Combiner Wars Wheeljack (or, why bother painting a $15 fig?)

[JediTricks]

TFW2k5 got in-hand shots of CW Wheeljack:

http://news.tfw2005.com/2016/01/08/comb ... ges-307495

There's a lot of new molding on him.

Unfortunately there's not a lot of new paint on him, specifically his blank chest windows that make this $15+ figure look like a Happy Meal toy. His alt mode has no sponsor logos anywhere, and his race number is in the most bland, simple block font ever. You can see in the sculpt where some of that paint was supposed to go, but then the budget wall hit hard and they decided that 15 cents extra was too much to spend to make it look right, despite the fact that the base design is almost at double digits in a single year.

[Dominic]

Stuff like this makes me hope that "Sins of the Wreckers" goes bad. (Seriously, give me reason to be done with TF. Go on Hasbro. Try me.)

Joking aside, the longer I go without seeing new stuff I care about, the less I care about the older stuff.

[JediTricks]

Stuff like this makes me hope that "Sins of the Wreckers" goes bad. (Seriously, give me reason to be done with TF. Go on Hasbro. Try me.)

Joking aside, the longer I go without seeing new stuff I care about, the less I care about the older stuff.

So you are finding your interest in TF failing, or your interest in accurate Wheeljac, or your interest in Wheeljack at all?

[Dominic]

My interest in TF as a whole. The longer the times between me being impressed (or even just habitually interested), the less interested I am. This has been my pattern for as long as I can recall. (I no longer care about Games Workshop after "Horus Heresy" went, and remained, below my minimum standard for interest.)


With TF, there has been something consistently available since 1995. (When BW dropped, I had more or less moved on after G2 ended. And, "Beast Wars" happened to be convenient enough as I was still in to toys and comics at the time.)

Now, I am trying to cut back and purge to begin with.

"Transformers" has not impressed me for over two years. The comics have been junk (at exactly the moment that Marvel was doing better stuff and DC would publish the occassional gem like "Multiversity"). The toys have been getting more expensive while getting worse. (Wheeljack is wholly consistent with the trend from the last 3 or 4 years.) The last time there were no comics (post Dreamwave), the toys were enough to hold my interest. At times when I did not care about the toys, there were comics.

Now, the biggest thing holding my interests is a limited series. That is followed by international reprints that are sporadically available and partly reliant on pre-exising interest (which is fading).

[Shockwave]

Well my interest is still holding, but as for the CW updates of some of these characters... yeah, no. I can't see paying $15 for a Wheeljack that's inferior to the one I already have. Same goes for most of the '84 characters (Prowl, Sunstreaker, Hound, Mirage). Hell even, Trailcutter is an improvement over the upcoming CW figure.

That being said, I'm predicting it now: Sky Lynx will be remolded into Hun Grrr. I could just see that mold easily being redone. That would likely mean Terrorcon limb bots. I would also hope for a Piranhacon at some point, but that will probably be a ways off if ever.

[JediTricks]

Funny how faith works. I'll be very shocked if Hasbro invests that tooling into Hun-Gurr or any of the Terrocons, especially when we already know Titans Return is coming soon.

I am getting Hound, but I think that's it. This line feels like it is petering out in spectacularly disappointing fashion.

[Onslaught Six]

Sky Lynx's inevitable remould is Deathsaurus/Deszarus, and the main guy of Liokaiser--might be one in the same, too.

This was going to have more paint, but they really cheaped out hard. Considering the extremely lukewarm reception of the Wave 1 Autobots and the fact that this will likely be the last CW wave--last waves being notorious for little distribution anyway--they may have figured no one would care.

[Shockwave]

I have hard time imagining that they would give us a new Computron and not somehow work a new Abominus in too. Even if they just retool the existing molds into "animalized" vehicles.

[Onslaught Six]

I think Liokaiser is the replacement.

[Shockwave]

That's weird. Although in hindsight, they've already done some weird things in this line. I mean, did we really need either Optimus Maximus or Galvatronus? And what happened with Galvatronus anyway? We never did get limbs for Cyclonus (yeah, I know they did in Japan, but here we got nothing). I much rather would have seen Abominus and Pirhanacon. Seriously, something with animal alt modes would have allowed for a lot more diversity. I dunno, on the one hand we got some pretty good stuff like Devastator and Superion and Bruticus and Defensor but then there's all the weird stuff as well.