BotCon 2014 Special Guest Revealed: James Roberts

All Hail Megatron was NOT written by Roberts or Roche.



(And it's no surprise)



Please fix that

synapse wrote:All Hail Megatron was NOT written by Roberts or Roche.

(And it's no surprise)

Please fix that

Gah, my bad. That's what happens when you go to TFWiki for additional information on an individual you don't know much of.

Sabrblade wrote:Yeah, the Cybertron Menasor mold has had the unfortunate honor of being officially disliked by the company who made it (Hasbro) and is likely to never see the light of day again.

I'd never heard of this. Is it deemed too expensive to produce profitably, like Prime Breakdown?

Mindmaster wrote:Mr. Roberts is also known for helping Nick Rouche cowrite popular comic series Last Stand of the Wreckers.

But LSoTW sucked...

I was already happy with the figures we were getting. I mean Devcon? That's cool stuff! Scorponok? With an actual, honest to Primus, Headmaster?! That is possibly the best figure they've come up with in their ten years. I say that as a huge fan of what they do. I am anxious to see what else we've got coming.

Rodimus Prime wrote:

Mindmaster wrote:Mr. Roberts is also known for helping Nick Rouche cowrite popular comic series Last Stand of the Wreckers.

But LSoTW sucked...

...... thats sarcasm right....?

I kind of wish Transformers stories today were actually about them TRANSFORMING. I am not a fan of going through three issues not seeing Transformers TRANSFORM.

Rodimus Prime wrote:

Mindmaster wrote:Mr. Roberts is also known for helping Nick Rouche cowrite popular comic series Last Stand of the Wreckers.

But LSoTW sucked...

Why do you say that?!

BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:

Mindmaster wrote:Mr. Roberts is also known for helping Nick Rouche cowrite popular comic series Last Stand of the Wreckers.

But LSoTW sucked...

Why do you say that?!

Not everyone loved LSoTW. Not everyone cares for Roberts' writing styles.

The majority opinion is not the same as truth.

OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD! I need this. Buying this on eBay is gonna murder my bank account though...

Henry921 wrote:

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:

Mindmaster wrote:Mr. Roberts is also known for helping Nick Rouche cowrite popular comic series Last Stand of the Wreckers.

But LSoTW sucked...

Why do you say that?!

Not everyone loved LSoTW. Not everyone cares for Roberts' writing styles.

It's not even Roberts himself. I haven't read enough of his stuff to make a judgment on him. I just didn't like Last Stand of the Wreckers. The story didn't have enough going on. Other than Overlord getting FUBARed, I don't even remember anything else about it. Though it's been a while. I just know I saw the TPB at a book store for $14.99 and passed on it. It wasn't worth that.

I'll be in Pasadena with a bag full of tomatoes and a good throwing arm. IDW has destroyed Transformers and turned their comic into a toy store circular full of rejects that REAL Transformers fans let SHELFWARM back in the '80s! Bring back Dreamwave! Free Pat Lee and lock up Michael Bay! Put iconic characters back on the shelves so the G1 fans who made your products great can buy them for their children! Put remakes of real cartoon shows like Sunbow Transformers and G.I.Joe on the air! And stop catering to the fringe element of the fandom who have MTMTE on their coffee tables!

84forever wrote:BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

I'll be in Pasadena with tomatoes and a good throwing arm.

So...they actually give you something like a G1 COLORED SCORPONOK, who happens to have a G1 CARTOON ACCURATE HEADMASTER HEAD, from G1, and you hate it? Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude. Get a life.

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

84forever wrote:BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

I'll be in Pasadena with tomatoes and a good throwing arm.

So...they actually give you something like a G1 COLORED SCORPONOK, who happens to have a G1 CARTOON ACCURATE HEADMASTER HEAD, from G1, and you hate it? Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude. Get a life.

It's not the Scorponok announcement he hates. It's the James Roberts announcement, as he sees Roberts has having childed his rapehood worse than movies have.

Nemesis Maximo wrote:Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude.

I admit, that got me rolling. The crap you come up with, man...

