I'm so glad I preordered these from Hasbro Pulse, so I could pay slightly more for them and wait slightly longer for them than just picking them up at Walmart when they were released! (You can taste the sarcasm in the air, I trust.)

BURNOUT

Technically this toy is named "Diaclone Universe Burn Out," but I prefer to parse it as one word instead of two, because I'm arbitrary like that.

Skids is not a character who got a redeco during G1. If they had played their cards right, he probably could have been an early 1984 release and then they could have done a 1985 version in one of the many different Diaclone flavors, most likely using a different head. As it stands, Skids sort of straddled the line between the 1984 and 1985 product assortments.

However, the Transformers team has talked about how they usually suggest possible redeco toys to help recoup costs when they're developing ideas for which characters to reproduce, so telling the Hasbro higher-ups that Skids would be a one-and-done mold probably would have resulted in the Legacy toy never getting produced. So, sure, Skids has countless redeco possibilities! You could do a blue one, a red one, a silver one, a black one... and this is why Burnout exists. Evidently she's a female character, according to the blokes on the Hasbro livestream.

If we assume for argument's sake that the face-with-a-mouth is the Skids head design and the face-with-a-mask is the Crosscut head design, then teeeeeechnically during Diaclone we never got this version of the toy. There were black, blue, and red versions of Skids, and there were silver and red versions of Crosscut. So, there was no Diaclone black toy with the masked face. But, that's still what this toy is meant to represent. It's visually more interesting than doing a straight redeco of Skids in black. If we ever get a Deluxe-class Reboost (red) or a Deluxe-class Crosscut (silver), they'll likely use the masked head as well.

So, in vehicle mode, Burnout is black with red and silver racing stripes down the sides. It's essentially the same tampograph as the one used for Legacy Skids, except the insides of the door handles on Burnout remain unpainted. She has yellow and red tail lights that really pop, and a gunmetal front bumper with red turn signals and yellow headlights. It would have been nice to go differently to really distinguish her from Skids, maybe doing white headlights or something.

In robot mode, her black vehicle shell parts are complimented with off-black robot parts—the biceps, the fists, the shin guards for the legs, the hips and midsection. It's not a huge visual juxtaposition, but it's a little different from Skids and still authentic to the Diaclone toy. (Both Diaclone versions had red fists. Don't know why neither Skids nor Burnout have them. Honestly, I was hoping Burnout would had red hands so I could pop them off and give them to Skids!) She's also got silver and red painted deco on the fronts of her shoulders, looking a bit like those consumer-applied stickers you were supposed to slap on top of the shoulder screws on the G1 toy.

The head sculpt is new, featuring a helmet with horns on either side, a prominent mohawk, yellow eyes, and a silver mask. It sort of reads like an Optimus Prime head. Optimus has pretty much cornered the market on this look, and most other Transformers with masks have managed to avoid crossing into this territory (Star Saber is probably the closest character to having an Optimus-like face, and that was clearly a deliberate homage).

She comes with the same weapons as Skids—the single arm blaster, the dual barreled blaster, and the axe or sextant or whatever it's supposed to be. Same paint deco choices—silver painted weapons, clear blue axe/sextant. I suspect it may be useful to have two of these axe weapons so I can build symmetrical crossbows or something when I get enough Legacy parts. Her box artwork suggests that the nominal positioning of her weaponry is to stack the two guns together to form a triple-barreled blaster for her left hand, and for her to carry the axe as if it were a gun in her right hand. So there's that. It's different from Skids, certainly.

Burnout is, however, a completely inessential character. With no media appearances, there's not much point to her existence. We've gotten a fairly large assortment of pre-Transformers characters from Diaclone at this point—characters who theoretically *could* have existed, but never did—so she makes a good addition to that crowd. But not much else.

ROAD ROCKET

The toy's full name is "G2 Universe Road Rocket," but I'm not sure what distinguishes the G2 Universe from the G1 Universe. One is just a continuation of the other. Also, we've gotten various toys in G2 deco already (Megatron, Ramjet, Sandstorm, etc.) that weren't shunted to some alternate universe, so they haven't been entirely consistent. But, it could just be a trademark thing like "Autobot Hound." Maybe "Road Rocket" alone didn't pass the trademark check.

