same characters. That's almost a decade's worth of toys I have no use for now.
> The toys require more complicated transformations that the engineering often cannot successfully accommodate, and it means higher labor costs in assembly (at a time when labor costs are rising in Vietnam), which requires cutting other corners even after raising prices.

I won't deny that there have been some design flaws. But, compared to the Great Cheapening, we're consistently getting toys made of better-quality plastic (assuming it doesn't start yellowing!) and usually we get about 90 to 95 percent of the paint applications that I want to see (they skip a few here and there, which is a shame, but it's often fixable with ToyHax stickers and such).

> The dominant play pattern seems to be “gingerly transform it twice, and then pose it on a shelf”, which means things like articulation are more important than being able to roll in car mode, or parts staying on when the toy is moved.

The whole inability to roll in vehicle mode has been an issue since early- to mid-Masterpiece. I wonder if it's because they're designing the toys on computers now, where tolerances and ground clearance are largely theoretical.

But, I think there's a shift in why people are buying toys, also. Like, when G1 first made its debut, the novelty was that you got a toy car that could also unfold into a cool-looking robot. So, it was packaged as a vehicle, and the robot was the surprising thing that it did. Now, these are heritage characters with 40 years of history. A car that opens into a robot is not a new idea. You're not buying a gimmick, you're buying an action figure of a familiar and beloved character. So, the toys get packaged in robot mode, so you can immediately recognize Tankzap or Shockburst or whoever it is.

> The Masterpiece line went through a similar change, starting with Bumblebee 2.0 and the Beast Wars toys, but just raised prices through the roof to mostly maintain quality and finish. And I just stopped buying them — not because of the money, but because each one was less fun than the previous one.

I would argue that, yes, toys need to be fun, but I might also argue that the Masterpiece toys begin to enter sort of a grey area where they're far less "children's plaything" and much more "adult collectible," and I would use different metrics to judge a collectible than I would a toy.

> Yes, Inferno can actually stand on his ant legs and nothing falls off (a vast improvement from my decades old Beast Wars toy), but he doesn’t do anything, and he really needs a paint wash on that beast head to look finished.

The whole Kingdom aesthetic for the beast modes is just Slightly Off in a way that's hard to quantify. The robot modes enjoy immense screen accuracy but the beast modes just don't.

> And I never found the fourth Stunticon limb, and my Motormaster is already yellowing. I wasn’t thrilled with the entire design of this iteration of Menasaur, so I’m not going to go out of my way — I’m honestly tempted to just drop the 4/5ths that I have into a nearby dumpster and regain space in my house. The new toy might look more like the cartoon character when put on a shelf, but it’s not as much fun to play with as the Combiner Wars toy — it’s worse as a toy.

I will say that Motormaster is so complicated that I just kept all his dismantled parts in Menasor mode until my fifth Stunticon showed up, because I knew I wasn't going to want to figure out how to transform him again. So, that says something.

> Also, a lot of the newer toys have dull colors. I think they are trying to be more "mature" or something, but it just ends up with a TM2 Megatron that is brick colored rather than an intense red.

With Beast Wars, I think they cranked down the saturation level significantly for the CGI models. They're just trying to match what was on the show.

> Back to the present. Rereading that, that is clearly someone who Hasbro has been failing to delight. Also, my Artfire has yellowed terribly and I am bitter about that, because I really liked him.

That's happened to so many toys. Artfire, Motormaster, Cyclonus, Soundwave, Shattered Glass Starscream, the list goes on. I need to check my Artfire, but I have no idea which box he's in.

> I do really like EarthSpark Nightshade. They are a very fun, tiny owl, with a solid transformation with a few nifty bits that take a few minutes to figure out but is straightforward enough that you quickly do figure it out.

That toy reminds me a little of the Convertors toy by Selects named Hoot. The world needs more transforming owls.
> I remain perplexed by Needlenose who perfectly captures a really terrible character design. He looks like a small child made a new character by disassembling two different toys from the same mold and then assembled a weird frankenstein monster version with purple arms and feet and nothing ties together visually. But everything feels solid, and pegs together well, and the transformation does things we haven't see in a while and which didn't work as well then. I can't figure out if I like him or not. He looks almost exactly like the original, which is either good or bad.

He's a grey toy, with purple and blue as secondary colors. I'm not seeing the visual clash that you are. Me, I'm just happy that Spinister finally has somebody to pal around with. And I think we're getting a new Quake for next year, something better than Hardhead in the wrong colors, so that's exciting. I love whey they finish off a team.

I really enjoy reading your thoughts and responding to them, even if I don't always agree.

You're not allowed to disappear again without telling us first!

Zob (really happy you posted this)