Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Latest Acquisitions - Combiner Wars wave 1

I haven't been posting about the toys. It's been more work for me to walk over, grab my camera, taking a few pics, resizing them, uploading, than it is to draw pictures and edit them and then upload them...

Okay, what REALLY is going on: drawing is just WAY. TOO. FUN. I am having a blast belting out dopey robots and Mort Inkingbot comic strips. Also, since I wasn't all that impressed with the lone figure from the new cartoon that I purchased, beyond Combiner Wars, I'm just interested in buying new figures.

And even with Combiner Wars, I'm..."meh." I never liked the Scramble City figures nor the combiners they...combined into. So with the new deluxes, I picked up Alpha Bravo and REALLY dug him, and still do. Silverbolt, the Voyager center figure of the combiner? Pretty good. Pretty cool.

Skydive and Firefly from this wave are airplanes and...this is where the series loses me. The transforming is similar to Alpha Bravo's, but like their original Scramble City counterparts, they looks like blocky robots with airplanes attached. They exist to be limbs. They're not more impressive than that. The plane parts are either flimsy wings or shells on their backs. The robot body is virtually the same for all of them, yet the transformation from robot to vehicle don't seem as fun for these two planes as it does for Alpha Bravo.

The last figure in this wave is Dragstrip, who is the Decepticon race car that forms part of Menasor. He's kind of an ugly robot, but as a figure he's very solid. His race car mode is also pretty awesome. I don't know why some of these figures seem flimsy in one form or another (Skydive & Firefly, so far) while others are consistent in both vehicle and robot form (Dragstrip, the still ultra fun Alpha Bravo). 

If the last Aerialbot is as weak as Skydive/Firefly, then I might pass on the rest of this series, save for a few figures like First Aid (for the MTMTE shelf), and if there's anything truly different beyond color themes and new heads. Will getting a new Mirage or Sunstreaker that are repaints of Stunticons be worth it? Open ended!

FINALLY! Powerglide. He looks like his G1 bad self, he's got a 3rd mode where he's kind of a weird shotgun for Superion. His tailfin fell off during transformation, so there's a bit of flimsiness, so please be careful. I never got the overly large Universe figures from a few years ago, but I like having a little version that replaces the G1 minibot (of which is broken, D'oh!).

Okay, so, bought some toys, enough to make a (slightly mismatched) Combiner, and some are cool and some are not, and I'm probably going to skip a few figures. Powerglide is pretty cool too. I am looking forward to Ultra Magnus and Devastator.

Not much else to add. More silly drawings soon.