Rocksolid Light

Welcome to novaBBS (click a section below)

mail  files  register  newsreader  groups  login

Message-ID:  

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? -- Charlie McCarthy


interests / alt.toys.transformers / Zob's Thoughts on Legacy Velocitron Deluxe-Class Crasher and G2 Drag Strip

SubjectAuthor
o Zob's Thoughts on Legacy Velocitron Deluxe-Class Crasher and G2 Drag StripZobovor

1
Zob's Thoughts on Legacy Velocitron Deluxe-Class Crasher and G2 Drag Strip

<fa6bd171-4acd-451e-bc92-1c72230838e5n@googlegroups.com>

 copy mid

https://www.novabbs.com/interests/article-flat.php?id=7068&group=alt.toys.transformers#7068

 copy link   Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
X-Received: by 2002:ac8:1402:0:b0:3a5:7037:9390 with SMTP id k2-20020ac81402000000b003a570379390mr9096127qtj.616.1667765536911;
Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:12:16 -0800 (PST)
X-Received: by 2002:a4a:b648:0:b0:47f:90bb:e7e8 with SMTP id
f8-20020a4ab648000000b0047f90bbe7e8mr19954952ooo.32.1667765536622; Sun, 06
Nov 2022 12:12:16 -0800 (PST)
Path: i2pn2.org!i2pn.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feed1.usenet.blueworldhosting.com!peer01.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!news-out.google.com!nntp.google.com!postnews.google.com!google-groups.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2022 12:12:16 -0800 (PST)
Injection-Info: google-groups.googlegroups.com; posting-host=73.131.216.167; posting-account=VatO8goAAADkHr1F3eCw5I8LKv1LHntN
NNTP-Posting-Host: 73.131.216.167
User-Agent: G2/1.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <fa6bd171-4acd-451e-bc92-1c72230838e5n@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Zob's Thoughts on Legacy Velocitron Deluxe-Class Crasher and G2 Drag Strip
From: zmf...@aol.com (Zobovor)
Injection-Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2022 20:12:16 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Received-Bytes: 10161
 by: Zobovor - Sun, 6 Nov 2022 20:12 UTC

These toys are supposedly part of a second batch of Walmart-exclusive Velocitron toys, but the company ordered very, very heavy on the first batch (seriously, my store has like twenty of them now, and all the Cosmos toys were picked through weeks ago) so it's unlikely they will order newer stock until the remains of the older stock has sold down. I got mine on Hasbro Pulse, thankfully, so I won't have to worry about whether I ever see them in a physical store or not.

DECEPTICON CRASHER

Hasbro has occasionally deigned to acknowledge the Tonka GoBots characters as part of the brand. The last time we saw this character, she was named Decepticon Fracture, and was ostensibly part of the off-screen movie assortment from 2008. (The Challenge of the GoBots cartoon showcased most of the toy line at various points, but there were really only six main robot characters—Leader-1, Turbo, and Scooter of the Guardians, and Cy-Kill, Cop-Tur, and Crasher of the Renegades—making Crasher one of the most memorable of the GoBots by far, simply by merit of being one of the only characters to be regularly featured.)

It's worth mentioning that even though Crasher is traditionally a female character, her box artwork makes no attempt to feminize the look of the toy, instead essentially depicting her as a black-and-white Mirage with a pink face. Indeed, despite her obvious GoBot heritage, she's referred to as "Decepticon Crasher" on the packaging and not, say, "GoBots Universe Crasher" as one might expect coming from a toy line that enjoys frequent call-outs to other franchise continuities. It's odd that they were willing to overtly describe the recent Road Ranger toy as a GoBot, but not Crasher.

So, the toy is a redeco of Kingdom Mirage, a toy previously only available as part of the Amazon-exclusive "Battle Across Time" set that came with Maximal Grimlock. It's a retooled version of Siege Mirage with more Earthly vehicle styling. Either toy probably would have worked for Crasher, though her Tonka GoBots toy was actually a Porsche 956, making her closer in design and form to Transformers characters like Triggerbot Backstreet or G2 Drench or RiD Daytonus. But, the Fracture toy established a precedent for Crasher being a Mirage redeco, so it's not wholly disingenuous for the character.

In vehicle mode, she's mostly a shiny, glossy black with a white area near the cockpit and parts of the spoiler, with red-orange elements and the racing numeral "01" emblazoned upon the hood (an homage to the Tonka toy). One contention of the GoBot character designs was that many of them poked up their robot heads while they were in vehicle mode (even if it was impossible for the Tonka toy to achieve this configuration). The old Crasher had a cockpit window that doubled as her robot head, but on this toy the head is buried underneath the engine and spoiler, making such a move impossible.

