I was fiddling with my Cybertron Beast Megatron figure, who is a wonderful
homage of the Armada Predacon toy that no one ever needed an homage to, and
I started mulling over what other terrible (but kind of awesome) homages we
could have gotten.

Sentinel Prime from the Studio Series 86 Scourge mold, in bright orange, to
homage the Titans Return Sentinel Prime. (Obviously, I would also accept an
Astrotrain, missing all train elements, from the same mold... I guess that
would be Astro)

Warpath from the Legacy Armada Megatron mold, to homage the Thrilling 30
Warpath H-Tank. The correct transformation here would be the very silly
weapons mode, with the turret on the front of the robot mode, and the
barrel sticking forwards.

That's all I've got. I didn't put a lot of thought into it, as I was mostly
searching for dress shirts with 38" sleeves. fyi: I am a giant, not a
gorilla.

(I still want a Toxitron from the Kingdom Optimus Primal mold, but that
seems like a reasonable redeco -- that's just swapping the underlying Prime
for a Primal. It makes sense, it doesn't baffle, and there's no wacky
coincidental resemblance in one mode or another)

GustavoWombat wrote:

> I was fiddling with my Cybertron Beast Megatron figure, who is a
wonderful
> homage of the Armada Predacon toy that no one ever needed an homage to,
and
> I started mulling over what other terrible (but kind of awesome) homages
we
> could have gotten.

Your ideas are kind of random, and I think the era during which we tended
to get weird, random redeco toys is over. The Transformers brand comprises
such a wealth of history at this point that people seem to want homages to
existing characters far more than new and inventive color schemes. If they
took Kingdom Rattrap, for example, and sold him as a brown rat named
Dirtbag, can you imagine the fandom outrage? "Why in the world would they
make up some new stupid character when Packrat was RIGHT THERE?!"

And it's kind of funny. People used to complain endlessly about the
"1980's snorefest" any time we got tributes to G1 heritage characters,
saying we needed to get new characters instead of constant, boring retreads
of G1. And now a lot of those same people are delighted now that we're
getting characters paying tribute to Armada or Energon or whatever. So I
guess it wasn't that they hated tributes to older characters at all. They
just wanted a boring snorefest that homaged a different decade.

So, there's less creativity in Transformers than there used to be. There
is still innovation in terms of transformations, how to hide the robot
fists or car-mode wheels or whatever, but there's not as much novelty. The
Rock Lords from United are the newest concept we've gotten in a while, but
really, even that's a retread of Tonka toys from 1986.

We know that once Hasbro commits to a mold, they want to sell us as many
redeco versions as they can in order to make the most money off it. That's
reasonable. The current Transformers team has also said flat-out that
their higher-ups at Hasbro are more likely to approve the creation of a toy
if the team can demonstrate its redeco potential. So every time a new toy
comes out, I always like to try and guess how we might get it again in the
future, since it's likely almost every toy has at least one potential
redeco or remold waiting in the wings. Which is why it surprises me when
we get toys like Siege Apeface or Earthrise Snapdragon that never get used
again for anything else.

I think that, for me to get excited about a redeco toy, it has to trigger
something in my brain that makes me happy. It really needs to be, like,
another character from the G1 toy line, or somebody from the cartoon, or a
"What If?" style Diaclone toy, or something that previously existed.
Because the whole reason I'm collecting Transformers as an adult is because
I loved it as a kid. That's the metric I use. So I will buy a red version
of G1 Mirage if they want to name it Redline and pretend it's an off-screen
G1 character, because that was a Diaclone color scheme and it could
theoretically have made it into Transformers back in 1984. But I would
have zero interest in an orange version.

With all that said, there have been a lot of redeco toys that I was sort of
expecting us to get eventually, which haven't happened yet. Studio Series
'86 Jazz as Stepper/Ricochet is one of them (especially since we did get
Artfire). We never got Fractyl out of Kingdom Terrorsaur. I thought for
sure the Core-class Exo-Suit Spike would eventually get reused as Daniel,
or as Jessica Morgan, or both. I really thought eventually they might put
together a "Killing Jar" multi-pack with Ultra Magnus, Cyclonus, Wreck-Gar,
and the Allicon in reverse white hole colors. Would have been expensive as
hell, especially now that Magnus is a Commander-class toy, but perhaps as a
HasCon or SDCC exclusive...

Then there's stuff I would love to see, personally, which I admit is far
less likely that Hasbro will actually do it. Stuff like Siege Shockwave in
Constructicon colors, or Earthrise Starscream in Pretender colors (I would
love the hell out of that), or stuff like that. There was a time when I
would have added Marvel Comics purple Soundwave or Marvel Comics light blue
Galvatron to the "never gonna happen" list, but with the advent of the
comic book series, I actually think there's a slim chance of it happening
now...

Zob (still wants a Voyager-sized Marvel Comics G1 Scorponok, too, but
that's well beyond the scope of redeco toys)

> That's all I've got. I didn't put a lot of thought into it, as I was
mostly
> searching for dress shirts with 38" sleeves. fyi: I am a giant, not a
> gorilla.

> (I still want a Toxitron from the Kingdom Optimus Primal mold

Picture this: Optimus Primal in a dress shirt with giant sleeves.

Also, the dress shirt has a Hawaiian print.

CodigoPostal wrote:
> Picture this: Optimus Primal in a dress shirt with giant sleeves.

Picture this: Optimus Primal in an actual dress because it's a M*A*S*H*
crossover and he's trying to get out of the Army.