Combiner Wars | JunkionHQ

Prime Wars Trilogy Blast Off with Megatronus

Posted on July 30, 2018
/Under Combiner Wars
/With 0 Comments

The first of the Prime Wars Trilogy Exclusives has arrived at JunkionHQ and wow, is it a great start!

The Figure

The figure is a very good update of the G1 figure and includes the chest details from the original.

The Shuttle

Transformation is always a bit worrisome for me with this mold, the shuttle nose always feels on the verge of breaking off. In fact, I often find myself removing it for transformation just to calm my nerves.

The Comparisons

Blast Off is my second favorite Combaticon just edged out by Brawl.

G1

Here he is with a gold-box reissue of the original figure. The colors are spot on even down to the faux windows on the forearms.

Unlike the G1 toy, the shuttle mode is more of an “inspired by” space shuttle.

Unite Warriors

This is the second release of this mold, the first being part of the Unite Warriors Bruticus box set. While TakaraTomy chose to make the top of the shuttle the chest, Hasbro literally gone the other way.

The new release is an olive green like the original toy where UW is mostly a light brown. The biggest issue with the shuttle mode is the fact that, since the arms have been swapped, the hollow parts end up being very visible.

Blast Off vehicle mode with Unite Warriors

The combiner hand is a dark grey rather than the silver on the UW version and the fingers are slightly lighter grey. The pistol is glossy black instead of a matte dark grey.

Megatronus

Megatronus, for me, was initially just a useless add-on. However, in hand, I find that I really like version of the Prime Master.

The special-edition Megatronus switches the light grey plastic with clear red and the dark grey with black. The outside of the arms have been painted grey leaving the fists in red which is a really nice look. The thighs have also been painted grey. The head is painted grey as well with a black face and unpainted eyes that allow for light-piping!

Prime Masters

While the original release had a very Megatron color scheme, I like that the special edition stands on it’s own.

The Conclusion

This version of Blast Off will take his place on display in place of his Unite Warriors equivalent.

Transformers Prejudices

Posted on November 8, 2017
/Under Combiner Wars, Fansproject, Legends, Masterpiece, Titans Return
/With 3 Comments

After coming clean about being a “Rumble is Red” guy in my last post I started thinking about my personal Transformer Prejudices. For example the reasons that, for me, Rumble is red, Thrust is the best Seeker (with wings behind his shoulders BTW) and Twin Twist is an important character is all due to the fact that I owned the toys as a kid.

A lot of the G1 arguments we have in the fandom are topics where both sides are technically correct. Of course, my side is more technically correct, but I digress.

Scale

We talk about this a lot; Masterpiece Ultra Magnus is too big (disagree), Masterpiece Grimlock is too small (conditionally agree), Power of the Primes Predaking is too big/not big enough (too early to tell). Lets be honest, there is no possible way that you can make everyone happy using a physical object to represent anything animated in the original cartoon.

Scale – I don’t think that word means what you think it means (photo from TF Wiki)

With deliberate mass-shifting and abundant animation errors it’s simply impossible to represent the characters as they were shown.

Takara decided to base their post MP-10 Masterpiece scale on the following guide (photo from TF Wiki):

This is great-ish. We have a standard scale for the robot modes that is consistent across the line. However, take Bumblebee…

…looks about right…

…wait, is that a child’s pedal-car model of a Volkswagon?

Personally I like the approach that Takara took since I primarily display my collection in robot mode.

However, eagle-eyed readers might notice MP-8 Grimlock standing between Ultra Magnus and Optimus Prime, a clear violation of the scale chart. To compound the violation is Bullsfire DB-01 Air Strike, my Swoop stand-in which, unlike every other Masterpiece themed Swoop, is scaled to match MP-8. I did pick up FansToys’ FT-05 Soar but it is far too large to fit into my display.

Ultra Magnus

I don’t think of Ultra Magnus as a repainted Optimus Prime in armor because I didn’t get the toy until I was in college and the animation model always transformed straight from the car carrier to the bot.

Sure, I’ve read the Dreamwave comics where he was “revealed” as wearing armor and I’ve read the IDW comics where he was “revealed” as Minimus Ambus, just one in a long line of Ultra Magnus cosplayers, but that was long after my opinions were solidified.

Takara vs. Hasbro vs. Third Party

There are a lot of fans that will, very emphatically, argue that one is inherently better than the others, often followed by declaring how poor those other two options “really” are. I tend to double dip into Takara for my main collection when a deco (Henkei chrome) or additional accessory (Targetmasters) warrants it then use third party versions to fill gaps, primarily on the Masterpiece side. If I have a third-party version and an official version comes out I tend to display only the official.

Takara, Fansproject, Hasbro sharing the spotlight