Phoneticus Lexicon, formed by the Alphabots.

 

"Prepare for PUNCTUATION!"

I'll see myself out...

 

Breach their sen-ten-ces!

 

my post had nothing to do with worrying about it coming from China for the reasons ya all are talking about.
I was just wanting to get one from someone here, this has nothing to do with covid19. So those assumptions would be wrong

 

*SHRUUUUUGGGGGG*

 

Quicker, cheaper and less exposure going the China route.

Dude is in the "NO", instead of the "Know".



 

 

Not quicker going the China route.

 

Anytime I’m interested in getting an item I always search for a MIB, Misb or lose first on here. So all those purchases will be United States based. If something doesn’t show up here after a good while, I will go to online retailers if I don’t find what I’m looking for on here.
It’s my preferred method of trying to support the community first before retailers. Same goes for my local shops the locals and here are always first.

community first.

 

Community transmission?

z

 

Then why not get it straight from China? Shipping is cheap to free for most things. I don't understand what you mean by "community first"; Most KOs come from China, so wouldn't it be logical to just go to one of several online sites that source KOs from China?

 

This isn’t important enough to have an argument about.

thanks for any help given. Have a great day.

 

Hey everyone. Hope all is well. I was wanting to know about the CoolBecomeBrave Bruticus. From the videos I have seen it seems to have pretty decent joints and looks pretty decent considering it is a KO. What have the other members who own this figure thought of him?

 

For the price, can't complain.

 

It just seems to be the best of the combiners overall from cbb from what I've seen though most say Superion is better. Really want to have Superion, Menasor (no cbb yet   ) and Bruticus from the season 2 combiners. Never really had any interest in Defensor...and it sounds like it is the worst quality anyway.

 

Having owned Defensor only, and based on reviews, it seems like the Defensor set is definitely the worst.

But they are pretty cheap, so relatively speaking, it's hard to go far wrong.

zmog

 

Hey there everyone, so I don’t know how I am just now finding out about this one VC, but now I need it... it’s a 2/3 scaled down supreme Devastator from the ROTF line. He started popping up around the movie so I doubt I’ll ever find one on the secondary market, but I can hope! If you have details somehow, I am very interested!

 

I have the CBB Bruticus, for the price I paid I was happy with him (saved about £70 over the Hasbro ones) You can tell the plastic is cheaper as I have a genuine CW Swindle for comparison and my (not)Onslaught feels a little bit loose on some joints but he stands solidly enough. I've never found a Blast-off though, and I begrudge paying more for one genuine figure than the rest of the combiner put together!

 

An Evasion Prime. There's also a white one that I found before of the same mold.



And RZB01 Prime.

 

He got touchy

(inhales)


Oh man, I don't want to do this. Why am I doing this? No-one's making me do this. I'm still doing this. I said I was doing highlights from each year of G1 one week at a time, and you can't talk about 1984 without Optimus Prime. I already did Megatron, now it's time to get the big red bugger out of the way.

Because here's the thing. I don't much like Optimus Prime. No, that's not quite right, I like him well enough I suppose. I like him fine. But I don't care about him. Yes, that's more like it. I don't really care about Optimus Prime. He's not my space-dad, he's not the hero I ever admired as a toddler, he's a relic, a symbol of everything that came before.

Like I said in the Jazz review, I was born in 1984, so by the time I came to Transformers a few years later, Optimus was already dead. Rodimus Prime was in, and any sightings of Optimus felt more like flashbacks than anything else. Optimus was part of the generation that your older cousins might have owned, that the big kids that had grown out of Transformers would recognise. We didn't need them any more. We had Chromedome. And, uh, Wheelie.

Still, I remember being excited by the anticipation of watching The Return of Optimus Prime again. The second coming was a big deal, even if you don't remember the first coming. And then it came and went without leaving an impression, because the nicest thing you can say about it is that it's kind of a dull episode. But returning to it later...

Listen. Rodimus Prime earned his place as leader. It took most of a season, but he bloody well earned it. He doubted himself, he questioned the idea of leadership, he self-reflected until his arse was a highly-polished sheen. But. He. Earned. It. It's the closest that the G1 cartoon ever got to a story arc, with Rodimus finally overcoming his doubts by the penultimate story, The Burden Hardest To Bear. And then before the series could die a merciful death, along comes Optimus to undo everything because he's Optimus Prime and he made some kids cry in 1986 when he went all grey and stopped moving. In doing so Hasbro made it clear that they weren't going to ever commit to any real changes in the franchise, and that sooner or later everything will just reset back to normal. Back to boring.

