With the imminent arrival of the Titans Return line which will focus exclusively on the Headmaster
gimmick, I thought this might be a good time to write up Generations Brainstorm, the first in the new generation of Headmaster.
In case anyone doesn’t know, the Headmasters are one of the
stranger G1 concepts. Speaking only for the American branch of the fiction, the
*-masters were full-fledged Cybertronians who took on a symbiotic partnership
with residents of the planet Nebulous, whose indigenous Nebulons were engaged
in a generations-long civil war themselves. For some reason, certain Nebulons
offered their services to the Cybertronians, becoming tiny exosuit wearing
partners that transformed into the heads (Headmasters), weapons
(Targetmasters), or most puzzlingingly later on, engines (Powermasters) for the
larger robots, approximating the “two heads are better than one” approach to
life. With this development coming post-’86 movie, the robots had sleeker, more
futuristic and abstract vehicle modes, and somehow that kind of made this wacky
concept work. The Autobots entries in these three categories were generally
cars, while the Decepticons got a boost to their air force as well as an
assortment of animals.
The robot mode on Generations
Brainstorm here is great. He is lanky yet solid looking. For a time before
I dropped out of it, Brainstorm was something of a player in the More Than Meets the Eye comic, wherein
he was a Decepticon agent who was working with time travel technology. This
figure does look like the comic Brainstorm, yet looks not-comic enough to sit
in the Classics display. Primarily teal and grey, it’s a surprisingly
eye-catching robot. He is quite poseable as well, in the arms and legs: the
arms have a double elbow, required for transformation, and the legs have the
thigh swivel/knee/ankle tilt arrangement, also needed for transformation. The
torso is a single piece, so there is no waist movement, and if I wanted to
lodge a complaint with the poseability, I could say that Brainstorm basically
moves along the transformation scheme, and that’s all. Some people feel that is
a criticism, but I generally do not. Open fists hold a pair of blasters that
can also store on the back of the robot, making for a very cool silhouette.
Brainstorm is a jet of indeterminate futuristic design, and
this is a real strong attribute for the toy in general. As more of an abstract
version of a jet, the figure benefits from not having to be too much of any
thing in either mode. The robot mode honestly betrays little of the vehicle
mode, and the vehicle mode is achieved through a simple transformation. Not
having to look like anything specifically can be a real blessing for
Transformers, although not always. Many, if not most, Cybertronian alt modes
look like junk, folded up robots requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief in
order to make them tanks and planes and whatever else. Yet there is a
difference between Cybertronian and futuristic, and in general, the late stage
G1 Headmasters seemed to have gotten this difference down. An updated version
of one of those should then have succeeded as well, and Generations Brainstorm does. While he does follow the trend of
folding a robot up underneath a jet body, the robot parts are beneath the back
end of the plane, and the front end is left to be nothing but sleek, long
fuselage, and it is a fast, aerodynamic look. It is the same general profile of
an X-Wing or a Colonial Viper: slender fore, bulkier aft, yet a configuration
that I think has a leg up on the general Seeker style transformation,
essentially a rectangle with a nosecone on the front.
The distinction between Transformers of the first few years
of the line versus those from the post-’86 movie is pretty large. It is because
the original, first two seasons worth of characters and toys were all already
made, being transplants from Japanese toylines. A number of them had an
internal consistency, so the Autobot cars and Prime and the Decepticon Seekers
and even Soundwave and Megatron all looked like they came from the same place.
Toys like the Dinobots and Insecticons the same, and even the first few waves
of combiners, all fit together visually, regardless of what they actually were
(a dinosaur and a Porche) or where they originated (Megatron and Prime are from
different lines of toys). I can’t imagine anyone looking at Scrapper and
Breakdown and Vortex and complaining that they all look so different from each
other, excepting what shouldn’t be needed to be pointed out as obvious differences.
But, it’s the Internet, so someone reading this is going to be all rankled and
be like, “Scrapper and Vortex are so clearly different because one is a
helicopter and one is green” and then think they’ve unleashed some devastating
counterargument on me. You do get outliers, like Omega Supreme, who will
actually share more visuals with the later toys, but this is an outlier.
The Season 3 toys, the first of the newly made and newly
designed Transformers, characters originating in the movie and beyond, cast off
the yoke of reality and were thus able to be and do differently. But you still
knew what things were. Blur was still clearly a race car, if you accepted the
idea that a race car didn’t have to look like what was on the front of your
Trapper Keeper. Sure, the eternal mystery of what the hell is Scourge endures,
but again, outliers. These vehicle modes were all actual vehicles, and not the
Cybertronain things that came along over the last fifteen years.
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| 128 IQ.... |
The *-masters have long been a concept that fans have wanted revisited. The official word from Hasbro had always been that the gimmick was one they were cautious of, owing to the fact that smaller parts are often lost, and such a critical component such as a head, were it to be lost, would render the toy useless. The new Titans Return line is made up largely of Headmaster figures, and by this I mean the smaller price point entries, which are nothing more than Headmasters with some small transforming vehicle or partner thing; a sort of combo between *-Masters and Action Masters. There is a pretty impressive array of larger figures as well, including updates of the original seven Headmasters, and then some real why? picks, like Galvatron is now a Headmaster. Personally, I am real disinterested in a line that seems to be mostly heads that don’t have bodies, now the opposite of the rationale Hasbro routinely used to decline a neo-Headmasters line. My interest in the line is really only a handful of figures, a real 180 from Combiner Wars where I went almost complete. My thought is that Titans Return is trying to be a real crossover line: kids (the perpetually repeated target demographic) don’t give two cares at all who Mindwipe is, but collectors (the group always being told doesn’t matter to the company) would rather have new versions of old characters/toys. I don’t see much value in swapping heads around between characters, just as I didn’t see that as a selling point in the 80’s, but kids might, and if they do, that opens the secondary play pattern for the line: any head can work with any body. Titans Return then is trying to reach both audiences by saying “Look kids!!! Switch around Headmasters to make new characters!!!!!” while also saying “Look, adult collector. It’s a brand new, Classics Skullcruncher.” I can support this completely, but the little head figures aren’t doing anything for me. Actual figures, yes; buncha heads, no thanks.
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| Come on, 80's Marvel comics! |
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