84forever wrote:I'll be in Pasadena with a bag full of tomatoes and a good throwing arm. IDW has destroyed Transformers and turned their comic into a toy store circular full of rejects that REAL Transformers fans let SHELFWARM back in the '80s! Bring back Dreamwave! Free Pat Lee and lock up Michael Bay! Put iconic characters back on the shelves so the G1 fans who made your products great can buy them for their children! Put remakes of real cartoon shows like Sunbow Transformers and G.I.Joe on the air! And stop catering to the fringe element of the fandom who have MTMTE on their coffee tables!

destroyed? just dont read them then. go back to your time capsule/bubble and ignore new things.

btw, whats your deffinition of a REAL transformers fan? collecting only primes megatrons and bumblebees? that gets old pretty fast.

shajaki wrote:btw, whats your deffinition of a REAL transformers fan? collecting only primes megatrons and bumblebees? that gets old pretty fast.

It's in his name. Fans of 1984 stuff and nothing else. The ultimate, orthodox Geenwunners.

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

84forever wrote:BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

I'll be in Pasadena with tomatoes and a good throwing arm.

So...they actually give you something like a G1 COLORED SCORPONOK, who happens to have a G1 CARTOON ACCURATE HEADMASTER HEAD, from G1, and you hate it? Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude. Get a life.

WOW. A Botcon offering only Satan can love. If this squat, gimmicky, pre-school piece of plastic scrap was in the original 1984 line up there would be no Transformers today!

BRING BACK REAL TFs NOW!

84forever wrote:

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

84forever wrote:BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

I'll be in Pasadena with tomatoes and a good throwing arm.

So...they actually give you something like a G1 COLORED SCORPONOK, who happens to have a G1 CARTOON ACCURATE HEADMASTER HEAD, from G1, and you hate it? Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude. Get a life.

WOW. A Botcon offering only Satan can love. If this squat, gimmicky, pre-school piece of plastic scrap was in the original 1984 line up there would be no Transformers today!

BRING BACK REAL TFs NOW!

Could you not?

A thought just occurred to me: Should we count Scorponok with Olin Zarak as one Pirate, or two? In the US cartoon, Scorponok was nothing more than a lifeless construct, I don't know if the same principle applies here.

84forever wrote:

Nemesis Maximo wrote:

84forever wrote:BOTCON HAS REACHED A NEW LOW

I'll be in Pasadena with tomatoes and a good throwing arm.

So...they actually give you something like a G1 COLORED SCORPONOK, who happens to have a G1 CARTOON ACCURATE HEADMASTER HEAD, from G1, and you hate it? Jesus H. Mary and Joseph born in a manger read the Bible Christ, dude. Get a life.

WOW. A Botcon offering only Satan can love. If this squat, gimmicky, pre-school piece of plastic scrap was in the original 1984 line up there would be no Transformers today!

BRING BACK REAL TFs NOW!

Oh I get it now, you're a parody account. Well played, guys!

84forever wrote:I'll be in Pasadena with a bag full of tomatoes and a good throwing arm. IDW has destroyed Transformers and turned their comic into a toy store circular full of rejects that REAL Transformers fans let SHELFWARM back in the '80s! Bring back Dreamwave! Free Pat Lee and lock up Michael Bay! Put iconic characters back on the shelves so the G1 fans who made your products great can buy them for their children! Put remakes of real cartoon shows like Sunbow Transformers and G.I.Joe on the air! And stop catering to the fringe element of the fandom who have MTMTE on their coffee tables!

yeah, Pat Lee, that paragon of virtue. Regardless of his work (if any of it was actually his work) I'd really hope that Hasbro didn't do any business with anyone that shady any more. I might dislike a lot about the Bay films but I'd like to think that at least everyone who works on them gets paid.

Sabrblade wrote:

shajaki wrote:btw, whats your deffinition of a REAL transformers fan? collecting only primes megatrons and bumblebees? that gets old pretty fast.

It's in his name. Fans of 1984 stuff and nothing else. The ultimate, orthodox Geenwunners.

ahh kay. so his collecting days ended 30 years ago then? why bother posting on anything current?

look! grandpa learned how to use the internet! adorable.

