Oh, Maketoys, I am so full of the disappointment with you. You started off with such promise. I enjoyed Battle Tanker, and (with apologies to Hercules fans) Giant Type-61 is, in my opinion, the
definitive Devestator! So full of awesome!
Then you released Hyper Novae. A Battle Tanker remold that... came with a cab? Hold on, what's all this then? Yes, it is pretty much using mostly original parts, but there is no denying that that mold was created based directly on the engineering that went into Has/Tak's RTS Laser Prime mold. Without the Laser Prime mold, there'd be no Hyper Novae. Perhaps not technically a knock-off, but dangerously close. It was in the grey area between original third party product and knock-off, and definitely leaning into the darker parts of grey.
So now you take that cab section and re-release it as a Laser Optimus Prime? WTF! Forget the grey, I'm calling it black. This is putting Maketoys into bootleg territory. Yes, it is a high quality and heavily remolded version of a figure, but it is still at the core the same figure, and being sold in competition with an official figure. (The reason I was willing to let Hyper Novae stay in the grey, albeit dark grey, was that it wasn't in direct competition with a corresponding official product.)
I am strongly of the opinion that third party companies should only ever accessorize official figures or supplement collections by providing figures that have not officially been done.* And that third party products should be original molds, not recolors and / or remolds of bootlegged official molds. This product violates all of that, to which I say, "Bad form, Maketoys. Bad form."
*
A third party Devestator gets a pass as Devestator needs to be a six member gestalt. This is not something that Hasbro had provided a "Classics" version of. The individual members are just as important in a collection as their combined form. (In fact, I currently have my combiner teams on my shelf as their individual robots.)
PM ME PLEASE!
