So someone sold us a 30 ish bot collection.

It included such gems as Kingdom Pipes, Kingdom Huffer, Selects Hubcap, Earthrise Cliffumper, and others

So of course from that collection I had to get Creatures Collide Ransack and Goldbug, as well as Selects Puffer and Road Ranger.

All toys made seemingly as an afterthought.

Puffer and Road Ranger were obviously just the last things they could think of to reuse these variations of the same mold, being slight modifications on Huffer and Pipes.

The Character Puffer is apparently a literal fusion of Huffer and Pipes caused by a time anomaly. So he's not named after a fish or type of coat as a lazy portmanteau of the names of his ingredients. It''s a bizarre story which makes it more interesting. The less interesting story is that he's a homage to the blue and white Huffer redeco (without remolding) that showed up in some parts of Europe marketed as Pipes. It's not a great homage because it's the Pipes redeco where the original was the Huffer mold. I mainly got him because he's reselling for next to nothing now and he originally came in a set with Road Ranger.

Road ranger is a update of a toy that didn't ave a reason for existing. Back in 2004 there was an E-hobby box set of 6 Autobot minibots recolored very wrongly as Gobots characters.
We got a
Bumblebee in white (not yellow) Bugbite,
Powerglide redeco as a white (instead of dark green) version of Bad Boy
Cosmos in blue (instead of gray) for Pathfinder
Gears as a Orange and Red (instead of Red and Blue) Smallfoot
Warpath in green as Treds (ok this one wasn't bad)
And finally Huffer in black and orange (instead of red and blue) as Road Ranger, which I bought for some reason. I guess I jut like his face and colors more than Huffer, and even though his Gobot form didn't have a pickup bed I can accept it for him more than I could for Huffer. This version of the mold has a significantly better clearance underneath than Pipes/Puffer does.. It's still annoying to get the arms in to place to get the front wheels into position correctly and a big gap through the body in vehicle mode though.

If Bugbite had been there I probably would have picked that up instead of Creatures Collide Goldbug. This is my first real experience with this mold. I skipped Cliffumper because I had a significantly better engineered Cliffjumper. I don't have any previous Goldbug toys except I can't remember if I still own the 2014 Generations Goldfire, but that's not the same anyway. It's all right but not perfect. Mine has an issue where one arm won't stay transformed. I also don't like the hands just holding the tailgate as he holds it very tightly making me fear breaking either the hands or the pegs. The gun is interesting but I wish it had a better way to attach to the car without making the rear half of the car goofy looking.

Ransack is much more interesting, even though the G1 Deluxe Insecticons were blacklisted from all media back in the day for fear of advertising something created by Bandai, he was pretty detailed in G1, and a simple color swap and headswap have made him very different from Kickback for Legacy(as well as the blades making the abdomen in the middle). I do like how everything has a place in all modes. I didn't find the insect face cover for awhile, but he's basically an oversized G1 Kickback in terms of transformation. It's a little dissapointing they couldn't find a whole lot more articulation to give him. I suppose knees, and folding toes. He has a big smoky gray chest window that will not open. I haven't had a Ransack since G2 when he was a plane (I might have gotten the DotM biplane??)

Overall 4 fun toys that didn't need to exist, which is of course exactly why I had to have them.

On Friday, October 28, 2022 at 7:00:38 PM UTC-6, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:

> Puffer and Road Ranger were obviously just the last things they could think of to reuse these variations of the same mold, being slight modifications on Huffer and Pipes.

Yeah, they were kind of pointless. There are really cool redeco ideas when somebody at Hasbro goes, "You know what we could totally do? We could turn Wheeljack into Slicer, and we could turn Fasttrack into the Exo-Suit vehicle for him to drive around in!" and everybody cheers. And then there are the times when Amazon or somebody asks for an exclusive and somebody goes, "Uh, well, how about, like, a blue version of Huffer? Oh, wait, that's Pipes. Well, what about a blue Pipes with a Huffer head? Screw it, I'm clocking out for the day."
> The less interesting story is that he's a homage to the blue and white Huffer redeco (without remolding) that showed up in some parts of Europe marketed as Pipes.

Maybe Hasbro is playing the long game, and we're eventually going to get Brawn in Outback colors, Gears in Swerve colors... I dunno. I'm surprised they haven't done a neo-G1 version of Mexico Prowl yet. And the name on his packaging would literally be Mexican Prowl™.
> Road ranger is a update of a toy that didn't ave a reason for existing. Back in 2004 there was an E-hobby box set of 6 Autobot minibots recolored very wrongly as Gobots characters.

I think the GoBots idea must have come after the fact. The eHobby toys clearly weren't meant to pay tribute to the Tonka GoBots based on the color schemes alone. But, now we've got this precent for a black Huffer, a blue Cosmos, etc. so I'm sure Hasbro is going to eventually pay tribute to every one of them.

> If Bugbite had been there I probably would have picked that up instead of Creatures Collide Goldbug.

Yet another miscolored GoBot. Of course, the Tonka Bug Bite was yellow, so it would have been tough to do a redeco without it just looking like Bumblebee. It would have been funny if they'd remolded Bumblebee's little flip-up robot face, so instead of the Bumblebee face, it was the car windshield face that the original Bug Bite had.

> The gun is interesting but I wish it had a better way to attach to the car without making the rear half of the car goofy looking.

The gun was really made for Cliffjumper (it's the sniper bazooka he uses in "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1) and every other version of the mold also comes with it, just because. At one point they sold it to us in green so it could double as an Ironhide bazooka that he carried at one point.

> Ransack is much more interesting

Ransack is neat. He's still very Kickbacky, but it's likely we're never going to get original neo-G1 molds for the Bandai Insecticons, so this is as good as it's going to get.

I am so angry at myself, because recently somebody was selling some G1 Deluxe Insecticon instructions on eBay. But then when you went into the actual auction pictures, the baggie still had both weapons and the unused decals. And it sold for like six dollars. I knew about the auction but I had just forgotten to look at it on the day that it actually ended. Grr. Still kicking myself over that one.

> Overall 4 fun toys that didn't need to exist, which is of course exactly why I had to have them.

I always say that I am a fan of Transformers because of the way they brought the media characters to life and made them interesting and memorable. And yet here I am, building up a collection of neo-G1 toys in Diaclone colors, buying vintage non-characters like Micromaster Combiners or Powerdashers.... clearly I need to reevaluate. I'm not saying I need to stop buying toys, but perhaps I need to invent a new excuse as to why I continue doing it.

Zob (finally getting the Encore Sunstorm that I've wanted for a Very Long Time)