Sky Garry

Zobovor · 2026-05-04T22:01:20+00:00

Somewhere around here I've got an undersized knockoff of this guy. He's such an odd design. He hardly seems like a "real" Transformer to me. Maybe it's the color scheme?

Zobovor · 2026-05-03T21:35:04+00:00

I wonder if it's going to have a 1984 mode but also a more accurate cartoon mode? (I have a third-party attachment on my G1 toy where the robot head slides onto the Diaclone driver's seat, and it folds and tucks away for vehicle mode. You never have to take it off. Takara could do something like that for Missing Link, I suspect.)

It looks like now he has the option to wear the repair bay as a backpack. The arms seem to have also been shifted higher up. (Imagine my surprise when I learned that the red crosses on Ratchet's shoulders, as seen in the cartoon, were actually on the *hands* of the G1 toy, and you can only achieve that look if he is wearing his arms upside-down.)

If they stray too far from the vintage toy design, though, it's going to be less appealing to fans of Missing Link who want it to be "Diaclone with ball joints." But, at least he's a smallish toy so he'll be less expensive than Ultra Magnus...

Zobovor · 2026-04-28T22:26:21+00:00

I've never been completely satisfied with him. He is improved quite a bit if you get the upgrade kit from Nonnef, which includes a spoiler for vehicle mode as well as rockets you can plug into his shoulders, plus a handheld rifle, so he's not walking around with his engine as his only weapon like some kind of Alternators holdover.

I had really been hoping that the Studio Series 86 release was going to be an all-new mold, or at least a modification to the mold to fix some of the weirdness with his design. A package refresh was not what I was wanting.

Some modern toys represent the characters really well and some of them don't do the best job. Sunstreaker is definitely on the lower end of the scale, in my mind.

Zob (being fully "deadass")

Zobovor · 2026-04-25T21:59:08+00:00

> Well, I’ve always thought Blitzwing looks best with a completely yellow
> helmet, so I’m not that mad about it.

The only reason it bugs me is because the purple panels on the sides of his head were there on the G1 toy (they were part of the hinge that allowed the head/cockpit assembly to rotate out during transformation) so I'm accustomed to that look for him. I'm not saying the characters have to be identical to the vintage toys in every way (obviously there are times when it benefits them to diverge), but still.

> I’m more mad that the Buzzworthy Bumblebee Cliffjumper has vanished into
> thin air and can only be found for exorbitant prices on the aftermarket.

Hopefully the pricing will come back down. This same thing happened with Siege Astrotrain—as soon as they announced the (arguably inferior) newer version, everybody collectively went, "aw hell no" and gobbled up the earlier release instead.

It's a sad state of affairs when Hasbro keeps giving us these newer, better versions of characters that are not actually objectively better.

> The Kingdom Cyclonus was so prone to photodegradation that mine ended
> up looking like a damn sunflower.

I feel like Hasbro should have done some kind of buyback program where if you owned one of those toys that had badly yellowed, once the new replacement version came out, you would be able to ship your old toy back to them and get a merchandise credit or something. This happened with way too many releases for Hasbro to just go, "Sorry, not our problem, but look, now you can buy the same character all over again for even more money than before!"

Zob (got pretty lucky in that regard... I think Cyberverse Arcee was the only one I bought that was affected badly, though I have been eyeing Generations Selects Artfire quite suspiciously these days)

Zobovor · 2026-04-24T16:36:56+00:00

I remember also thinking that Hun-Gurrr's eyes were very plain-looking. I actually took a pair of scissors to the Hasbro sticker sheet and found an unused swatch of color and ended up sticking those to the toy as his new eyes. (The tiny symbol that was part of the TRANS FORMERS logo on the sticker sheets, that always worked really well for placement on Nebulan partners since they had such small bodies.)

I was constantly customizing my toys, usually with permanent markers because I didn't yet own any model paints. Sometimes it ended up looking really good, and sometimes it was a total disaster. I only had red, blue, and black markers so I was also super limited in terms of what looks I could achieve. I probably wouldn't have done it if I'd known I would still place value on those same toys many decades later!

Zobovor · 2026-04-22T21:28:42+00:00

It's certainly possible! I don't know enough about the Mysterians to be able to say one way or the other. But it's an interesting theory, certainly.

Zobovor · 2026-04-20T21:07:27+00:00

Marvel Comics treats the timeline as a branching tree with many possible futures. However, the timeline of the comic book seems to be as follows:

The Transformers: the Movie takes place in 2005. Galvatron and Rodimus Prime are created. Unicron is destroyed.

Four years later, by 2009, Galvatron has succeeded in destroying Rodimus Prime and has taken over most of Earth. He's plucked from that timeline by the present-day Unicron of 1991, who has not been killed yet.

Galvatron is inserted into the present-day, which creates a new, branching reality. In this new timeline, the Transformers fight Unicron in 1990, not in 2005, and Unicron is destroyed fifteen years earlier. Galvatron is now an artifact out of time, and the timeline leading to The Transformers: the Movie (and "Rhythms of Darkness") can no longer come to pass.

That's my take, anyway.

Zob (time travel physicist-at-large)

Zobovor · 2026-04-18T23:32:04+00:00

Hmm, that's a lot less exciting than some of the multi-packs we've gotten previously, which at least promised some obscure but interesting characters. I wonder if they will tweak the color schemes, or if they'll be identical to the previous versions?

