So, let's get this out of the way now. Yes, I am a huge hypocrite. I'm still spending money on inessential toys, because I am an addict. I haven't fed the plastic crack addition in like two whole days, so I was starting to have withdrawal symptoms.

With that said, here's the justification I came up with to trick myself: these *are* Walmart exclusive toys, meaning they're going to be comparatively rare. They're going to be much more expensive if I wait a few years and try to pick them up on the secondary market. Plus, you never know which one of these is going to turn out to be the next Velocitron Cosmos. Yay, selective rationalization for the win!

G2 UNIVERSE AUTOBOT JAZZ

The actual G2 release of Jazz sold in 1993 wasn't significantly different from his G1 release (the plasic colors were the same, but he was decorated with musical notes and the numeral "1" instead of racing stripes and the number "4"). However, concept art for a planned future release included a version that was basically orange from head to toe, with some light-to-dark color gradients and random triangle shapes on his doors and legs. It's mainly because of the triangular deco, and of course the orange color, that I keep calling him Doritos Jazz.

So, using the Studio Series '86 Jazz toy as the basis, they produced it in colors trying to approximate this aborted concept art as closely as possible. The artwork is kind of open to interpretation, and it's hard to tell in some places where there's a true light-to-dark color gradient and what parts are just shadows and highlights. But, he's a bright Wheelie orange, for the most part, with a dark orange (almost red) used for the forearms, upper legs, and the fenders on the lower legs. He's decorated with a yellow G2 Autobot symbol on his chest (the actual concept art didn't show a symbol at all) and his headlights and robot face are painted yellow, too. It's such a crazy look for him that I'm surprised they marketed this as Jazz at all, and didn't try to assign a new name to him.

He comes with the same gun from the Studio Series release (made of dark orange plastic but painted silver) as well as two new weapons which feel like they were designed for Houndworthy Hound, but were included with Jazz instead. I imagine the goal was to try to replicate his box art as closely as possible, and he's shown with an orange version of his G1 shoulder launcher. (The actual G2 release would have had a G.I. Joe Snow Serpent style missile launcher, but that's neither here nor there.) So, he's got an orange version of what is pretty obviously cartoon Hound's handheld gun and his shoulder launcher.

But, the cool thing is that you can plug the Hound gun into his back, and then plug the launcher into the barrel of the Hound gun, so you end up with a launcher hanging over his shoulder, approximating the box art. It's not perfect (it hangs back too far, and isn't really over his shoulder per se) but it's something.

Transformation is the same as the Studio Series toy, including the roof-and-window assembly that's made entirely of fragile translucent plastic (yellow, this time). Here's hoping it's not fated to crack and shatter like a stale corn chip some day. Any of the three weapons can plug into his roof (or all three at once if you want to stack them together like Tinkertoys), which also nicely mirrors the way in which the 1984 Jazz toy was modified to include a hole in his roof to mount a missile launcher for his subsequent 1993 release. The Hound launcher looks the best on the roof, because it most closely matches the G2 launcher configurations.

His vehicle mode sure makes a bold fashion statement. He's mostly that dark orange color, with lovely Doritos deco on the top of the spoiler and sides of the doors, and the color gradient shifts to a light orange about halfway to the hood. No actual photographs or prototypes of the toy in this color scheme have ever surfaced, but it seems accurate based on what we can extrapolate from the robot-mode artwork.

I really didn't need this toy, but I own it now, and there's nothing you can do about it! Mwu ha ha haa!

Fun Anecdote #1: My first G2 toy was Jazz, and when my girlfriend came over and saw it, she was both impressed with his missile launcher's ability to actually shoot across the room, but she also said the missile looked decidedly phallic, and she always called his missiles "penile projectiles." To this day, decades later, I cannot look at G2 Jazz without thinking of them as penile projectiles. So, thanks a lot for that, Trish.

G2 UNIVERSE LASER CYCLE

This is almost certainly Laser Cycle Jazz, but it seems like Hasbro has been consistently assigning new names instead of doubling up, maybe so Jazz and Laser Cycle can exist together at the same time instead of merely being two versions of a single character. (Laser Cycle Jazz arguably got a little farther than Doritos Jazz in the planning stages, as he was featured along with Laser Cycle Soundwave in the Toy Fair catalog for 1995. They would have been redeco versions of Road Rocket and Road Pig, respectively.)

So, the proposed version of Laser Cycle Jazz was actually sort of ugly. His motorcycle mode was a weird white-to-yellow gradient with a green-colored seat, colors which naturally carried over to his robot mode as well. The Legacy toy, which is of course a redeco of G2 Universe Road Rocket, looks approximately the same, though now the yellow-with-green look carries over to the forearms as well. It's actually a bit more of a uniform look. They're still not great colors, but at least it's not-great everywhere on the toy.

As with Road Rocket, one possible transformation is to leave the front motorcycle wheel closed up and on the robot's back, though to achieve a proper G2 Laser Cycle homage, it's better to split the wheel in two and have each piece hanging behind the shoulders, to more properly evoke the G2 toy design. (As an aside... since Prime Arcee is female and Road Rocket has been retroactively made female, I wonder if Laser Cycle is female by default?
Is every iteration of this toy a chickbot?)

I had forgotten how much I hate this toy's transformation. It's so needlessly complex, and the vehicle mode doesn't even look like anything until you put the motorcycle windshield piece in place. Before that time (and after that time, really) it just looks like a pile of folded-up robot parts.

