These two sets were originally supposed to ship in March 2022, but I guess Amazon was ready to ship early, and frankly I'm more than okay with that. (I think, right now, the online retailers provide themselves with an extra buffer, in anticipation of distribution and shipping delays.)

AUTOBOT JACKPOT and AUTOBOT SIGHTS

(It's not impossible for Hasbro to trademark a common word found in the dictionary, but couple a regular old word with "Autobot," a trademark they already own, and it basically grants them instant rights to that name.)

Anyway, Jackpot was one of the new characters introduced as an Action Master in 1990, depicted as a gambler with amazing luck. He's not been entirely ignored since then, and this also isn't the first time a Jazz toy was used to make a Jackpot toy (the Animated version of Jazz was turned into Jackpot for BotCon 2014), but this is the first version we've gotten of him for neo-G1.

The fiction attached to this toy is that a traveling Jackpot was struck by the same quantum surge that mutated the Beast Wars characters into Transmetals, and it granted him the ability to transform.

The first Jackpot toy we got couldn't transform, but he was designed in such a way that suggests he had a vehicle hood for a chest, a similar design philosophy shared with Jazz, Prowl, etc. So, using the Studio Series Jazz toy as the basis for this character wasn't a bad option. It's amazing how a new color scheme can almost make it look like a different toy.

All or most copies have a flaw in the design of the robot head. The halves of the mold for the helmet must have been slightly misaligned, because the robot head is molded with the left side slightly off-center and raised with respect to the right side. The head is a single piece of molded plastic, not two halves that could be disassembled and reconnected properly, so there's no practical fix for this problem. It's unfortunate. The new head sculpt is, of course, designed to resemble the head from the 1990 figure, right down to the way it resembles the butt-end of a Ferrari Testerossa.

In 1990, Jackpot came with an Action Master partner named Sights, a blue and black falcon. To complete the full homage, the Siege Battlemaster named Pteraxadon has been pressed into service again, making this the fourth iteration of the mold (after Terror-Daxtyl and Eneraxe). Pteraxadon has always reminded me a little bit of Sights, despite being a dinosaur instead of a bird, so this was a good bit of serendipity. The pteranodon mode transforms into either an axe or a gun that Jackpot can carry (a gun is a more suitable homage, of course). He comes with an orange blast effect that plugs into the axe blade, the same as the style that came with Pteraxadon.

Jackpot also comes with the same handheld gun as Jazz. His packaging shows it rendered entirely in blue plastic, but the final version is black plastic that's been painted blue, except for the peg-handles.

Transformation is the same as Jazz, of course. Warning: his car mode is not pretty. Mostly black, with bright yellow fenders and rocker panels, and orange headlights and windshield. Honestly kind of garish. He reminds me of the color schemes of a lot of the generic background characters I've done color models for. You just can't apply one character's color scheme to another toy and expect it to always look good. But, honestly, the ability for Jackpot to even be able to transform at all is kind of a bonus. I imagine most people will keep him in robot mode, because therein the homage lies.. You can mount either Sights or his handheld rifle to the hole in his roof.

This is one of those toys that definitely works better in robot mode than in vehicle mode. With that said, I always love a good Action Masters tribute. We just don't get them too often. Jackpot can finally join the ranks of only a select few, like Krok and Mainframe, who have managed to get a proper transforming neo-G1 toy after all these years.

ROAD RANGER AND PUFFER

We all know Hasbro wants to reuse designs and sell us the same toys as many times as is practical. All the 1984 Mini Autobots have ready-made, built-in redeco versions in the form of the 1986 Mini Autobots they were transformed into. Case in point: they sold us Kingdom Huffer, and then they sold us Kingdom Pipes. There's your twofer. Despite this, Hasbro wanted to sell us both Huffer and Pipes again. Not sure why. Maybe Amazon asked for some exclusives to sell again this year, and this was all Lenny Panzica could think of. Neither of these is an essential toy for anybody's collection, and most people probably don't even know who or what Puffer actually is.

The fiction attached to this set explicitly describes Road Ranger as a GoBot (the X-Dimension set from Takara in 2004 sort of danced around the issue, implying the characters were GoBots without coming right out and saying it) and that Puffer is in fact the mutated fusion of Huffer and Pipes together, merged together into Puffer as a result of the quantum surge. Creepy!

