Here's that good looking couple all dressed up in their robot mode duds.

 

decided to do a little setup.

 

Hi, I was wondering if anybody has business with Specimen-17 before?

 

After making that Decepticon base, the Autobots wanted their turn  

 

That's really well-done! Everything is interconnected.

 

Fantastic stuff!!!!

What a gorgeous room. Is it interview time yet?  

All the best
Maz

 

A few shots of Predaking.

 

beautiful, beautiful work man! I'm all doe eyed looking at it!

 

Whenever you're ready  

 

Finally got Windcharger in.

 

I just posted these beauties in the most recent purchases forum but they belong here as well.

Enjoy!

 

Tell me about it, After passing over a ton of auctions for ones with floppy arms, and buying one where the guy lied and said the arms were tight, I finally found one with tight arms but with a busted clip on the head piece. Fortunately the other one I bought had good clips so after a little "surgery" I had a beautiful Bumper with tight arms... and one to leave in alt mode FOREVER  

 

...i guess i lucked out when i tracked down bumper on alt.toys.transformers back in the early nineties; mine's pristine, crisp, and with just the perfect amount of friction in every joint!..

---

...brawn was my first autobot, an early birthday gift from late autumn 1984, alongside ravage and rumble: i received them in advance to play with a friend at his/our combined birthday celebration a few days before my own birthday...

...i quit collecting transformers for the third time late summer 1999, making a deliberate point to abstain completely for about sixteen years in order to focus my time and resources on more-pressing priorities, but i still occassionally admired the modern toys from afar...so, when stumbling upon universe brawn during a grocery trip with my future wife in the autumn of 2008, i couldn't resist launching into an inspired soliloquoy about the original toy, his character, its personal significance, and the amazing improvements wrought by twenty-first century design, culminating in me buying her first transformer, as a gift!..

(see what i did there? maintained my own collecting-abstinence; gifts for other people don't count!)

...other than that one isolated incident, i didn't touch any transformers again until the fall of 2015, when my now-wife surprised me with a gift of combiner wars devastator, utterly turning me back to the dark side, once more to forever dominate my destiny, but that's another story for another time: the point is that my wife loves me very much and surprised me with another gift of titans return brawn for my birthday last december, my first titan master!..of course, he merely served as an appetiser for the main course looming this spring in titans return legends-class brawn, and what an amazing figure he is!..




...i can't quite bring myself to pull the trigger on badcube's brawny reissue this summer; despite a temptingly-stunning robot mode, his vehicle mode merely serves an anemic, underdetailed rendition of of the original brawn toy in my eyes, and that G1 rough-and-tumble, flared-fender, big-knobby-tired look is at the heart of brawn's character...

 

That does strike me as the best way to do it, make a perfect one from a couple of examples, because a straight up unaffected one is too tough to find on its own.

Loving the Brawn shrine there!

Forgive me, I have to ask, is there a reason you start all of your sentences with ellipses?  

I didn't see enough good stuff in Brawny to keep him either, the transformation was interesting but it just was not polished enough or proportionally spot on in my opinion.

All the best
Maz

 

Double Target Masters! You asked, we listened. Drink deep friends. Said no-one ever. Maybe you could accuse Hasbro of running out of ideas but considering this came out in the year we got the Pretenders it might be fairer to simply credit this to corporate excess in the design meetings. SNIFFFFFFFF!

To be fair, I really like Scoop and I always have. I didn't own him myself, as I'd pretty much stopped buying Transformers by this point, but a friend had him. He was a kind of fascinating little oddity. Weirdly, the only '87 Target masters i'd seen were the '86 redo's, but at least I was familiar with what a Nebulon Targetmaster felt like in hand. Not this! These guys were miniscule and had the handle between their legs! They looked like garden gnomes for perverts. But hey, at least you could join them together. Great.

Scoop himself was a fairly undistinguished 'bot, with a five step transformation sequence. he's got that chunky, kidified feel that so many of the '88 vehicles like Nightbeat or Slapdash. Those little dinky hands that flip out and are too small to actually hold his guns ("apparently his guns are the feature, shouldn't he at least be able to hold them? oh, another line. why, yes thank you!"). he has got a very Diaclone headsculpt, but beyond that it's hard to really get down to what I like about this toy. He just as a sort of low key charm that I find endearing. Maybe it's some odd mix of familiarity and loyalty.

I don't think anyone was expecting this guy to turn up in Thrilling 30, but that was part of the fun of the line. Well, it was for me. He doesn't even strike me as the most obvious of the Double Target Masters to select. That would be any of the Decepticon ones, though let's be grateful they left Quake until Titans Return. In many respects he's quite an unremarkable little figure. Just a classic, well articulated, well proportioned, little deluxe with the then de rigueur light piping. Man do I miss light piping. Anyway, Scoop does hand hands that can hold his guns now, but he's been designed with such love and attention that he has 5mm ports in his wrists and the back of his digger mode, just like the G1 toy! Beautiful. His wee Nebulon partners make up for a lot of the sins of the originals; the handle flips behind their legs and there's at least some shoulder articulation now. legs are still fused together but they're well detailed little guys. Maybe it's the sum of all this that makes Scoop such an appealing guy. All that attention to the little details really does make him more than the sum of his parts.

 

Hell yes with the 88 Targetmaster Autobots.



I just recently received my vintage Landfill stickersheet, so I'll be upgrading the labels on that specimen eventually.

All the best
Maz

 

Oh man I had all three of these as a kid. No longer have them but I remember them fondly.

 

@Turbine027, what did I tell you about cutting in the interview line?
Some people...
 

Not like my room is ready for that kind of thing anyway. Started taking all my G1 down last night, gonna finish up tonight. Moving everything to the new house on Friday. Hopefully my next collection room will actually be up for more than a year before moving again  

Landfill is da bomb. He's fun as hell to transform back and forth. I transformed mine so much the truck bed stickers have faded from excessive handling. But, faded stickers = well loved!

 

...i cultivated the habit as a form of protest, i suppose, against losing the expression manuscript afforded my personal voice during the mandatory academic transition to typewritten prose in the mid-eighties; a measure to soften and humanise what felt like the cold monolithic tenor of impersonal machine voices and a token rebellion against the sapir-worf implications of regimenting homogenised structure to human dialog...

...my earliest forays into BBS, email, and usenet culture more-or-less coincided with the same transition from handwritten to electronic correspondence, so naturally the habit carried over and at this point is entrenched by four decades of use; it's as natural as breathing to me...back in the era of academia and government-contractor mainframe accounts it never drew a second glance, but as usenet opened up to the general public in the early nineties i remembre a few people commenting that i 'typed with an accent' for the first time...

It's also a convenient mechanism for distinguishing voice in official correspondence.

...my wife laughs and says that for someone who loves fictional robots so much, i'm terribly racist against them in real life!..

...i hear you on the polish; i picked up my first badcube figure last month, veteran wardog, and despite looking spectacular in both modes, his transformation sequence is such a delicately-fidgety thing that it really puts a damper on his play value...quite the letdown after my first third-party masterpiece experience with mastermind creations' stealth sphinx and liger, enough to give me pause before considering future badcube releases...

...too bad G1 huffer can't convincingly pull prime's trailer...