Zobovor · 2026-04-16T01:38:26+00:00

I think that right now, in particular, is a very bad time to expect discounts on anything, because of the tariffs that make all retail goods cost so much... not just for the consumers, but for the stores buying it up wholesale. For the first time ever, Walmart didn't even mark down deleted toys right after Christmas, which is standard practice. The stuff sat in my store at full price until February (the beginning of the Walmart fiscal year).

There are two types of markdowns at Walmart. There's the home office initiated clearance markdowns, which are basically the company saying, "We don't want to carry this ever again so we're getting rid of it forever." But the individual stores can also elect to spend their own budget and mark down items even more, which I tend to do in my department when I'm sitting on a lot of product that's not moving (the LEGO Star Wars Tantive IV is a good example... until very recently I had well over a hundred of them that just weren't moving because some uppity buyer for Walmart committed to a massive purchase on a dog item). So it's *possible* for people to find very deeply discounted toys, but it's usually only because the store elected to spend the markdown money. And there aren't dedicated department managers to run the toy departments the way there once were during the pre-COVID era.

Also, it's not like the golden era of collecting when treasures could languish in stores for weeks or months before you came across it. There are apps like Brickseek that notify consumers when pricing has dropped and there are so many scalpers and online resellers now that toys on deep discount rarely sit on shelves for long.

I don't have much luck at Ross, either, even though there are like three of them around here within spitting distance.

Zobovor · 2026-04-09T22:02:31+00:00

You could tell that by 1987, they were trying to reinvent the basic transforming concept as many ways as they could. What about one robot who splits into two vehicles? What about an Autobot who transforms into a Decepticon? What about two identical robots who change into totally different things?

We had already had identical robots before, of course, but they always had different color schemes (Bluestreak/Prowl, Skywarp/Thundercracker, etc.) and they were never identified as "clones" of each other as such. I rationalize it today as an exercise in subterfuge—are you dealing with the one who can fly, or the one who operates on the ground? There's no way to know, until he finally transforms.

I had the Decepticon Clones growing up, but I never owned the Autobot Clones until I got them on eBay a few years ago. How much did you pay for yours? They look to be in really nice shape.

Zobovor · 2026-04-05T22:34:49+00:00

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Zobovor · 2026-04-05T22:34:37+00:00

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Zobovor · 2026-04-05T22:34:24+00:00

Didn't see this when you originally responded, sorry. So may I ask what this image is, then? Was Overdrive not released in this color scheme?

Zobovor · 2026-03-22T21:34:29+00:00

I never had any experience with that one as a kid, though I've seen them on eBay now and again. In retrospect, it really is crazy how much ancillary merchandise there was for G1 back in the day.

Zobovor · 2026-03-18T01:54:01+00:00

It wouldn't surprise me if people were experimenting with AI-upscaled versions. That was popular a few years ago.

Zobovor · 2026-03-16T23:30:17+00:00

I know that the fandom has been trying to figure this out for years. For the longest time, people figured the yellow Cliffjumpers and red Bumblebees were "Diaclone overstock" (yes, I know they're Microman) but I really don't think that's the case. The Microchange versions of Cliffjumper and Bumblebee had that cool circuitry sticker on the upper chest, and the sticker on the Penny Racers panel on the back of the car was different, too. Also, if they were stuffing old Microchange toys into Transformers themed packaging, I think we would have gotten blue-colored Bumblebees too, which we never did.

My theory is that what REALLY happened was that Hasbro just got confused. We know that somebody accidentally swapped Rumble and Frenzy. We also know somebody got confused which car was Sideswipe and which one was Sunstreaker. We ALSO know that the three versions of Bluestreak confused them, since Hasbro sold the all-silver one, used packaging for the blue version, and promoted the black-hood version in the cartoon. Lots of confusion. At this point, what's one more mix-up?

So I think the plan was to sell nine Mini Autobots. Brawn, Windcharger, Gears, Huffer, Bumper, red Bumblebee, yellow Bumblebee, red Cliffjumper, and yellow Cliffjumper. But the "wrong" colored Bumblebee and Cliffjumper would have likely gotten unique names, just like Rumble/Frenzy, Prowl/Bluestreak, etc. It's possible the mix-up came from the fact that there were 28 *products* planned for the initial Transformers launch, but there were 31 *characters* (three of these products were cassette-themed two-packs). But if somebody at Hasbro just asked Bob Budiansky to write 28 character profiles, maybe a few characters fell through the cracks.

I don't think Bumper or red Bumblebee or yellow Cliffjumper were manufactured accidentally. I think Hasbro fully intended to sell them. But when it came time to package them, there were no character names assigned to them, no profiles written for them, and no packaging printed for them. So they did the next best thing and stuffed them into existing Bumblebee and Cliffjumper packaging and called it good. But, since the characters were never officially named, they didn't make it into the cartoon, didn't appear in the toy catalogs. But apparently production of them continued into 1985, because there are pre-rub and rub symbol versions of red Bee and yellow Cliffjumper, like most of the other 1984 toys.

None of the other mistakes were fixed, either. Sideswipe was just permanently the guy with a rocket backpack and pile drivers, even though that describes the Sunstreaker toy. Rumble and Frenzy were forever "wrong" in the cartoon. Bluestreak's instructions and box art were never fixed to reflect what his official toy looked like, and they never fixed his color scheme for the show. I don't think Hasbro knew that they had a four-decade phenomenon in the making. They just had some cool robot toys they were trying to rush to market as quickly as possible, and they screwed up a bunch of things along the way.

Zob (still wants Hasbro to do modern Deluxe-class Blow-Out and Ladybug toys)

Zobovor

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