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:A thought just occurred to me: Should we count Scorponok with Olin Zarak as one Pirate, or two? In the US cartoon, Scorponok was nothing more than a lifeless construct, I don't know if the same principle applies here.

I'd assume that the pair would be one. All forms of fiction (not counting Masterforce and Zone) starring Scorponok has always has the noggin being the guy in charge, with the main body/Transtector being little more than an extension of lil' bit (if I'm mistaken about that, whoops). Plus, the wording of the one tweet from BotCon saying that Olin is the heir to Scorponok suggests Scorponok is inanimate.

Scorponok himself was at least somewhat alive in Marvel G1 and IDW G1.

And probably all alive in his brief Dreamwave appearance.

Sabrblade wrote:Scorponok himself was at least somewhat alive in Marvel G1 and IDW G1.

And probably all alive in his brief Dreamwave appearance.

But since Wings is based on the G1 cartoon, we can safely assume Scorponok is nothing but a Transtector.

it's weird that Scorponok/Zarak was the one Headmaster to carry over the Japanese idea (or pre-empt it?) of the larger bot being inanimate without the head. I honestly don't care what fiction they come up with for this, because if it's cool, it's cool. If it's not, then the toy will just be an updated version of some form of the G1 guy anyway. Probably work better in comics scale than cartoon size, but maybe you could get some World's Smallest or Cyberverse guys around him to make him look huge.

craggy wrote:it's weird that Scorponok/Zarak was the one Headmaster to carry over the Japanese idea (or pre-empt it?) of the larger bot being inanimate without the head. I honestly don't care what fiction they come up with for this, because if it's cool, it's cool. If it's not, then the toy will just be an updated version of some form of the G1 guy anyway. Probably work better in comics scale than cartoon size, but maybe you could get some World's Smallest or Cyberverse guys around him to make him look huge.

Maybe Olin remodeled the original design to be smaller.

shajaki wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

shajaki wrote:btw, whats your deffinition of a REAL transformers fan? collecting only primes megatrons and bumblebees? that gets old pretty fast.

It's in his name. Fans of 1984 stuff and nothing else. The ultimate, orthodox Geenwunners.

ahh kay. so his collecting days ended 30 years ago then? why bother posting on anything current?

look! grandpa learned how to use the internet! adorable.

I collect classics and MPs. And not only am I on Internet, I'm on PS3 WFC and FOC Escalation too! Boy do these younger guys suck. You might be tech savvy, but my generation pioneered this stuff.

84forever wrote:

shajaki wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

shajaki wrote:btw, whats your deffinition of a REAL transformers fan? collecting only primes megatrons and bumblebees? that gets old pretty fast.

It's in his name. Fans of 1984 stuff and nothing else. The ultimate, orthodox Geenwunners.

ahh kay. so his collecting days ended 30 years ago then? why bother posting on anything current?

look! grandpa learned how to use the internet! adorable.

I collect classics and MPs. And not only am I on Internet, I'm on PS3 WFC and FOC Escalation too! Boy do these younger guys suck. You might be tech savvy, but my generation pioneered this stuff.

Oh shit, what're we gonna do now?!

I'm not sure if this has been said before but is Rung's look based of James, because in the picture they look eerily similar.

craggy wrote:it's weird that Scorponok/Zarak was the one Headmaster to carry over the Japanese idea (or pre-empt it?) of the larger bot being inanimate without the head. I honestly don't care what fiction they come up with for this, because if it's cool, it's cool.

True for The Rebirth, and Marvel Cerebros was essentially a Transtector too.

With this being the Wings universe and Olin being green, Sunbow rules will surely predominate, but if Llyra's getting mentioned, that means some comic elements are bleeding in. Scorp gradually subverting Zarak's mind was what made his character for me back when I read the limited series, and while overdoing that in this story could risk making Olin's character too much of a retread, a desire to outdo daddy and rise above being changed by this new power could make for effective motivation. Even if Scorponok never was sentient, a bit of Zarak's personality lingering inside it could have essentially the same effect as the Marvel "latent-engrams," or however that worked.

In terms of Sunbow's take on Scorponok (and Fort Max) I'm not sure what to think. All the other Headmasters had their own lifeforces (sparks?) before hooking up with Nebelons, so it s a little inconsistent that these two don't.