So, let's back up. In 2004, Takara had reissued a bunch of the original Mini Autobot toys (Cosmos, Huffer, Powerglide, Warpath, and Bumblebee) and somebody at Takara had the idea to do redeco versions of the toys, only to pay homage to the Tonka GoBots. (This was likely the brain child of Takara employee Hirofumi Ichikawa, who was unabashedly a fan of the American version of Transformers.) The vehicle modes were a good match, but the robot modes and color schemes were not. So, Bumblebee became Bug Bite (in white instead of yellow again); Powerglide became Bad Boy (in grey instead of dark green), Gears became Small Foot (in orange instead of red); Warpath became Treds (in dark green, which is correct), and Huffer became Road Ranger.

While the Tonka GoBots toy named Road Ranger was originally a red-and-blue flatbed tractor trailer, the eHobby version was black and orange, because why not. So, the Kingdom toy is a direct homage to the eHobby version. Unlike Kingdom Huffer, whose face is based on his cartoon look, Road Ranger here gets a head sculpt that's based more directly on the G1 Huffer toy, giving him a visor and a mask. It's a cool way of differentating the two toys a little bit. He's got some different color mapping this time, with a regular orange and a dark orange for his mid-torso and upper legs, and some red deco on his chest.

Road Ranger comes with all the same parts that Huffer did—the weird toothy shield thing and the weird Nerf Elite Splitstrike gun. (This in itself is kind of ironic, since the GoBots characters from the cartoon were infamous for almost never carrying sidearms. They could all shoot energy blasts from their fists.)

This toy doesn't look like the Tonka GoBot from 1983 named Road Ranger at all, but it's a good tribute to the eHobby toy. It's the second such tribute we've gotten, after Bug Bite, which makes me wonder if we might get tributes to all the X-Dimension GoBots eventually, once we get new versions of Powerglide and Cosmos and Gears. It could happen, right?

PUFFER

There are all these variations to the G1 toys when they were produced in different countries. The Mexican version of Prowl is an infamous example. Evidently, in some parts of Europe, instead of selling the proper version of Pipes, they just continued to manufacture Huffer, but started selling him in Pipes colors. (The name Puffer is a nickname, like Bumblejumper, that fans used to describe this version of the toy.) So, you'd think an official version of Puffer would be Kingdom Huffer in Pipes colors, right? Yeah, no. This is not that toy.

Instead, it's a version of Kingdom Pipes in a much lighter shade of blue. There are some other deco differences—he has a white body, and white head, and his arms are painted silver instead of being bare white plastic, as on the actual Pipes toy. The detachable smokestacks are also black this time. So, enough differences that he's certainly visually distinct. This time, the head sculpt is based on the G1 Pipes toy, with the eye visor and featureless mask, rather than the version from the cartoon that had separate eyes and a nose.

I'm not sure what about this toy, specifically, suggests that he's been fused with Huffer. He looks like Pipes with the brightness cranked up a bit. I guess this is a toy representing a character who only exists temporarily, like Tuvix from Star Trek: Voyager. I wonder how he behaves. Does he collect junk like motorized pencil sharpeners and musical snow globes and then just complain about them endlessly?

With all these tiny trucks on my computer desk now, I'm struck by the notion that they really should have remolded the Huffer truck cab headlights and front grill into something different for Pipes. Because right now, all four trucks pretty much look exactly the same, and it's a little disappointing.

Nobody needed these toys. They're so utterly inessential. I'm not sure why I bought them. But, I own them now. So, there's that.

Zob (well, it certainly won't be the last time I buy toys I don't need)

On Sunday, December 5, 2021 at 6:03:15 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> All or most copies have a flaw in the design of the robot head. The halves of the mold for the helmet must have been slightly misaligned, because the robot head is molded with the left side slightly off-center and raised with respect to the right side. The head is a single piece of molded plastic, not two halves that could be disassembled and reconnected properly, so there's no practical fix for this problem. It's unfortunate.

This problem has really been bugging me for a while now. It's such a glaring flaw in an otherwise great toy. Somewhat recently, I saw a fix that somebody had done (Reddit or Twitter, I forget which) where they'd taken the head from the 1990 version of Jackpot and grafted it to the body of the Golden Disk version. That looked like something I wanted to try, so I found a broken Action Master Jackpot missing an arm for like ten bucks on eBay.

The end result is great. I cut off the Action Master neck peg and drilled a hole into the head, and I inserted a new piece for the existing ball peg to pop into. The toy isn't able to transform while the new head is attached, but you can easily pop it off, or just not transform him.

I still can't believe such a mistake made it past quality control. Hasbro's usually a lot better than this. But, at least I was able to find a fix that made me happy.

Zob (ended up packing 11 boxes today, so that's a start)

On Saturday, February 19, 2022 at 6:08:04 PM UTC-8, Zobovor wrote:

> I still can't believe such a mistake made it past quality control. Hasbro's usually a lot better than this. But, at least I was able to find a fix that made me happy.

