Crackerjack box

So, my Wheeljack and Thundercracker from HTS arrived yesterday!

Thundercracker is, at this point, very old hat, although his deco is pleasing (very metallic paint on the torso) and he manages to look very different from that other blue Seeker, Dirge. Even so, after transforming him into bot mode, it didn't take long for him to be squeezed into my Seeker shelf, where he'll remain for a long time.

Wheeljack, on the other hand, while being "just" a remold and not a brand new toy, is as fun as a barrell of monkeys. He's based on the same mold as Tracks, but there are a number of new parts:

- Head (obviously)
- Wingtips on car doors
- Front bumper/feet
- Back of legs (now has a C-clip connector for his tools, and the wheels can rotate down)
- Spoiler (the panel it's connected to no longer rotates)
- Wrenches/exhaust pipes/guns instead of rockets
- Knees (bend the other way now)

If that wasn't enough, Wheeljack also has a different key transformation step to make him look even less like Tracks - this time, the hood of the car forms his shins, rather than the back of the legs, like Tracks. Also, the leg remolding has made its so his legs don't extend as far, making Wheeljack fairly short for a Deluxe Autobot that's not Bumblebee or Cliffjumper, but it's not a real bother.

While Tracks and Wheeljack have been somewhat similar over the years, this is the first time they have actually shared a mold, and while Tracks was both revealed and released first, how great Wheeljack has turned out makes you wonder which character the mold was initially intended for. The end result, though, is that it doesn't matter; unlike with Universe Sideswipe and Sunstreaker (where Sunstreaker ended up less like his initial G1 design due to transformation changes), neither character here suffers from being a remold of the other. They both look great and do a fantastic job of updating the originals. Here's hoping we get more remolds of this nature.