by King Kuuga » Wed Mar 18, 2015 5:58 am
- Motto: "Yesssssssss....."
- Weapon: High Energy MASER Cannons
Honestly I feel that Unicron and Sentinel Prime do not qualify as shellformers. Most transformers are going to have alt mode kibble on their bot modes, for simplicity's sake and purposeful aesthetic design. Shellformers are transformers that don't integrate any of their alt mode parts into their robot mode, and to transform they just fold up and let their alt mode parts form around them. Generally you could remove the shell parts and form the alt mode separately, as someone demonstrated with that famous Big Convoy picture. So for Unicron, who is 75% folded up robot in planet mode, and Sentinel Prime, whose truck morphs into his legs, I don't think they qualify. That's my two cents.
As for my favorite shellformers, I actually don't own many but I will say that I love Big Convoy because of the detail that was put into him. His mammoth heads have big missile clusters sculpted into them, you get tonfa under his arms, you've got Beast Wars Megatron-esque projectile launchers in his shins from the mammoth sides, and if you have any sort of imagination you can turn the legs on his hips around to make more cluster missile launchers. Dude is armed to the tooth. Honestly his worst accessory is actually his handheld gun, because it's the entire trunk, middle head, back, and tail of the mammoth. It's large and unwieldy, and I wish it had separated into smaller parts.
I don't own AOE Galvatron but from what I've seen I'm pretty forgiving of him. In the film, all the neo-Decepticons transform by magic. They disassemble into little particles and reassemble in their new form. Resultingly, they have even less alt mode kibble on their robot modes than most of the guys in AOE (which is saying something), because they don't transform in the usual way. You literally can't replicate that in a toy, and with the push for simpler transformations across the board from Hasbro they apparently couldn't engineer in some better integration or hiding places for the truck parts on Galvy's bot mode. So I can forgive that particular toy for doing what it does.
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