The reason the robot arms have the yellow-and-green colors this time is because those are the parts that fold up to make the motorcycle seat this time, and not the robot legs (which end up as part of the undercarriage). His (her?) motorcycle mode evokes the correct color mapping, including the white-to-yellow gradient. There is some green paint around the headlight area, but the numeral "21" (which actually appears backwards in some photos, because they flipped the image for catalogs) is absent this time.

There are a few packaged samples of the G2-era Laser Cycle Jazz out there, but not many. This is the closest most of us will ever get to owning one. It will be interesting to see if they ever do a proper Road Pig update, because there's a Laser Cycle Soundwave redeco already waiting in the wings!

Fun Anecdote #2: The proposed tech specs quote for Laser Cycle Jazz, as seen on his packaging, was "I like to smash Decepticons like I jam on my guitar!" ViceGripX and I used to make fun of that quote a lot, and I've jokingly referenced it here many times. Well, I found the Toxitron Deluxes at Walmart before he did and so I packaged some up to send him. I wrote out a little word balloon of Jazz spouting that tech specs quote and taped it to his package, along with a tiny little guitar that I've had for years (it was actually an eraser). I mean, he's got to actually HAVE the guitar if he's going to jam on it, right?

G2 UNIVERSE AUTOBOT MIRAGE

Another proposed idea for the G2 toy line that never made it to fruition (fruit-ition?) was watermelon Mirage. This is kind of interesting because, unlike Jazz, the G1 version of Mirage was never produced as part of the G2 toy line at ALL. (We did get a Go-Bot version of him later, though, a redeco of Double Clutch.) The Mirage concept art by Jeff Mangiat shows him in a weird pink-and-green color scheme, with racing number "188" on his chest instead of "26," and an alligator-themed design on his side panels instead of the "CITANES" sponorship. Unlike Doritos Jazz, a painted proof-of-concept version of G2 Mirage has surfaced (and he's got a hole drilled right into his crotch, the spot where his missile launcher would have been plugged in for vehicle mode).

So what Hasbro did for the Toxitron version is take the Earth-mode Mirage toy from Kingdom and try to reproduce these colors as faithfully as possible.. He's so gloriously hideous. Robot mode features lime green head, biceps, pelvis, and lower legs, with a bright pink chest and shoulders and forearms and upper legs and toes. (This does deviate slightly from his concept art, which shows vac-metal chrome feet for robot mode, as well as pink fists instead of black. The back of Mirage's box shows him with metallic silver painted toes, but this didn't carry over to the final production version.) There's not a lot of real estate on the sides of the arms for the alligator deco, due to the metal connector pin in the center, but they still found enough room to make it happen.

He comes equipped with a handheld rifle (made of pink plastic but painted silver except for the peg) as well as his shoulder launcher (the rocket and launcher are also both molded out of pink plastic; the missile is inexplicably painted a dark blue, which is a very strict reading of his concept art, which I assumed was intended to represent black). The stock version of Kingdom Mirage can't wear his rocket launcher on his shoulder, so sadly watermelon Mirage doesn't fare any better. You need some kind of third-party adapter or add-on part to accomplish this. (The orange Hound gun works in a pinch, if you want Mirage to just explode into a veritable cornucopia of sherbet flavors.)

On Thursday, July 27, 2023 at 7:07:52 PM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> I still need to get G2 Dead End and Miami Vice Sideswipe at some point—I bought them for ViceGripX, thinking I was safe because I had all the Toxitron toys on pre-order. It was only later that I found out that Hasbro hadn't done pre-orders for all the Deluxes! Silly me. Well, I'll find them eventually. Gotta feed that plastic crack addiction, after all.

I get the feeling those two are going to be the most difficult to get of the bunch. From everything I've heard, they're shortpacked - just one per case versus two per case for the rest of the assortment.

I got Laser Cycle through Pulse, and he's since arrived in the mail. Hoping to snag G2 Dead End, Doritos Jazz and Miami Vice Sideswipe, but alas, my local Wal-Marts appear to be sluggish about putting out new Transformers products.

On Friday, July 28, 2023 at 8:45:34 AM UTC-6, William A. Rendfeld wrote:

> I get the feeling those two are going to be the most difficult to get of the bunch. From everything I've heard, they're shortpacked - just one per case versus two per case for the rest of the assortment.

I think something happened to muck up the case assortments. Originally, Doritos Jazz was listed as being part of wave one, and was the only Deluxe who went up for pre-order on Hasbro Pulse. At some point, we found out there was supposed to be a wave two (watermelon Mirage and the rest, plus Shadow Strip in a package refresh) but then they all got mixed together into one wave, and Shadow Strip was kicked out of the club. I guess when you only have five characters ready to go but they ship in a case of eight, somebody is bound to get short shrift.

Years ago, Hasbro used to do updates to their case assortments in the form of case revisions, using codes on the boxes like W3R2 to denote "wave three, revision two" or something like that. I wonder why they fell away from that?

Of course, if the Cosmos situation is any indication, even if G2 Dead End and Miami Vice Sideswipe end up being rare and hard to find, Smyth's shops in the UK will probably still get solid cases of those characters... *rolls eyes aggressively*

> I got Laser Cycle through Pulse, and he's since arrived in the mail. Hoping to snag G2 Dead End, Doritos Jazz and Miami Vice Sideswipe, but alas, my local Wal-Marts appear to be sluggish about putting out new Transformers products.

Technically, these aew "new mod" toys aren't on the current toy department modular layout. They're new product meant to concide with the semi-annual department reset that most Walmarts are doing. So, it's likely they will stock the Toxitron toys after their reset is finished.

Zob (according to my Mattel vendor, I'm the only one who has even STARTED doing my department reset, out of ten stores that she services)