And yet. When I opened up the packaging for this here KuBianBao MP10-V Convoy, a downscaled knockoff of Takara's own MP10 from a few years back, I have to admit to feeling a thrill of excitement on seeing it for the first time. Specifically, the luscious deep blue of his legs jostled a memory I didn't realise I had, of being round a friend's house as a child and jealously seeing their G1 Optimus Prime in person, with that same navy blue hue that somehow signified a certain level of quality well above anything I had at home.

Damn. I like it.

I'm not going to bang on about how good MP10 was or is. It's still to my mind the best version of the character that exists, and that's including the more recent cartoon-accurate MP44. MP10 looks like a truck, not a hastily-animated drawing of a truck. Here though it is scaled down to better exist next to main line transformers, with the loose scale guide that means that cars are deluxes, trucks voyagers, etc. Plus he doesn't tower over his mates in robot mode either.

There's only a few changes to the original MP10 tooling going on, most notably a metallic waist instead of the plastic one that the original had. You also get a bunch of extra accessories as well - some spare heads I could never get on, a jetpack in case you want him to recreate that time he had a jetpack, and a sword in case you want to... well, swords are cool I guess. God knows where the sword originally came from, but in solid die-cast metal it could double as a handy letter opener if you want to resume your correspondence from your fellow 19th century fops. Whatever its origins, KBB didn't think to give it the wrapping around the handle which it was clearly designed for, so it rattles around unconvincingly in old Optimus's hand. Still, taking the rubber grip off a cheap biro and gluing it on seems to have done the trick.

The trailer, and the rest of the accessories such as roller and a slightly sunburned Spike, were sold separately some time later, meaning that the eventual cost was not altogether far off what an actual MP10 would be. Still, you can't not have a trailer. The vestigial part of my brain that was programmed as a pre-toddler to enjoy putting things inside of other things still gets a tickle out of stashing deluxe cars inside. I'm a simple soul.

That'd all be fine, but let's stop ignoring that elephant in the room. This is a knockoff, and that troubles me. Not, I should add, that I'm especially troubled by the infringement of copyright, even the outright theft of physical moulding equipment owned by Takara. Okay, that's pretty low, but Takara and Hasbro are big enough, old enough and wealthy enough to take that hit. What bothers me more is that, being a knockoff, there's no way to tell how, where, or in what conditions it was manufactured.

It's a high-grade knockoff, using high grade materials, so skilled and trained workers had to have been used to put it together. But even so, while Hasbro and Takara would be publicly raked across the coals if they were ever to be exposed as using exploitative working practices in their factories (and risk their stock values) KBB have no such concerns. Were the workers paid adequately? Were their working hours reasonable? It's not like we'll ever be able to tell, as they'd never advertise their situation, having flagrantly broken the law to even produce something like this. And it'd be a mistake to assume that just because the product is good that the company's moral compass is equally good.

And it's not perfect either. Partly due to the downscaling process that makes certain parts small and fragile, and partly due to the use of materials which aren't quite up to Hasbro / Takara's standards, there are flaws in MP10-V's makeup. One of the flaps that cover up the wheels on his legs broke off a while ago, and was far too fiddly to repair. The other one is hanging on there - just. Over time the parts don't seem to fit together as well as they did when it came out of the box, and some joints are getting looser with age, while others seem to seize up. So... do I regret it?

Sort of. I regret having supported sketchy knockoff merchants in China. But I don't regret the toy itself. Honestly, if Hasbro or Takara had just made this themselves they'd have had my money, but they didn't. Well, they sort of did with Earthrise Optimus Prime, and the similarities at a glance make it very likely that the existence of MP10-V was a consideration in its creation. And owning MP10-V makes it impossible to ignore the scrunched-up torso proportions that ER Prime has, as well as the disappointingly small trailer that can't fit a deluxe car inside properly. So no, I'll keep my sketchy knockoff for a good long while yet. It's only Optimus Prime after all. I was never that much of a fan.

 

Which OP is that on the left?!

@SirToys