Manic Ramblings and Delirious Ranting
Had a friend pick these up for me; they're apparently out... in Omaha,
Nebraska, at least. I bought Wave 4 directly from BigBadToyStore at
OTFCC. I'm through wasting my time looking for them in stores, when my
only option is Walgreens that restock maybe once a year and don't have
more than 2 or 3 different figures at a time anyway.
The wave includes:
Not a very exciting batch, really; Ratchet's the only one I *really*
wanted, but I figured the whole set was worth having to get Metroplex.
The way I figure it:
- Regular HOC guys are to cartoon-based scale with the original G1
combiner toys, so you can have HOC Prime fighting your G1 DEvastator.
- HOC Devastator and Omega are to reasonable scale with the original
Metroplex toy, and maybe Fort Max too, if you want to go by what the
cartoon and the package art imply, rather than by the height implied by
the human-sized Spike.
- HOC Metroplex is... crap, he's really too big to be in scale with Armada
Unicron, alas, unless you accept a *really* small Unicron (which does fit
with most images of him in the fiction, heh), but it's still the closest
fit we've got. MyClone Trypticon works a bit better with Unicron.
The card art on this wave is *terrible*. Past waves' art has been dull
but serviceable, being strictly based on the actual figures. These... at
least give them some new poses, which is nice, but the forms are rather
mangled. Ratchet has a bizarrely mishapen chest and head, with a face
that just needs a fu man chu to make him look like a Chinese warlord
(though at least they got rid of the ridiculous long legs of the toy.)
Devastator looks like he's about to topple over backwards from the weight
of his enormous chest plate.
Ratchet: He inherits Ironhide's bizarre proportions, unfortunately.
Thanks to Takara's fondness for obscure moments, he sports a welding tip
in place of his right hand. Despite all that, it's nice to have a Ratchet
that looks like Ratchet.
Omega Supreme: His thick proportions match his show appearance quite well
(though I always thought he looked a bit strange somehow on the show, too
man-in-a-suit somehow.) But... his face! What did they do to his face!!
It resembles no incarnation of him ever seen before. He's got big round
eyes and a big round open mouth and looks like the cutest widdle thing
ever, except he's Omega Supreme.
Devastator: Again, a good rendering of a character model I never liked
much. It's just so impossibly simplified compared to the "bizarre and
awkward" design described in his bio and exhibited by his toy. His head
especially looks awful; it's a flat-fronted block with a face sticking out
of it. He has goggles in this incarnation, though I think an overlong
paint ap on his nose might be accidentally keeping it from being a
cartoon-style visor. I've always preferred the visored look for Dev
myself, but the large goggle-eyes are good too.
Megatron: Whee, another Megatron. Laserbeak's a nice enough little
sculpt, but his feet are permanently molded to Megatron's arm. He can
detach from the feet, but, well, then he ain't got no feet. Megs has a
shiney fusion cannon now, with a little red paint ap on one end that
wasn't there before; he's also got a new arm sculpt.
Starscream: Whee, another Starscream. He gets new arms, a cape that gets
pegged in place by his wings, and... oops! They gave him the
Skywarp/Thundercracker head! Heh. The full-length cape cracks me up, as
does the fact that he's frozen in a half-second moment from a 30-second
scene from the movie, gesturing widely with one arm. This would be a neat
bonus piece for the regular Starscream figure, if it didn't have the
shoulder flares molded into it. Also, he's a slightly darker grey than
the original version.
Optimus Prime: Whee, another Optimus. He gets two new arms, neither of
which has his rifle, so that's something, I suppose. Pretty boring. His
left smokestack was bent by the packaging -- the bubble was actually too
small for it. Whoops.
Finally: will there be a Wave 6? The well of US-based characters that
Takara made is starting to dry, though as Sipher points out, there's
enough left to make another wave or two. I find it hard to believe that
they'd end the line with three minor remolds instead of putting Thrust and
Ramjet out. We'll see. Still, I've now got most of the figures that
really interested me personally, so future waves will have to have
something enticing (Scorponok pieces?) to get me to buy the whole
schlemiel. I already skipped a bunch, like Paradron Medic, the
MTMTE-weapon leaders, and the various PM Prime incarnations...
Back to Rob's Pile of Ramblings
Rob's Pile of Transformers: Manic Ramblings
re: Heroes of Cybertron Wave 5
2/10/04
- Ratchet
- Omega Supreme
- Devastator
- Megatron w/ Laserbeak
- Prime w/ communicator
- Starscream with corronation gear
- bits to make Metroplex