Alpha OTS

There was an A-10 in the movie too, wasn't there? We're probably too far pass the movie line window for a movie themed version though. Damn, that was a missed opportunity too. Can you do anything with Incinerator's propeller hands? Do they pop off? Can you replace them? Can you peg them on any other part of the figure and have it look ok?

I decided to add the "vehicles that were in the movie but weren't officially robots" to my movie line up; transformable robots would just be a plus to that plan. So I picked up Landmine, Stockade, and Screen Battles Long Arm w/legless Bee. I'm passing on Incinerator, just too big, and the propeller hands are a big turn off. One would be acceptable, but both? Nope. No deal. Landmine was the first I opened and remains the one I'm the most impressed with. He's the dune buggy that the soldiers were driving out of Sector 7's base in Hoover Dam. Not only does he have an excellent vehicle mode and transformation, but he's one of the few unofficial movie bots that manages to carry over the movie aesthetic in a good way. From the face to the arms and especially hands to the "they didn't need to add this TF step, but cool, they did!" factor to the over the shoulder cannon to the better than Bonecrusher roller skates. It's just a well engineered and good looking deluxe mold in both modes. Arcee's the only other figure from the line that I thought captures the movie aesthetic. Glad to have another figure that does too. Stockade is unfortunately the complete opposite of Landmine. He's the SUV model that the Sector 7 agents were all driving. Simple transformation, which I don't mind so much except that the bot mode isn't much to look at, and most importantly doesn't really capture the movie aesthetic at all, especially with the "G1 Wheeljack" styled head. LongArm is what I expected. Solid, but just doesn't convey the movie aesthetic like Landmine does. I do find it funny that his name is LongArm and the Megan Fox driver has very long arms. Legless Bee does look pretty neat sitting on LongArm's shoulders though.

I think it's going to be something we're not thinking of, like some combination of Baltar, Six and their respective pookas.

SWTF Tie Bomber and Grievous Pics have surfaced. Just like I thought, the Tie Bomber shields are arm shields for the robot. Still looks pretty nice.

Wait, we can watch it now? GAH!

I stopped by Target on the way home to see if they had a MK1 or Monger. No dice. But they did have the Target exclusive Repulsor Red prototype, which is the MK3 with silver instead of gold details. And again, I had to hunting through which ones they had on the pegs for a nice clean one. Just about all of them had a speck or blemish on the face. Even the one I settled on isn't perfect. Again, if you're going to pick up anything out of this line, just don't grab one randomly. Look and compare. I prefer them on, but I was surprised that it looks good without them. Still disconcerting that they pop off so easily though. The problem with it is that it doesn't look like something Iron Man would use. A War Machine armor, yes, but not Iron Man. Maybe it shows up in the movie *shrug* Walmart Exclusive and Target Exclusive I had a heck of a time taking a picture of these two, something about the red shiny armor my camera didn't like and I'm not smart enough with my camera to fix. This was the best pic I could manage. Only negative about the Target exclusive is that the repulsor rays are painted red like the rest of the armor. On the Walmart exclusive they were blue like the center chest. Although it really doesn't make a difference because you can't get a repulsor blast pose on either of them.

I think GobotFool's pics are the *first* pics I've seen of the CMs that make it look good! Great pics!

With the new season fast approaching, the subject of The Final Five is popping up on other boards. Might as well post my theory here as well. I'm in the "Final Five exists as Ghosts in the Machine" camp, and move from person to person. This makes it a bit easier to buy that Tigh's a cylon, and the Chief too to a lesser extent. The way the other Cylons talk about the Five, they're more advanced. The existing Cylon models can only download to their model shell. A Six does not download to a Sharon or vice versa. A logical step above that would be to be able to download to anything with the capacity to hold them. This kind of feeds into my theory about what happened to Six and Baltar during the nuclear explosion. Radiation alters their ability to function and download, which was also suggested in the original premiere. Six's download was altered by the radioactive blast, which accidentally passed through Baltar and inadvertently "swapped" those parts of consciousness which could be considered binary, which is why each of them has their own pooka of the other. And is also why the final five could hide in *anyone*, ie: the formats are compatible. There are a myriad of #6's and such, each similar in personality, but also each suprisingly unique as we've discovered. I have a feeling the final five are single entities. There's one of each of them, no more. It might be why the Cylons made no more of them and fear them. They have none of the boundaries or controls that the existing Cylons do. They shelved the Lucy Lawless, how do you shelve the Five?

