Grave Considerations: Music Hoarding

There has been an issue in my life for the longest of times, and I have tried to parse some sense out of it for years; I’ve never really been successful, or at best, I’ve never found any of my conclusions to be satisfactory in the long run. So, once more we will try it again.

Grave Considerations: Music Out of Time

Confession time: I am a hoarder of music.

It may not be as noticeable as it was back in the yesteryear of physical media, and maybe two years ago my wife and I went full hipster and only bought physical music on vinyl. But this in no way sated my appetite for new music, and I continued with my stockpiling and constant iPod syncing.

But I don’t necessarily want to talk about that terrible, terrible habit of mine today. The hoarding is something that’s gone on for years and years, and I often believe is a part of a larger issue that I’ve never made myself confront.

What I want to talk about here is this strange phenomena that I’ve recently stumbled upon, that I can only seem to name “music out of time.” I am using this to refer to music that was released at some point in the past and was consumed, but for some reason disliked, only to be rediscovered years later and be really enjoyed. I’m not talking about something like “I heard this song once or twice and didn’t like it, but now I do.” I’m talking about “I heard this when it was brand new and didn’t like it, but can’t really say why, but now I do.”

Transformers: Masterpiece Loud Pedal and Road Rage

 

  I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not I was going to write on both of these figures together, or separately. I would like to think that my ultimate decision is obvious now.

Both Loud Pedal and Road Rage are repaints of the Masterpiece Tracks figure, which is an entry in the series that I skipped, and don’t have much of an interest in going back to find. Tracks, while a fine G1 character, never did that much for me, and my Masterpiece buying is pretty much limited to characters I love or figures that I feel I really need to have or find interesting. Not that long ago, I paid some attention to Exhuast, a repaint of a good mold of a character who I’ve no sustained interest in, but as a repaint interested the hell out of me. Tracks had, as many G1 characters did, his one staring episode, and then he’d show up on occasion, as most of the original Autobots did. These two figures are not characters at all, but rather like Exhaust, Masterpiece versions of G1 Tracks variants, neither of which were widely available, or at least, not available in the US. A strange inclusion in a line like Masterpiece, then, these figures that aren’t really characters.

Transformers: Titans Return Octane

 

 

For starters, I understand that copyrighted names are a thing, and that is a legal issue. But there is no way on earth I will refer to this figure by the name on its package, which is a nonsensical “Octone”. This is not a matter of adding the faction prefix, which became a thing during the 2007 live action movie toy line; this is not a kneejerk response to something like “Decepticon Octane”. The box says “Octone,” and we know it’s not a typo but rather what Hasbro named this figure, mainly because of a copyright issue. But I’m not saying “Octone”.

Transformers: Titans Return Blitzwing

 I occasionally wax nostalgic on here about Transformers experiences from my childhood, and this article on Titans Return Blitzwing is going to begin in just that way. I remember a kid in my second or third grade class had G1 Blitzwing (the only Blitzwing at the time) and let me see it during recess. Man, that toy blew my young mind in terms of what I’d later know to be engineering and design. The transformation scheme was out of this world, and the toy changed into three distinct modes. THREE! Amazing. I didn’t add a G1 Blitzwing to my collection until many, many years later, and now I feel I have a hundred of them. (In truth, there are only three in my possession: an original, the Platinum Series reissue from two years ago, and an eHobby Overcharge.) Blitzwing has gotten a handful of updates over the intervening thirty years, the most recent being in the Generationsline, which was a real mixed bag of a figure. So, it falls to Titans Return to produce a version of Blitzwing that works all around, in both alt modes and as a robot, while presenting a transformation scheme that effectively creates and then hides all three forms. How well does it do?

Grave Consideration: Transformers Titans Return Titanmasters

By now we’ve had months to experience the Titans Return line and its gimmick of everyone being a Headmaster. I have repeatedly said that I have no interest in head swapping among these figures, as the idea of it doesn’t make sense. I’m not current on the lore of this line, if any exists, and so I don’t know if there has been an official address of this, but what are the Titanmasters?

Transformers: Masterpiece Exhaust

 

  

Finally getting a chance to get around to some recent(ish) Masterpiece acquisitions, and I am super happy about this one. One of the rare Masterpiece Decepticons that isn’t a Seeker, Exhaust is a repaint of the Wheeljack mold, based on the G1 "Marlboor Wheeljack" variant figure, a toy long sought after and attained by deep pocketed collectors. A sort of controversial figure, the G1 toy sported a deco that was based on the pretty recognizable Marlboro cigarette box design, and was never widely released (if it was released at all) worldwide. This makes Exhaust something of an oddity, and a sort of random entry in the Masterpiece line.