This is a lot...!

Toyfair 2017! Man oh man did Hasbro show off a ton of TF product. Firstly, RiD Combiner Force gets some real combiners:

This here is Ultrabee, who interestingly gets away with only four components by using the appropriately larger Grimlock as a pair of pants, almost Energon-style. It's pretty neat!

Motormaster! I like his look.

Menasor is interesting - not as good as I'd like but it's nice to see this combiner that hasn't seen much action outside of G1 get a new look.

Cyclonus! I'll get the legion toy and hope for a Voyager, but this is pretty neat...he forms the torso of:

Galvatronus! Holy crap, I can't believe this guy made the multiversal jump so quickly, and with new-character limbs to boot! The head favors Cyclonus over Galvatron more than I'd like, but otherwise this is really cool.

Bee looks GREAT. So much better than either AoE mold, I may actually buy this despite having too many BBs already.

Sqweeks! I think that's how you spell it. This is a pretty awesome toy; it's much more fun looking than ROTF Wheelie was and has more going on than Legion Fixit.

TR Wave 4

So the current pics are mostly low quality, but over the last few days we've gotten confirmation of TR wave 4 for all size classes.

The Titanmasters were already confirmed at NYCC as Repugnus and Shuffler (Skytread and Nightbeat are recirculated as the other members of the case).

The new member of the legends class is Throttlebot Chase with a new name as a new-head retool of Bumblebee. 

The deluxe wave is where most of the new info is; as of NYCC we only knew of Perceptor. Now we have learned of Kup, Topspin, and Krok and Quake, pretty much in that order. Kup was "reserved" for the cover art of the last TFCC magazine cover and then Ben Yee was allowed to run a review on his site. Topspin showed up on the back of some other toy's box as a co-sell, and now the latter two toys have been shown. Both Kup and Topspin are new molds, Krok is a new-face retool of Skullcruncher and Quake is the same for Hardhead. Of all of these, I think I'm the most excited for Krok. He has of course been a pretty important MTMTE character for years now, which landed him a TFCC toy that I wasn't quite interested in. This new toy plays off his name and Gatoraider partner by making him based on Skullcruncher. His color scheme is great too; the gator mode should look really cool. I've never liked Quake's colors, so while I like the Hardhead mold and should be interested in a Decepticon version of it, Quake isn't the best. He isn't ruled out but he's not a big draw either. Topspin, however, is the least interesting of the wave for me. I've never been a big fan of the Jumpstarter toys, and Topspin is definitely the worse of the two just because of how weirdly undefined his altmode is. The Generation FoC toy got around this by making him a remold of Blastoff, but this new toy pretty faithfully replicates the original's design to my chagrin. I do like his guns, though, and hopefully his existence means we get a nice Twin Twist sooner than later.

Kaiser Kringle

Just ordered Liokaiser! He'll be my Christmas present this year.

Megatron: a Retrospective

I don't know what it is. Be it my steadfast inability to put down CW Armada Megatron, my admiration of Classics Megatron's lightpiping, or tinkering around with TR "Nucleon," I've got Megatrons - and Galvatrons! - on the brain. 

As such, over the next several weeks (months? Years?) I am going to focus on different Megatron and Galvatron toys, especially those that have especially captured my imagination and managed to stay in my play/display rotation more than most. I'm also really looking forward to TR Voyager Megatron, and am very close to biting the bullet and purchasing the One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall Platinum set with its half-assed Repaint of Classics Optimus but terrific repaint of Classics Megatron. Recently a new Masterpiece Megatron has been revealed by Takara, but I've no real interest in that.

Do the Shuffle (or, NYCC 2016: Hasbro Does it Again)

Well, Hasbro was back at NYCC this year! After last year's great introduction to Titans Return, this year they continued the steady drip of new product info that kind of started at Botcon earlier this year, continued at SDCC and most recently appeared at Cybertron Con.

Let's start with Shuffler, shall we? This Titanmaster was new to me, but his accessory is a fantastic little mammoth/tank, and just look at that head sculpt! It's so evil! What a great addition to the Decepticons, I thought, especially with yet more purple on the shelves. So I looked him up on the wiki last night and discovered a couple of things:

A) Shuffler's mammoth accessory is pretty accurate to the original mammoth mode seen above! The only real difference is the molded tank treads and gun barrels. 

B) His new head mode is way better than the original. Just look at that thing! Big improvement while keeping the tusk/trunk motif.

C) HE'S A FRIGGIN' AUTOBOT! I can't believe it. This dude looks like nothing less than Crashbash's cousin and looks mean as hell and he's an autobot. Well, not in my house. 

Here's Brawn, who now amusingly has both a Titanmaster toy and legends toy in the same line. This mold look good enough, but I'm not a huge fan of the character and I hope we get an Outback remold.

Doublecross, as seen in that one leak at the end of April. Again, looks ok but I don't really care about him.

Triggerhappy got leaked when Doublecross & Co. did, but these pics make him look better than ever. He has a really great jet mode and the bot mode has some cool weapons options. Don't care much about the character, but unless he gets rereleased as a more appealing character/deco, I may get this one for the mold alone.

Perceptor! This one is too good. Pretty sure he's the first TR deluxe triple changer and he's a big improvement over the RTS toy though I wish he had his AHM reticle. Not much else to complain about, and one of my few Autobot must-haves for the line.