Yeeeaaahhh boooyyyyy!! This is a new vid of a brand new toy. I know, right, can you believe it? I found this feller and his wavemates at Toy Planet, the bitchingest toy shop in town. I'm glad that place exists.
The Prime line has already caused its share of controversy after the First Edition wave was cancelled in the States. I don't mean to sound like a dickhole, but I just can't bring myself to give a shit about that. The End.
Of all the toy-centric Saturday morning cartoons spawned from that strangest of decades, the 1980s, Transformers has proven to be probably the most imaginitive and enduring of the lot. Standing head and shoulders above the glut of muscle-bound, neon-clad archetypes, this is a franchise with its own world - a world huger than I ever imagined. With all that creativity shooting back and forth in red and purple laser beams for 25+ years, you can bet Hasbro's terrifyingly huge mechanical brain has dreamed up some pretty insane shit in its time. Here are a few bits and bobs that accompanied the actual toys and filled countless kids' worlds with crazy.
It's a funny old time to be alive, right? I mean, look at us all, gawping into our magical space-age typewriters and our giant skin-operated photo frames, screeching at all our mates in garbled moron code about our every single stupid bloody activity every single stupid bloody day. With such magnificent communication equipment at our constant disposal and incessant encouragement to tell everybody else exactly what we're thinking about absolutely everything, it's extremely easy for any ordinary human being to shit a giant cretinous clanger out of our brains from time to time. Speaking as an ordinary human being, I can comfortably say that the information superhighway is strewn with the reeking roadkill of what a colossal fucking idiot I can be. Let's look at some videos I made about my favourite luxury consumer products in which I got some extremely minor details a little bit wrong!
#1. The Ultimate Destructor's Defiantly Non-Static Head
Let's start with a very, very small error I made about a very, very big toy. This one isn't even a big deal, but I got it wrong and it bugs the shit out of me.
Ha ha ha! Look at me, prattling on about that thing like I know what I'm talking about. Armada Unicron is a breathtaking piece of hot plastic action, bristling with neat features and planet-shattering attitude (shattitude?) and I seriously wish I hadn't made this teeny tiny error. Skip the vid to about 3:25 and gaze in horror as I boldly claim that because of his blazing electronic eyes of hatred, he can't move his head.
Correction:
His head totally does move. Christ, you have no idea how much better that feels.
#2. Turns Out WWII Enthusiasts Dislike Poorly-Researched Throwaway Gags
When HFTD Highbrow showed up early last year, I thought it was the butt-ugliest robot I'd ever seen. It's a skinny, freakish, baby blue shambles of a thing, so it's a good job that it turns into a frigging amazing WWII fighter that's very nearly a P-38 Lightning and all the way a total babe.
Watch and snigger as my entire world collapses at the 3:30 mark.
Correction:
What I didn't know when I made that lame joke about the plane shooting itself down was that people who build military aircraft don't fuck about. The whole thing with the guns sitting behind the propeller was a thing that got figured out pretty quickly, and my ignorance to this fact coupled with my enthusiasm to parrot an old joke about a military Concorde scored me more bollockings from spitfire-savvy viewers than any other fuckup ever.
Look, I'm not very good at knowing things about real-world technology.
#3. That Bloody Clip
Masterpiece Skywarp encompasses everything that is lovely about being a Transformers collector. Big toys are ace, fighter jets are ace, things that are black and purple are ace, Skywarp is ace, and high-quality figures that are huge and stunning and beautiful... are ace.
Mm-mm. That's the good stuff. Except at 2:40, when I'm all "I don't know what this tiny black clip is for".
Correction:
Well, not really correction, because technically I didn't get it wrong. I just didn't know. But now I do. Oh God, do I know now. It's for attaching the Megatron gun that came with MP Optimus to the underside of the jet mode. After the video went live, I must have received fifty comments explaining in detail what a useless bellend I am for not figuring it out. I still get them to this day, at a rate of about three a month. Two years later.
Shoulda done my homework!
#4. Watashi Wa A Fucking Idiot Desu
This one turned into a bit of an epic, so I mercifully put it at the end. You're welcome. Honestly, feel free to duck out at any point.
Some people like things that are Japanese. That's fine. I like some things that are Japanese. Some people, however, insist on liking all of the things that are Japanese, and that is fucking bonkers. That's like saying that you like everything that's yellow, or everything that's on Channel 4, or everything that's longer than it is tall.
What I'm saying is that I enjoy the Transformers universe for what it is. It's as rich and varied as any fictional universe whose entire reason for being is to sell toys is likely to get. I recently picked up the entire All Hail Megatron comic series and managed to enjoy it, despite all the narky critiques I'd heard about it. I mean, I didn't know that the story ended in volume 2, with volume 3 being a sub-standard Spotlight collection and volume 4 entirely dedicated to cleaning up the massive, prodigiously stinking shit that McCarthy had left in the sobbing mouth and eyes of the established IDW canon.
Yeeeaahhh! Fuck you, Furman!
Anyway, one of the things that wound a lot of people up was this one guy Drift. Basically, McCarthy thought he could improve the TF universe a bit by sticking in a katana-wielding, seldom-speaking, morally-torn character laden with heavily Japanese design cues to pander to the Otakus. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I actually didn't find Drift anything like as unbearable as I expected to. Sure, the whole thing with Perceptor was a bit fucking mawkish, but Drift was by no means the Jar-Jar I'd braced myself for.
ANYWAY. Holy shit. It's obviously not Drift himself that's the problem. It's the ham-fisted insertion of a shitty version of an unnecessary external influence by some douchebag newbie writer with big ideas. I mean, there are several entireJapaneseversions of Transformers, and Transformers fans know about them. If we want to know what it's like when Japan does Transformers, we'll fucking well do it properly and get into the version that already exists.
Phew! This could have been its own post!
Ah, there I am as a younger man who still knew where his Murderface t-shirt was saying basically the same thing I just twatted on about for four paragraphs! Anyway, I drop the ball about 3:15 when I foolishly claim the slightest knowledge of something outside of Transformers. Y'know, something that actually might be useful in the real world. A language.
Correction:
That douchey decal actually translates to "Samurai". The reason I thought it said "Drift" was because I think I heard somebody say that the original concept art for the guy had the "Drift" kanji on it. I was pretty blown away by the level of arrogance this imbued in the character and revealed in its creator, and I was too enthused by the prospect of bitching about this on camera to even notice when they changed it. Yes, I am that much of a prick.
So, review #110 went live last night! Its subject is one fierce retool, Generations Sky Shadow. And yeah, we are carrying on as normal even though this is the first video for two months and the first blog entry in infinity, thanks for asking.
Be warned that the video contains a graphic first-person reconstruction of that time I fell down the stairs last summer after buying the original Thunderwing figure. I smashed my back in a bit, bruised a toe, and felt like a total muppet for the remainder of the day. It was horseshit.
Obviously it wasn't really Thunderwing's fault - it could equally have been the WFC Soundwave I picked up that day, but I've a feeling it was mainly down to my exuberant clumsiness and the quart of whisky. Still, the echo of embarrassment and lumbar discomfort that I experience whenever I catch a glimpse of his pallid, moderately disappointing chassis and gimpish Tygra face is real enough.
FUN FACT: This is the first donated figure I've reviewed where I forgot to flash the guy's name up at the end. So big ups to knucklesfan08, for he is a ledge!
