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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