On Monday, August 31, 2020 at 10:48:41 PM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> Saw four of these guys on the shelf at work today. Now there are three. I didn't really need another Blaster, but thirty bucks really isn't a lot of money. It's hard for me to pass up minty new G1 reissues when I see them on the shelf. They're just so beautiful.
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> So if you've bought any of the Walmart reissues, you'll pretty much know what to expect here. The packaging is similar, but not identical, to the G1 packaging from 1985; there are
telltale differences like the dual language text, the fact that he now "converts from radio to robot and back" instead of "transforms" (Hasbro doesn't want to use the term in the lower-case for fear of diluting the trademark), and the tiny disclaimer at the bottom that he "does not operate as radio or cassette player."
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> Aside from a facsimile of the original box art (which seems severely hypersaturated), it looks like the original 1985 photography is used on the package. It's an early Blaster before the rub symbols were affixed to the toys from that year, and he has a black tuning knob, a separate piece, a holdover from the Microman toy design (the final G1 product had a red tuning knob which was the same piece of plastic as the body).
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> I can't speak definitively about the history of Blaster reissues since I only have the original G1 edition from 1985 and the original Takara reissue from 2006 that came with Steeljaw. There was another reissue in 2010 and 2015, so I guess at this point they're just popping Blaster out every five years. However, the three toys I've got represent a span of 35 years so it's still a pretty good sampling from over the years and shows how he's evolved.
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> The 2020 version is a bright red with a bright yellow cassette door, a bit more vibrant than the colors of the 1985 release. The difference isn't nearly as jarring as the difference in color on other Walmart reissues, like Devastator or Astrotrain. The legs were sort of a swirly silver plastic during G1, like the chestplate for Bruticus, but now the color is an off-grey with some tiny metallic flecks mixed in, similar to the style of plastic used for G1 Thundercracker. It's a brownish-grey that reminds me of the color used for the Titans Return version of Powermaster Optimus Prime.
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> The two struts that connect together to form the radio handle have been modified so that they now pop off very easily. The handle pieces were previously connected via thick plastic bars, but now those bars are merely tiny plastic nubs. Also, the sliding black bar that forms the center of the handle was very badly stuck on my toy, and required a lot of force to get it unstuck. It's fine now, though.
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> Blaster was one of the few G1 toys who didn't have any consumer-applied stickers; like Perceptor, all of his labels were applied at the factory. Where they were paper labels for G1, they've been replaced with metal foil labels for the 2020 reissue (which has, I believe, been the case with all the Walmart reissues so far). The color of the blue stickers on his shoulders is a markedly darker shade than the 1985 toy. And, naturally, he's got the new-style rub symbol that turns red, rather than the old liquid crystal sticker that turned to shades of brown and green and blue.
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> My toy is rather liberally bathed in mold-release oil. He's very greasy to the touch. I have a longhaired cat named Rainbow (she's grey) whose fur is exceptionally fine, and it's lighter than air, so whenever she walks by, it just floats through space until it lands on Blaster and sticks to him. Possibly forever.
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> But, the upshot of this is that all of his joint movement is exceptionally smooth. His arm sections slide up and down freely. His cassette buttons all work beautifully. The way it's supposed to work is you press the PLAY button, which will remain locked in place; the middle pair of buttons, the STOP button, will unlock the PLAY button; the EJECT button functions as STOP button but also makes the cassette door spring open. A lot of people think Blaster was retooled at some point during G1 to lock his cassette door shut; I've never seen evidence of this, and it's likely those toys were simply not adequately lubricated.
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> This is something like the twelfth time this mold has gone into production (if you include Microman and the various editions of Twincast) but the mold is still in surprisingly good shape. Usually, you start to see pock marks or mismatching parts or other evidence of mold degradation by this point, but the parts on the new Blaster fit together just as well as the original..
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> Rather than reproducing the original G1 instructions, which were drawn in 3/4 view, the Blaster reissue uses different front-facing illustrations. (Blaster has been reissued a bunch of times so I'm not sure whether these drawings are new for this reissue or whether they've been used in the past.) Notably, the instructions are wrong; they say nothing about collapsing the knees or hips to complete the robot mode. (You tend to see lots of photos online of mistransformed Blaster toys, since people seem not to know that the shoulders and hips and knees are designed to telescope. It's weird to see this mistake reproduced by the official sources, though.)
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> Sadly, there are no reissue cassettes available for Blaster as of this writing. When Hasbro polled the fandom via Facebook and asked whether Blaster or Skywarp should be the next reissue for 2020, the majority was in favor of getting Blaster and his tapes. Maybe we'll get something later on. (Right now, the only way to get the reissue version of all four Autobot cassettes is to buy two different "Big Mission" 4-packs, since Blaster's tapes were split up between two different reissue sets. There aren't even unofficial Zhong Jin versions of them.)
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> This is one of the more affordable reissues we've gotten, since both Mr. Opt. P. and Soundwave originally retailed at closer to fifty bucks, and they're tiny toys compared to Blaster (who can easily go eye-to-eye with Devastator). Of course, Blaster's only die-cast metal parts are a couple of struts holding his arms in place, so that's probably a contributing factor.
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> I'd love to see Hasbro continue to offer G1 reissues to Walmart in some capacity. I'd really like to see them branch out into characters who haven't been reissued endlessly, though obviously they're limited somewhat by which molds are available. With the focus on The Transformers: the Movie characters coming for Studio Series, this might be a good time to bring back Ultra Magnus or Kup or maybe even Galvatron. But, I guess time will tell.
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> Zob (still has the G1 Blaster toy I got for my tenth birthday)

Very glad they decided to rerelease Blaster - despite his many, many reissues over the years, this is the first opportunity I've had to experience the mold.

Picked him up for $15 during Walmart's recent online sale (presumably initiated to compete with Amazon's Prime Day promotions), and he is easily worth twice that much.

His colors pop, his size has presence, and his transformation is sublimely G1 in all the best ways - intuitive, smooth, and fast. With a little more articulation (biceps, hips, knees), he would easily outcompete any number of current releases.

The lack of tapes is a disappointing oversight, and with the shift to Vintage Beast Wars, I wonder if Blaster is the last G1 release we will see for a while.

All in all, a fantastic Transformer who deserves to be on the shelves of more collectors and in the hands of more young fans.

On Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 10:05:14 AM UTC-6, Codigo Postal wrote:

> All in all, a fantastic Transformer who deserves to be on the shelves of more collectors and in the hands of more young fans.

I think, at one point, he was the one toy I wanted more than any other. I think I asked for him for my birthday in March of 1986, and I remember hoping against hope that he was somehow in the pile of wrapped gifts, despite one clearly being a telescope-shaped box and another being quite obviously a book...

My son was quite enamored with the G1 toy when he was three or four years old. He carried it around everywhere. It's the perfect size for little hands. He's 13 years old now, and I got him his own Blaster reissue. I don't know if he's as excited about it as he would have been ten years ago, but it's the thought that counts, I guess...

Zob (truth be told, he's all about Fortnite, mostly)