Transformation is the same as Earth mode Mirage, which means Crasher ends up with a faux car hood on her chest (it's decorated with the 01 numeral again to create the illusion the chest is formed from the hood, when in truth it splits in half and ends up behind the legs). She uses the alternate robot head that first appeared on the Hologram Mirage toy that came in the Siege three-pack with Impactor and a Powerdasher. It's more like the G1 Mirage face than the cartoon face, but is not at all like either the Crasher toy face (which was a blank silver mask and a red visor) nor the Crasher cartoon face (which had bright red lips and yellow cat eyes).

She comes with black versions of the Mirage handheld rifle and shoulder launcher, but everybody knows GoBots don't carry ranged weapons. They shoot energy bursts through their fists. It would have been awesome if she came with blast effects you could slip over her hands to simulate this. But, I get that this was a cost-cutting redeco, and such expenditures would, I'm sure, have been beyond their budget.

Well, I do loves me some GoBots, and I'm a big fan of Crasher in particular, so I couldn't not buy this toy. I'd love to see additional GoBots tributes in the future. Studio Series Wreck-Gar as Cy-Kill when? Leader-class Blitzwing as Leader-1 when? Come on, Hasbro, don't you want my money?

G2 UNIVERSE SHADOWSTRIP

It's odd that they're already throwing G2 Stunticons at us when they haven't even finished off the G1 team yet (as of this writing, Dead End is just barely hitting shelves and Breakdown remains unreleased), but at least they're broadcasting their intentions so we can prepare for it. (I'm not super thrilled about spending another $100 on Motormaster, but I'll do it because the G2 color schemes are awesome. And it beats the hell out of the $18,000 I'd probably have to cough up to get a genuine unreleased G2 Motormaster.)

It's also strange that they're classifying this as a G2 Universe character, but they've renamed him Shadowstrip instead of just calling him "G2 Drag Strip." I imagine it might be to allow both characters to co-exist at the same time (SEE: Bluestreak and Silverstreak) so you feel like you're buying two different characters instead of a differently-colored version of the same character. So does that mean we're going to get a Shadowmaster and a Shadowrider (that's actually kind of cool) and a Shadow End (doesn't really make sense) and a Shadow-Down (makes even less sense)? Probably not, since the name Shadowstrip surely refers to the toy's black coloring, which the other characters won't share (G2 Dead End is bright red and electric blue; G2 Breakdown is fuscia and teal; G2 Wildrider is yellow; G2 Motormaster is blue and purple).

For those who don't know, or have forgotten, the Stunticons were among the toys Hasbro planned to sell during Transformers: Generation 2 as part of the 1994 product line, along with the Protectobots, but they were cancelled in mid-production. Breakdown eventually found his way to consumers as a BotCon '94 exclusive (several hundred packaged samples already existed, so why not?) and Hasbro considered offering the rest through a mail-order promotion, but it never ended up happening. Enough photos of pre-production samples exist online that we know what the toys would have looked like, though. Drag Strip would have been black with a bright blue cockpit, a vac-metal gold engine, and some stickers that evoke a checkered flag.

The Legacy version pays tribute to that design without being a straight, slavish attempt at copying the deco. The imagery of the checkered flags is still in evidence on either side, but the racing stripes from the G1 version are carried over, in gold this time. (They might have been using my fan color model for reference, in which I took the G1 cartoon designs and applied the G2 colors. I'm not saying it's a certainty, but my color model is also the third Google hit when you do an image search for "G2 Drag Strip," so it's certainly possible.)

The guns are molded in black plastic, but are painted a light metallic blue.. All in all, it's a very subtle, muted look for the character. People complained about the all-yellow look for the G1 version, even though he mixed it up a bit with a canary yellow here and a mustard yellow there. This version is all black, through and through, for even less color differentiation.

As a robot, he's got a bit more color. He's still predominantly black with gold highlights, but now the metallic blue head is visible, and oddly, his eyes seem to be a slightly different shade of red than his face—a bit more purplish. I wonder if the eyes were painted blue first, and the red was painted over that. I also wonder if it was deliberate, since it does create a slightly different look without having to mix up an additional color of paint.

Functionally, you can connect Shadowstrip to the neo-G1 Motormaster as an arm. But, that's probably not what he's intended for at all. There's an unspoken promise here that we will eventually get all five G2 Stunticons, so you can build you own G2 version of Menasor in all those glorious blues and purples and teal colors. (There is no mention of transforming him into arm mode in the instructions, and no "1 of 5" logo anywhere on the box as there was with the G1 version of Drag Strip. So, the unspoken promise isn't set in stone.)

We did get a Combiner Wars gift set of the G2 Stunticons in 1996, but the newer Legacy designs have much greater fidelity to the cartoon designs, which makes the most recent versions more appealing to me. I do hope we get the entire set eventually.

Zob (got nine new toys on my computer desk at this point, with at least two more on the way)

1
server_pubkey.txt

rocksolid light 0.9.7
clearnet tor