Saturday, July 28, 2018

Grave Considerations: TFCon Toronto 2018 and SDCC 2018 Reveals


Hi everyone. I know that this month has been a less than active one around the Coffin, and I don’t really know the reason why. I have been busy with summer classes, and Life has been busy with conventions and new toy reveals and movies and stuff, I just have not been able to find the time or motivation to do much blog-related work. Sure, I have posted a pair of articles this month, and have begun three or four more, but for some unknown reason I’m having a real hard time mustering up the energy to dedicate myself to Coffin business. So I figured I’d take a little time and talk about some toy reveals we’ve gotten this past week, between TFCon Toronto and San Diego Comic Con.


Let’s start with what we saw out of TFCon Toronto. The annual Third Party convention offered a lot of reveals that kind of feel mixed. The cavalcade of Masterpiece scaled or styled Stunticons rolls on, they seemingly following the Constructicons and Predacons as the combiner team that everyone needs to produce right now, and Masterpiece the size class that Third Parties now apparently feel the need to utilize for combiners. I have really liked the Stunticons in this size that I have seen, but am not sure that they are really necessary for my collection.

The real meat came from my (apparently) favorite Third Party company and the one that seems poised to usurp it, TFC Toys and MakeToys, respectively. I really enjoy the TFC Toys combiners, which should probably be obvious from my blog, but I am less than impressed with the general renders of the first two of their Terrorcons. The combiners’ name is going to be Satan, Hades already taken and thus upsetting the Greek naming convention that the company has employed up until now, and the first two figures appear to be Beelzubub (Sinnertwin) and Astaroth (Rippersnapper). It feels like ages ago, but the rumor was that the TFC Toys Terrorcons were going to be reshellings or reworkings of their pretty fabulous Seacons, and these initial renders appear to confirm that, and I am not real thrilled about it. While the existent images are merely sketches and renders, with no physical samples yet, the Terrorcons look like slightly altered Seacons, particularly Astaroth/Rippersnapper, who is pretty obviously an edited Cyberjaw/Overbite from the Poseidon team. And, they don’t look that good, honestly. Real opinions are going to have to wait until after the prototypes start to surface, but as of right now, it would seem that UniqueToys Ordin remains still on my shopping list. Not sure if there was an estimated date for these first two TFC Terrorcons to materialize, whether TFCon Chicago would be a reasonable time to start looking for physical samples, but now I’ll be keeping an ear to the ground in that regard.

On the flip side, nearly everything that MakeToys showed immediately went on my “to preorder” list, beginning with their Coneheads. At the end of May I got Meteor; this past week, Lightning and Skycrow FINALLY arrived. Capitalization in this instance indicates excitement, as I swear when I preordered those figures the listing said they were expected within a week or two, and that was back in May. (Game 4 of the Avalanche-Predators series, to be exact. I preordered them while my wife was taking a nap. –mr) Some time in June, or early July, grey prototype pictures of the Coneheads showed up on Twitter and I kind of wanted them right away, but needed a small amount of convincing from my wife to decide that I would in fact order them, when orders went up. That night, I sat on my couch and smiled the biggest smile, knowing that I would be the owner of a full set of these MakeToys Seekers and Coneheads. The physical prototypes shown at TFCon reinforce the idea that they’re going to be excellent, and I find them exciting. Something of a strong response, considering they mean I’m going to have to face some tough collection questions in the not too distant future: where do I put 6 more Masterpiece sized Seekers? Do I keep my official Masterpiece Seekers? Seems unfathomable that I wouldn’t, but I have read reviews of Meteor that seem to indicate that one could sell the official versions and just replace them with the MakeToys ones and not have any dip in quality.

In addition, MakeToys showed physical protos of two figures that drove me wild when renders of them appeared on the socials: Buster Skywing, a radical reimaging of Jetfire, and Rioter Galcatron, a radical IDW-style Galvatron. Both of those will end up on my shelves, for sure. Physical prototypes were shown at TFCon, and I really hope they wind up making the trek to TFCon Chicago so I can see them in person as well. I like everything about those figures right now.

San Diego Comic Con was host to a slew of new information, and frankly it was a mixed bag on the action figure front. Some good new from the Star Wars division, as the Black Series will release a subline called Archives, which will feature reissues of older Black Series figures, starting with Boba Fett, which is totally, totally awesome news. A few months ago I came to the realization that I wanted to try backtracking through the line and obtaining figures that I missed before, or at least some of the figures that I passed on as part of maintaining my “I only collect Imperial figures from this line” stance, something that was adopted at the start of my Black Series journey that really no longer needs to apply. Some other cool new figure reveals, including more of the cast of Solo, and a Hoth Leia from The Empire Strikes Back, which is terrific. The ESB look is the default Leia in my mind, so I’m glad to be able to add it to my shelf. It’s going to look nice with the Bespin Han that’s already up for order on a number of etailer sites. Also noteworthy is that figures previously marked as Toys R’ Us exclusives are going to be made available through other outlets, which is great news.

But I suppose, let’s talk about the Transformers news. Hasbro debuted a few figures from the upcoming War for Cybertron line, set to be another trio of product lines, beginning with Siege. The main gimmick here appears to be Targetmasters, rechristened as Battlemasters now, and although only one or two were shown, they look like the Minicons from Armada: little robots that turn into weapons that peg on to larger figures. Great, cool idea, one that was successful before, and so should most likely work again. These will be taking the place of the Titanmasters and Primemasters. The larger figures though are not very impressive. Apparently the intention is that they all have alt modes that straddle the line between earth and Cybertronian modes, basically spaced-up versions of earth vehicles. Prime has some extra bulk on the truck mode that makes it look a little less earth-realistic, and that apparently makes it Cybertronian. Don’t get this wrong, this is an improvement from the usual Cybertronian alt mode practice of “What is it? A space truck,” but they don’t leave much of an impression on me. Also returning is the concept of Ultra Magnus being a white Optimus Prime with attachable armor, and Micromasters. The Micromasters are puzzling, as they look exactly like their 1989 versions with ball jointed hips, and that’s about all. The patrol concept, where four similarly construed Micromasters would be packaged together, appears to have been reduced to only two team members, as though ball joints ate so deeply into the budget that Hasbro couldn’t release full teams. It’s not a case of just releasing the popular members of the patrols, because most people, even if given all day, would be hard pressed to name any Micromasters, let alone just the popular ones.

I have purchased three Power of the Primes figures, and have repeatedly expressed a general disinterest in Hasbro’s Transformers products for the entirety of this year. It doesn’t look like that’s going to change in the next year or two. I’m simply not impressed by the things that I see. Initially, I’d thought the issue perhaps was fatigue from combiners and Headmasters going into Power of the Primes, the line that was pretty clearly intended to release all the figures that Combiner Wars and Titans Return ran out of room for. But these new figures leave me feeling amazingly blah as well. And honestly, every single thing I see about Titans Return Predaking makes me laugh at it, and that was supposed to be the big centerpiece of the line. I just don’t see anything that really interests me these days, and I don’t see any real indications that that could change any time soon.

So ultimately, this summer brought a convention that showed me I was going to be spending a lot of money, and another one that showed me that much of the money I spend is clearly on superior products. And that’s fine, so long as I’m getting figures that are worth their cost to me. I can’t say I’ve had any issues justifying the price of the third party figures I own, never had that buyers’ remorse that truly did accompany my last few Hasbro purchases. But, regardless, the next year or so in figures looks to be a promising one, on the unofficial, official, and Star Wars fronts.

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