Never really liked them. That said, ROTF probably had the best version of them. To me, at least.

 

Love them. The Decepticons, anyways. They always looked crazy and sinister. The Autobot ones were almost all just fat guys in big metal suits.

 

Budiansky botches another concept.

Transformers disguising themselves as Human-sized Humans in Masterforce made a lot more sense. Of course, it's not hard to make more sense than zero sense. I have no idea what Budiansky could have been thinking. He had giant Megatron transform into a gun a human could hold, but he couldn't make the mental leap from there to having the Pretenders being the size they obviously had in mind when the toys were created. Humm.

 

Never liked 'em. The robot modes of the toys all looked similar, and had poor alt modes. Plus they represented that point where Transformers went off the boil and onto a downward slope to naff-ness for me. I was really too old for them as toys, and the happy times with my G1 toys were behind me.
Glad to say that recently with Masterpiece and 3P, I'm reliving some of those great days as a "kolector" and havin' fun doing so.
Not looking forward to the time when we've run out of cool G1 stuff to turn into "MP's" and Pretenders rear their heads again. I'd probably bow out of TF collecting again at that point.

 

Didn't really like the concept. Weird, with a lot of potential plot holes. However, I do use the characters, with the Decepticon ones being either mutants or Unicron cultists with monstrous bot modes, and the Autobots/non monstrous ones having exo armor, which is usually transformable. No biological features though.

 

I don't like the look of the old pretender toys and I didn't think much of the concept beyond "It's just stupid sci-fi logic" but I love several Pretender characters, and I really liked it's reintroduction in Stormbringer.

 

Masterforce handled this pretty well now that I think about it.

 

The shells look good but make for poor toys. And I like the inner robots but I admit they are simple. I'd have liked repaints of the inner robots for Universe 1.0, in particular the Classic Pretenders.

 

I don't like the toys due to them being fat looking,also the idea of pretenders when they first came out didn't appeal to me especially following the head/targetmaster concept that was straying away from the original Transformers.But having said that I love some pretender characters from the marvel comic including Skullgrin,Iguanis,Landmine and the Mayhems.

 

I love them as a kid. And I loved the fleshed out (pardon the pun) characters in the Marvel comics like Thunderwing and the likeable Skullgrin.

Landmine and Cloudburst were a great team.

Bludgeon looked great but he's become a cliché like movie Drift.

I hate the modern toys where they meld the shell with the robot.

Apart from Bumblebee the Pretender Classics had horrible inner robots thankfully the Actionmaster could fit in the shells.

Personally I'd like updates of the inner robots. In the comics Landmine, Cloudburst and Skullgrin's vehicle modes looked great.

I'd be happy with repaints for some:

Cloudburst - Classics Jetfire
Iguanus - Ransack
Bombburst - Cybertron Starscream

With the third party trailer armour for Classics Rodimus and Magnus, I'm surprised no one's tried shells for Starscream or the others.

I'd love to see a new type of Pretender where the shell is based on another character. Kind of like Flare up disguised as Megatron. It could be a nice way of getting 2 characters.

 

I hate the human pretenders, but love the shit out of the animal/monster ones.

ROTF's interpretation sucked.

 

I don't think I could get in to the human pretenders, they looked like they belong with He-Man.  

Alice a shit.

 

Pretenders are such a fun concept to me, but so hard to get right!

I think my favorite use has been in Masterforce.

 

The monster shells I think are great, and a great concept, a powerful techno organic shell that looks terrifying. The humanoid ones were just daft to me. I've only ever seen them used in fiction in IDW and they work it pretty well.

 

Totally disliked them. To me, it was Has/Tak's desperate attempt to revitalize the line. The gambit did not work (at least for me it didn't. In fact, it actually pushed me away from TFs for a while).

 

I dislike them mostly for the flesh/organic part.

 

I hate them. I much more prefer transforming robots than robots in shells

 

But they still were transforming robots. Just transforming robots IN shells.

 

Would have been nice if the shells actually transformed.

 

I never cared for the actual toys but they looked sweet in the comics. That counts for a lot. It's reverse power armour or a reverse mech . That's fairly unique. Toss in being particularly goofy and you've got a winner.

I would love to see a pretender toy done as a proper monster instead of the guy-in-rubber-suit style. That would go a long way to make people like it. Bugly would be really nice for this. I'm keeping the hope alive that one day even this gimmick will get some love from the Generations line.