This mold was originally release as Prime Universe Arcee, a toy I had no interest in so I didn't buy it. One possible redeco idea the designers had floated was Action Master Axer, which makes sense inasmuch as the original toy did come packaged with a motorcycle. Then somebody else (I think Mark Maher) suggested the idea of making it either Road Pig or Road Rocket, and obviously Road Rocket was the better choice of the two due to his specific vehicle styling and the way the twin wheels end up behind his shoulders, similar to the original release as it came out in 1995.

As I am not at all familiar with Prime Universe Arcee, I am experiencing this toy design for the first time.

So as with all Velocitron toys, Road Rocket comes packaged in vehicle mode. He's approximately in the guise of a Kawasaki Ninja sport bike, if Kawasaki sold motorcycles that were made out of robotic body parts. The seat is pretty obviously a pair of arms, and the gas tank is pretty obviously a pelvis and pair of upper legs. I mean, I get that motorcycles are harder to do, because there's less vehicular real estate to work with, but this is very nearly a "this is a motorcycle because we say so" type of vehicle, only a step or two up from Iguanus. He was all tied up with twisty ties, including one wrapped around the front of the motorcycle, and when I took that off, the entire front shell of the motorcycle came with it. Without that front shell piece, it looks nothing like a real motorcycle. At all.

He has one kickstand that kinda-sorta helps support him in this mode.

Transforming Road Rocket involves splitting the rear wheel in half and the assembly to which each half is connected to form the legs and splitting the motorcycle seat in half to form the arms. The instructions also pretend, laughably, that the front motorcycle shell piece will stay attached to the front wheel while folding it up and positioning it somewhere on his back. It does not do that.

As an additional transformation option, the front wheel can also detach and also splits in half, and can be reconnected on the robot's back, behind his head. This isn't required, and it was conceived as a transformation option for Prime Universe Arcee, but it works really well for Road Rocket because it mirrors the placement of the motorcycle wheels on the G2 toy. I think the front motorcycle shell will just continue to fall off until I glue it on, though.
There's no way around that.

His only weapon is a piece of blue plastic, with a ninja star emblem embossed upon it that's painted black. The disc-shaped piece splits in half and can be attached to either arm, or can remain connected together and used as a shield. I would have preferred a saber weapon of some sort, but this toy wasn't really designed with the Laser Cycles in mind.

The only remolding done to the toy was the new head. Everything else is the same. He gets a tiny G2 Autobot symbol on his collar, ostensibly the only real estate on the toy where a tampo-printed symbol could go.

Hasbro identified Road Rocket as a female character despite being established in his 1995 G2 tech specs as being male. If Transformers are genderfluid, then I guess I'll stick with the earlier depiction as a male character since that's the one I'm most familiar with. The toy is more lithe than most, and I guess I can see why reassigning the character as female makes sense, but there's nothing overtly female about it that would automatically preclude Road Rocket still being male. I almost feel like the woke crowd will try to hit me with cancel culture if I go into this any further, so I'm going to move on.

Given the similarity between their two designs, I'm incredibly surprised that this toy wasn't planned as getting a Road Rocket redeco right from the start. Also, the weird, almost-masculine styling of the robot body always strongly pointed towards the idea that Arcee would get repurposed as a male character, so the idea of assigning a female gender to Road Rocket probably wasn't necessary. They didn't get me to spend money on this toy as Prime Universe Arcee, but they got me good with the G2-themed redeco. So, mission accomplished, Hasbro. (I wouldn't have hated this toy as Axer, but honestly that's more of a weird fusion of ideas, having the character transform into the vehicle that he used to ride. It would be like having Jazz transform into a skateboard.)

I still have a few more Velocitron toys on pre-order (Road Hauler, Scourge or Black Convoy or whatever his final name is) but, since I pre-ordered them as soon as they were available, of course now I have to wait for them despite brick-and-mortar Walmart stores already physically having them on the shelf. Because this is how pre-orders work.