Agamemnon wrote:Delta Magnus wrote:Not sure I'm gonna bother with these. The Monster Pretenders were always kinda daft and these look kinda generic to me. Personally I'd have preferred it if they'd worked aesthetic elements from the shells into the robots and ditched the shells altogether.
Yes, indeed! This is why I used that one cheap 3P dinosaur combiner as my Dinoking. Sure, it was only five members (I'm looking to do a custom Ankylosaur add-on
) but they had a look that seemed to fit the derpy, comical approach of the members in the Japanese cartoon.
If a company did exactly as you suggest here, DM, I would be all over it! That would be in keeping with the "Classics" update approach I've liked from day one of the line, and why I like other pretender "Classics" updates like Thunderwing (though a bit small) and Bludgeon.
Aye. It's funny, because the shell designs for the Monster Pretenders are awesome (I'm particularly fond of Slog with its dumpy red tentacle goblin thing) but the inner figures (from what I've seen) are honestly the worst G1 combiner team ever. I'm usually quite fond of the dafter stuff from the late 80s (as my love of Seacons can testify) but the Monster Pretenders, shells aside, are just...bleh. Also 2 of their members suffer from Gold Plastic Syndrome, and those gorgeously lumpy shells are prone to rotting.
Going a bit off topic here, but if you were a 3P company doing Pretenders, how would you do them- as in, how would you make each specific Pretender? I have some ideas for a few of them, notably:
Skullgrin: Transforms from a hideous skull headed horned beast of a robot (like his shell) into a tank seemingly made of flesh, bone and weapons.
Submarauder: Transforms from a chitinous, slimy robot mode into a horseshoe crab (his submarine mode always looked like a horseshoe crab to me...)
Bomb-Burst: Transforms from a hideous vampiric bat-monster into something resembling Car Robots Gigatron's jet mode.
The Monster Pretenders: Beast modes are essentially their shell designs, whilst their robot modes have more in common with some of the more hideous Beast Wars figures than any conventional Transformer. Monstructor, meanwhile, is a lovecraftian, barely humanoid aberration with hands and feet formed from various bits of the indivdual beast modes- one foot could be a bloated mass of flesh, the other a cloven hoof, whilst for hands he could have a tentacle on one arm and a lobster claw on the other.
Basically Monstructor needs to live up to his backstory as an eldritch abomination.
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