The Energon Pub

Ruthless Cynic wrote:Energon Bulkhead was a pretty amazing toy, and did Springer justice. As far as triple changers go, I think Apeface was one of the best.

Energon Bulkhead/Sprung is a decent homage and a very interesting bridge linking G1 Springer to the guy we see in Animated and Prime. But as a proper Springer, I think he leaves much to be desired.

How about Scalpel? I thought he was an awesomely evil character, but to take the toy out of the package to see all of his legs fall out of their already broken sockets; epic failure.

I was thinking Wreck-Gar, not only out of scale, but NO other Transformer can ride him. and yes i still have him after 25 years of being in storage.

And maybe Skyfire/Jetfire too be entirely technical about him, he wasnt a Transformer! Robotech has to be pissed about that.

On the subject of Motormaster, all the G1 combiners bar the Predacons were too small and the Predacons were garish bricks.

Other TF's of good character/poor figure:

Classics Octane/Tankor, way too small. Thank Primus for the oversized KO.
Sandstorm
Broadside

ROTF Nightbeat, his factfile is an obvious homage to his G1 comic book incarnation but that head is too alien to be a Cybertronian. He's dying for a third party rescue.

the Battlechargers
the Throttlebots though Rollbar oozes character to me
Getaway
Slapdash, like Sandstorm, I hate the faceplate on the toy.
Bludgeon, only good toy is the Wreckage repaint not the one with the goofy skull head.

Scourge, I like his G1 toy, his Titanium figure was a nice attempt but the Generations and Botcon figures look like slag, both giving him terrible alt modes and ruining his iconic bot mode wings.

All the deluxe cars are hideously oversized to their cooler G1 counterparts, not to mention every deluxe jet.
As a kid I would have thought this was slaggin' stupid and still do.

BTW, would it have crippled Hasbro financially to produce clip on heads for the vans? The third party ones are great and dead cheap on Ebay.

good character, awful figure...

lets be honest now, we've all known that girl?

Seriously though, I haven't considered G1 figures, primarily because a lot of the major candidates are from the Microchange/Diaclone lines and the only reason they're nothing like their animation models is the guys who designed those animation models years after the toys were created cheated.

BW/BM are the more obvious modern culprits. RiD was pretty good from what I saw. OK, the Spychangers were a little brick-y compared to their ninja on-screen counterparts and the Combaticons, well almost all G1 combiners were a lot better in their media representations than in plastic form. The main problems I've had Classics onwards have been scale issues, and even that seems to be considered a lot more nowadays.

On the flipside, poor characters/great figures...well, I haven't really watched Animated, so I can't comment on the figures, but while I didn't like many of the on-screen designs, the Hasbro/TakaraTomy designers have done an outstanding job of translating those designs to 3D.

Ruthless Cynic wrote: There really wasn't a single triple changer that didn't have some significant goofiness in all three forms;

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THat is crazy talk man!!

Astrotrain is an excellent triple changer in all modes. Train mode is a perfect locomotive with zero goofiness to it as well as the space shuttle mode. Quite realistic under the circumstances.

Sandstorm is also fantastic. Each mode is completely unique from the other.

The only truly goofy triple changer in my opinion is Broadside and Blitzwing has a terrible bot mode.

my vote for great character and awful figure goes to G1 Galvatron or G1 Wreck-Gar. Those two are terrible representations of their cartoon on screen counterparts.

Of course that isn't a very thorough assesment on my part because i'm not familiar with armada or cybertron and other lines such as Beast machines.