Considering that the G1 cartoon has shown living Transformers being built from scratch before(the Dinobots, Trypticon), is there room to assume that these two were also built into living Transformers before becoming binary bonded? They don't show much personality in the cartoon, but that looks like more of a time constraint issue than anything else.

Yeah, Scorponok, not Lord Zarak, even only had one single line in the whole Rebirth 3-parter, which was "AUTOBOTS, DIIIIIIIIIIE!!!!!" and was spoken in a voice that could have very well been Zarak himself or a sentient Scorponok. But as it was never made clear, it's hard to tell either way.

I wonder if the Club will retain this ambiguity and have Olin do all the talking whenever Scorponok is not in robot mode.

Any shots of Olin in robot mode yet? Or did I just miss it?

Rodimus Prime wrote:Any shots of Olin in robot mode yet? Or did I just miss it?

none yet

Just for answering Rodimus' question here, a post from a few pages back:

Mindmaster wrote:For the curious, here's comparison with the original Generation One Headmaster Spike and what we have so far of Scorponok's new noggin:





For Olin's robot mode, imagine Spike's robot mode, but probably decoed similarly to one of these two:

RiddlerJ wrote:In terms of Sunbow's take on Scorponok (and Fort Max) I'm not sure what to think. All the other Headmasters had their own lifeforces (sparks?) before hooking up with Nebelons, so it s a little inconsistent that these two don't.

Considering that the G1 cartoon has shown living Transformers being built from scratch before(the Dinobots, Trypticon), is there room to assume that these two were also built into living Transformers before becoming binary bonded? They don't show much personality in the cartoon, but that looks like more of a time constraint issue than anything else.

well depending on day of the week it was, the cartoon required Vector Sigma to give a newly constructed Transformer a personality, but Zarak and Spike both just knocked up their gigantic transforming city-bots in half a day with a few welders and tins of paint, never visiting Cybertron until already built, named and ready to be shipped off to toystores. Cerebros being part of Fort Max makes it easier to imagine a new personality developing, and it is possible that both might have been gifted life by Vector Sigma, either after the events of The Rebirth or even during the climactic energy-hoover malarky.

This pic was uploaded on Apr. 1 and retweeted by the BotCon twitter.

https://twitter.com/lonelyhydra/status/ ... 1796298752 < Original post




The character's name is Chairman, apparently another pirate. And the RTS Perceptor mold, perhaps?

Or perhaps I'm just a fool...

Henry921 wrote:Or perhaps I'm just a fool...

Yep.

That was Hydra's April Fools joke.

In addition to last week's reveal about the biggest Transformers Collector's Club exclusive figure for the upcoming Pasadena BotCon, the official Twitter account for the event has revealed the jet mode for Scorponok and Olin Zarak - as was expected, given that the figure is a redeco of Energon Scorponok. The image is apparently an in-hand shot with tweaked colours, and it also reveals that the Olin figure cannot fit in the closed cockpit. They also posted a second image, showing Olin outside of the vehicle itself. Check them both out below!

Also, they've posted a pic of Olin unseated from the cockpit - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=742829992424129&set=a.742830042424124.1073741825.247519665288500&type=1

Well, it beats flying around in city mode.

That never looked very aerodynamic.

Did TF Energon Scorpinok have this jet mode also? Or is this just some fabrication that resembles a jet mode?

AutoBorst wrote:Did TF Energon Scorpinok have this jet mode also? Or is this just some fabrication that resembles a jet mode?

Yes, it had this Jet Mode.

AutoBorst wrote:Did TF Energon Scorpinok have this jet mode also? Or is this just some fabrication that resembles a jet mode?

The Energon Decepticon were Triple Changers for the most part. The Deluxes had Attack Modes, while Voyagers and Ultras had all new alt modes. Scorponok had a jet mode and Shockblast was a satellite.

AutoBorst wrote:Did TF Energon Scorpinok have this jet mode also? Or is this just some fabrication that resembles a jet mode?

Yes, the original use of this mold did have the jet mode. He was advertised as a Triplechanger from the start, back in 2004.