So you contact Hasbro about an unpainted hubcap on Selects Lift-Ticket but you let this fly?

On Sunday, February 20, 2022 at 11:57:09 AM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:
> So you contact Hasbro about an unpainted hubcap on Selects Lift-Ticket but you let this fly?

All the Jackpot toys are defective. Even if Hasbro sent me another one, it would have the same problem. At least with Lift-Ticket, maybe they will send me a new wheel or something.

On a related note, Big Bad Toy Store is usually very good about sending out replacement parts if you end up with a toy that has two left hands or something like that. But does anybody ever wonder how they come across their extra parts? Apparently they just open up another package and send it to you. They're having a sale right now on all the various toys they've done this with, and it's bizarre. Ninja Turtles missing arms and heads, Transformers missing their weapons, stuff like that. It's like the curtain has been pulled back.

Zob (one day I will start eating real food again, and it will be grand and glorious)

On Monday, February 21, 2022 at 4:25:09 AM UTC+1, Zobovor wrote:
> On Sunday, February 20, 2022 at 11:57:09 AM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > So you contact Hasbro about an unpainted hubcap on Selects Lift-Ticket but you let this fly?
> All the Jackpot toys are defective. Even if Hasbro sent me another one, it would have the same problem. At least with Lift-Ticket, maybe they will send me a new wheel or something.
>
> On a related note, Big Bad Toy Store is usually very good about sending out replacement parts if you end up with a toy that has two left hands or something like that. But does anybody ever wonder how they come across their extra parts? Apparently they just open up another package and send it to you. They're having a sale right now on all the various toys they've done this with, and it's bizarre. Ninja Turtles missing arms and heads, Transformers missing their weapons, stuff like that. It's like the curtain has been pulled back.
>
>
> Zob (one day I will start eating real food again, and it will be grand and glorious)

It seems that you can actually fix it somehow, since the head is actually two parts glued together and not a single piece, see post below. It seems like it can be pried apart with an Xacto-blade, trimmed on the inside and then re-glued in a more aligned fashion:

https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/generations-wfc-golden-disk-collection-jackpot-and-sights-amazon-exclusive.1224425/#post-19798986

On Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 2:36:14 PM UTC+1, Avaran wrote:
> On Monday, February 21, 2022 at 4:25:09 AM UTC+1, Zobovor wrote:
> > On Sunday, February 20, 2022 at 11:57:09 AM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail..com wrote:
> >
> > > So you contact Hasbro about an unpainted hubcap on Selects Lift-Ticket but you let this fly?
> > All the Jackpot toys are defective. Even if Hasbro sent me another one, it would have the same problem. At least with Lift-Ticket, maybe they will send me a new wheel or something.
> >
> > On a related note, Big Bad Toy Store is usually very good about sending out replacement parts if you end up with a toy that has two left hands or something like that. But does anybody ever wonder how they come across their extra parts? Apparently they just open up another package and send it to you. They're having a sale right now on all the various toys they've done this with, and it's bizarre. Ninja Turtles missing arms and heads, Transformers missing their weapons, stuff like that. It's like the curtain has been pulled back.
> >
> >
> > Zob (one day I will start eating real food again, and it will be grand and glorious)
> It seems that you can actually fix it somehow, since the head is actually two parts glued together and not a single piece, see post below. It seems like it can be pried apart with an Xacto-blade, trimmed on the inside and then re-glued in a more aligned fashion:
>
> https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/generations-wfc-golden-disk-collection-jackpot-and-sights-amazon-exclusive.1224425/#post-19798986

And how it looks disassembled:

https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/golden-disk-jackpot-revealed.1221111/page-32#post-19791367

I was iffy on this obscure character toy, but all this BS has convinced
me not to buy it.

On Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 10:33:43 AM UTC-7, Travoltron wrote:

> I was iffy on this obscure character toy, but all this BS has convinced
> me not to buy it.

Honestly, I don't blame you. They just need to never design a Transformer again whose head splits down the middle like that.

Zob (poor Jackpot, condemned to a life of bilateral asymmetry)

On Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 6:36:14 AM UTC-7, Avaran wrote:
> It seems that you can actually fix it somehow, since the head is actually two parts glued together and not a single piece, see post below. It seems like it can be pried apart with an Xacto-blade, trimmed on the inside and then re-glued in a more aligned fashion.

I appreciate you posting this link. But, even the fixed version looks bad to my eyes. It still has the seam going down the center of the helmet and face, interrupting the lines of the head-windshield. It's just poor design.. I'm happy with my Actionmasterified Jackpot.

Zob (he's stronger, faster, more alive)