-thanks Heroic Decepticon for the coffee shoutout in his awesome 2 part SKIDS review (I linked part two, with the leg fix for Generations Skids. You can find part 1.).
-And now I can't wait for Skids. He looks AWESOME in those pics (double good jorb, Heroic D!). So many TF fans have posted about how awesome Skids is in More Than Meets The Eye and Hasbro responded (or already had plans, who knows, who cares) and it looks like they hit a home run. (My expectations are high.)
-Eric of Til All Are Mine is all "when are we gonna podcast? when are we gonna podcast?" So we'll record Robots In Cahoots #8 probably this weekend.
-Make sure you're hitting the list of blogs on the right sidebar (scroll down a bit, you'll see it). Lots of good stuff lately.
-Now, I saw Optimal Omega's post about 3rd party stuff and I was going to argue with him, but I actually pretty much agree. He included a pic of iGear Brawn and I LOVED iGear Brawn. I disagree that iGear Brawn is Legends size. He's Classics Bumblebee size. THE JUMP:
But I DO agree that 3rd party is getting to be too much. I mean, WAY too much. Why is there a GIANT and a HERCULES? One of those is enough. We're getting Generations Skids and soon a Tailgate and Swerve and a Voyager Whirl (the former, legends size, I'm thrilled about; the latter not so much)...Hasbro is giving us figures on characters who are tons of fun in the very enjoyable More Than Meets The Eye comic, maybe Perfect Effect could ease off and let Hasbro give us a Leader size Fort Max and screw it up before jumping in with their own.
"But 3rd party figures fill in the gaps Hasbro hasn't, and 3rd party listens to the fans and gives them what we want!" Yeah, maybe they do. And I've bought a few and I've gushed over them. But now that I look at my shrinking collection, I noticed that those were the first to go. Yup, I sold iGear Brawn. And I LIKED the figure, a LOT. Buuuuut iGear flooded their OWN market with four more figures and at 10 bucks each more per figure. And the pics of that Swerve? "The fans" only "want" Swerve because of MTMTE, and iGear dropped the ball by not matching Swerve's head with the design in that comic. That's just my opinion. But throwing FOUR figures at us right after iGear Brawn, with the only one that I wanted at $54 when it was introduced (that might not have been up to them, but still...), well, it was too much. This is a fun HOBBY but I have other interests and my goal to get a CHUG set of figures based on the G1 1984/1985 characters is now being fulfilled by Hasbro.
Don't get me wrong, because most of these are interesting, some of these are GREAT, and the accessories like HeadRobots are clever and do add to giving CHUG figures a G1 look. I wouldn't look down on ReproLabels and definitely have been scouring 3d printer services for fan designed weapons and parts. And I have turned regular Hasbro figures into customs of figures that haven't been/won't be released, some in the same spirit as 3rd party efforts. But that's because when *I* customize (well, ruin) a figure, that's ME, and it's not costing me much. (And it's fun.)
THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN however has to be the SXS Gears and now Swerve. These are prototypes, right? Because these look like crap. Like total crap. Even if they didn't look flimsy, which they DO, the head sculpts are either creepy or lame. The TFW article cites Swerve's popularity in MTMTE, but he's popular because he's funny and adorable. HERE HE IS NEITHER! The Legends sized Hasbro Swerve, and we're talking Legends which is by TF fandom definition "cheap," looks miles and miles better than this. This looks like a KO. Like a crappy gooey-gross-melty-plastic-feeling probably smells bad KO. Eww.
You get the idea. And the idea for me is that 3rd party is, technically, knockoff. They are imitating Transformers. It might be someone else's design and in most cases they've put a LOT of work into it, a lot of thought, and their product is actually stellar and solid, but they're not Transformers.
So, no more 3rd party figures for me. I mean I'll look, I'll point my finger and laugh, but I'm just not going to spend the money and show a little restraint now that Hasbro is giving the CHUG line some good stuff.
Okay, here's a silly page. Not that silly, I think. It's super late as I type this and they're not all winners. Though: am I creating fanfic where Arcee & Sideswipe are a couple? Or is it just the two of them rubbing Chromia's disinterest into Bumblebee's face? (It's the latter.)
(Yes, I rail against 3rd party in this post. I'm aware of the irony of my "customizing" this comics page. I'm a goofball, what do you want?)
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