The Cyberman may looks awesome, but it barely has any articulation: no upper arm or thigh swivels. That's the only standing pose I really like him in. He has a wrist gun too, which you can barely see. Because it's my collection and I make the rules? It's more of a movie/tv shelf with a heavy emphasis on robots/machines/cyborgs. There's Aliens and a Predator on the other side of the shelf, standing next to a Cylon, who's in front of Robocop mecha, between a small die-cast Gort, and all in front of a Terminatrix hugging a T-800. Plus I had nowhere else to put them. I went hunting again for the MK1 and Monger. The only normal sized figures stores seem to be keeping in stock are the Red&Gold Iron men(either normal or the snap-on armor one). Except for Walmart. All they had was the exclusive Stealth suit in War Machine colors, which I picked up because I didn't want to come home with nothing. About him.... When I first picked him up and walked towards the register, I noticed a blemish on his face. So I went back looking for a cleaner one. There's a sort of weathering effect going on on the silver parts and it's not perfectly uniform, and when that happens on the helmet, it doesn't look right. Plus there were random "specks" on the helmets of most of the ones I was going through. So if you're going to pick one of these up, you really should compare with all the figures there to make sure you're grabbing the best looking one. I did manage to find a pretty clean one, but just about all of them had a "speck" on the helmet or a blemish in the weathering effect. About his weapons... I *hate* the clip-on wrist guns because that's what they look like, clip-on wrist guns. They don't clip on to any set peg on the arm, and it's only friction holding them in place. The shoulder pads fall off a little too easily. The blue and orange missiles just look plain silly when in place on the gatling gun and missile launcher. He looks much better without them, except for the missile launcher which has a huge hole in the center for that missile. That all said, he still looks cool. Articulation's pretty good, but as has been mentioned, it's really dissappointing that despite having repulsor rays on his palms and the wrist articulation, you can't put him in a palm up pose because of the armor on top of the hand getting in the way of the wrist. Am I allowed to pose him next to Hulk enjoying a beer? Edit: grammar police

Now that's bumming me out because those are the two I really want. I'll buy them anyway. I mean, they still look badass when standing at attention, and even the poses the catalog have them in look nice (right?). The cockpit Monger looks like it has a brighter cleaner color scheme in some pics I've seen compared to the gritty color of the normal one. I hope that brown swirling effect isn't as off putting to me as it is to you, because I like what I'm seeing in pics online. The MK2(War Machine) has retractable back weapons? Anyone have a link to a pic of that? This is the only Iron Man figure I own. I've always liked Iron Man, but I prefered the "real world" colors(if that makes any sense) and designs when it comes to his armor, so War Machine themed armors were my faves. This is the man in the tin can costume from the Marvel Legends line. The origin comic it comes with is unintentionally hilarious. Did you know he painted this armor gold simply so the armor wouldn't scare people while he was saving them and thwarting crimes? There's even a comic panel with the caption(going from memory) "Tony Stark leaves the gay party for a date with an electrical cord!" And he's standing next to a Dr. Who Iron Man

Dake at the allspark posted this pic of the Iron Man figure catalog. I really like the look of all the metallic/gray figures. They look really mechanical and cool for some reason I can't quite express. I went to Target yesterday, but the only figure they had was the MK3. That made me a very sad panda.... This pic's the first I've seen the inside of that Iron Monger on the lower right, I didn't realize it opened at all. Given the other closed cockpit pics I've seen of it, I doubt there's any kind of removeable figure or if there's any further type of detachable armor. Still very cool nonetheless. The only thing I don't like about these figures are the missile launchers. Thankfully they'll probably all look better without the missile in the launcher, especially the MK1.

That's what I'm hoping, although it won't surprise me to see both wings used as arm shields.

The deluxe Brawl is very nice.......as long as you don't touch him. Those arm bar pegs don't even pretend to connect.

I really enjoy the OT SWTF line, but I agree with just about every negative thing said about them. The Darth Star is the best of them. The Millenium Falcon's probably the most solid figure after that. The others all have their little quirks and problems and aren't on par with a Transformer of equal size. Even so, I'm still really looking forward to the Tie Bomber that's been announced.

