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I love the look of the thing. The chrome is what catches your eye right away, but it's the teal piping on the cab that really seals the deal for me. In base mode, it's kinda incoherent but also the exact sort of thing that a little kid is going to have hours of fun with. Unfortunately, the air-driven missile launcher no longer works. I can't remember if it was like that when I got it or if the hoses rotted away during the years it was tucked away in my basement, which is an obvious sign that I should break the trailer out more often! The disc launcher and the quintuple missile launcher are winners, though.
I also managed to forget at some point that this is actually Black Convoy, not the Hasbro Scourge.
While I was digging for the trailer I found my CW and POTP sets, which were filthy for some reason. So I wound up spending much of the afternoon taking the combiners apart, carefully washing the components and putting them into robot and vehicle mode. It's been ages since I've done that!
This is about a quarter of the figures I've got, but a pretty good sample. Air Raid and Streetwise and their mold-mates are far and away the best of the bunch. Swindle (not pictured) is also a really solid figure, but such a bizarre take on the character that I hesitate to call it a good Swindle. From the Power of the Primes sets, Rippersnapper and Blot were fantastic takes on two of the brickiest toys from the original line. But everyone else was...kind of terrible, honestly. It didn't help that there was about three distinct transformation schemes among the lot of them, so the ones that aren't great just wind up feeling derivative. And I don't think there was a single good Voyager across the two lines. Every one that I've handled has been hollow, flimsy and felt fundamentally compromised by the decision to have them turn into torsos without the help of any add-on bits.
The most frustrating decision of the line is embodied by my two Blast-Offs there, though. Hasbro was obsessed with retooling and repainting everyone into everyone else, which left us with some very unsatisfactory options in the retail line: a white Vortex instead of Slingshot, an APC based on Swindle instead of Groove, a truck instead of Wildrider so they could reuse tooling they needed for First Aid...and most bafflingly, a brown Slingshot as Blast-Off. And then issuing the Takara versions of those characters as exclusives anyway when they realized that their customers were confused and dismayed by their nonsense.
I think Energon might have actually done the "combiner" thing better.
The Dinobots deserve special attention, because...because how disappointing was this?
I was excited as all heck when Hasbro first revealed these, because we hadn't seen these characters in decades and because they'd kept the distinctive clear-plastic gimmick from the originals instead of going full Sunbow. I remember really looking forward to getting them, and I wasn't nearly as hard on them five years ago as I am now. As time goes on, though, they just feel so cheap. Flat grey and gold plastic instead of chrome. Missing accessories. Wonky proportions. Limbs on Slag and Sludge that you can see right through thanks to all the waffling. Snarl's terribly hollow arms and badly engineered legs add to the disappointments. Swoop is the best by default but I can't honestly say I like him very much either, with his hollow legs and wispy proportions.
Somehow, they still manage to be more appealing to me than the modern Studio Series offerings.