Ok, just finished watching the 2033 Bubblegum Crisis for the first time. I watched partly because of the Blade Runner comments in this thread, and partly because I thought the motoslave and rider was a pretty cool concept, but I ended up being very dissappointed that that combo is barely in it. Is it used more in the other series episodes? That said, the later episodes are better than the earlier ones, mostly because that Blade Runner theme's a bit more obvious. And Sylvia's creepy brother seemed to thankfully dissappear completely after a couple of "He didn't just say that. Did I hear that right?" incest comments. I was hoping watching it would make me want a motoslave with rider, but it didn't.

I frequent ClubTokyo.org, and even though I *still* don't understand why this occurs because personally I think figures that look like that aren't worth $2, Roger isn't exaggerating much about the prices on those kaiju above. Edit: And next to the Toyami, the CM looks like it desperately needs a ham sandwich.

I love BinAlts, but the Convoy mold has always sucked. It's like the engineers got half way and said "eh, good enough". I have said before that without remolding it, it *might* be able to pull off Hoist as long as the green and orange are used appropriately because Hoist's G1 figure and Marvel comic interpretation are almost Prime-ish as seen here at TFU.info. But *that* neon green is not what I had in mind. Although I get the vibe that that's a lucky draw type item, and they're just re-issuing the normal Convoy which, while still crappy, at least has much better paint apps/deco than Alternator Optimus. As for "Arcee". I pulled out my Decepticharge just to remind myself what he looked like. Ok, the head's not quite as Megatronish as I remember. It looks more like a young Megatron, and it has a sort of RiD Sideburn quality to it. But it *still* looks very much like a guy, and he's definitely grimacing. However, if they're not going to mold a new head, they might be able to pull this off if they change the mouth into either a small smile, or maybe add some lips. But I'm not going to hold my breath. I wanted BinAlts to come back, but so far, this hasn't been what I had in mind.

I'll second this idea. I'd buy at least a half dozen sets to cover what I have and have an extra for each. I'm not too familiar with the figure, but would the Alpha poseable hands work at all? I know the scale is similar.

There's an animated Wreckgar coming? My Henkei(aka Japanese Classics) Megatron, Optimus and Starscream arrived today. Just like I was hoping, Megatron's chrome isn't at all jarring in person. I think most of the pics that have been taken so far are either with flashes or with the light reflected in such a way that it looks like the chrome has more of a brighter contrast to the silver and gray paint apps than it actually does. It really does look much better in person. I like this Starscream much more. The red is more of a cherry red, and what I really like is that the face and chest vents are painted. Unfortunately, there was a little paint sloppage on the head. It looks like when the machine colored in the eyes, a tiny drop of the red paint fell onto the side of the head. I zoomed right in on it. And again, fortunately the chrome on the cannons are not as jarring in person. I never liked all the yellow on Classics Prime so Henkei Prime is naturally more preferable for me. I really like the silver paint apps on the legs and chest. It's a little unfortunate that the red on the forearms and the red on the rest of the figure doesn't match up like it should. The chrome on the grill in truck mode in pics I had seen beforehand didn't look that bad, so I wasn't worried about it, but fortunately again, it looks much better in person.

I remember reading that there's an easy mod that you can do to E.Jetfire so he can turn his head, but I don't remember what it was. I never owned the mold.

Looks like Beagle may have eliminated the decapitation transformation step.

Same here. Each time I reach for my credit card because of pics here and in the Mospeada thread, someone posts a Beagle pic and I put it away.

Cool, then Destro can call for the bore worms!

Four new SWTF molds coming. I hope the other two are OT molds. http://jediinsider.com/index.php?catid=8&itemid=10982 ------ JI: Can you tell us what new Transformers/Star Wars sculpts we might see for this year? Hasbro: Four all-new sculpts are planned for later this Fall. We are going to be revealing all of them (and possibly more) at Comic Con, but we'll give you a little taste of our September waveGrievous/Grievous Starfighter, and TIE Pilot/TIE Bomber.: General

That sounds like the opposite of what I would think would happen though. The figure's backheavy but extending the foot forward stops it from falling forward? I don't quite understand. Edit: Almost forgot to put this other youtube link up that shows the complete MH transformation in a minute and a half and without the awkwardness seen in the dx review.