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Preorders are live for both MP-53 Skids and MP-54 Reboost. The pair of Honda City Masterpieces have a Japanese SRP of ¥9,800 (or 10,780 including 10% sales tax in Japan), though it's not hard to find reputable retailers knocking the price down below that a bit. Preorders are also available officially from some US-based retailers, coming in at $90, which is roughly equivalent to the Japanese SRP. Both Masterpieces are set to be released simultaneously in late November.

Between the two, Reboost seems the slightly better value, with additional weapons, the Diaclone-based scooter accessory, and a "holomatter avatar" mini figure to ride it. But compared to many Masterpieces of late, $90 almost feels like a bargain either way.

Apparently by way of 4chan, we've had our first picture leak of Studio Series Slag over the last couple of days. The second Leader Class Dinobot is looking every bit as big and chunky as Grimlock, and carries on the same style of being heavily influenced by the G1 toy, but mixing in cartoon elements like the red head and light color thighs. Fans have been quick to point out this also makes it resemble the Canadian variant of G1 Slag, though this outcome is almost certainly coincidental.

Slag comes with an exosuited Daniel Witwicky accessory figure, which much like Wheelie is a sit-on-the-shoulder display piece rather than being a useful partner action figure in its own right. We expect to learn about Slag officially next month, during a Fan First Friday announced for May during the recent Fan Fest stream.

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We're back to discuss what went down during the Hasbro Pulse Fan Fest, as well as Brian's experience in being part of the event.

We have news! Galvatron, the Ark, a charming Australian kid! What a week!

 

News

RFC News Desk 137 – Amazon Australia Leaks

IGN Previews Kingdom Galvatron, Scorponok, And The Ark

Can't have a scheduled event without leaks!

Amazon Australia has presumably stepped all over the Transformers portion of this Friday's Pulse Fest by posting a bunch of new product listings which we're guessing covers everything intended to be revealed - and probably more.

All of the listings are effectively text placeholders with no pictures yet, but we do have names and rough ideas of the prices, though in Australian Dollars where Deluxes are around $30, Voyagers $45-50, and Leaders somewhere in the neighborhood of $90.

Thanks to a further accidental posting by Hasbro Pulse, we have support for the idea that some of these are representing a Shattered Glass subline, as Pulse had an out of stock (and unpriced) listing for Shattered Glass Blurr appear this morning. It's believed that the listings on Amazon for Goldbug, Jetfire, and Megatron are part of the same group.

"Figure Packs" are also a thing here, including listings for Sideswipe and Nightprowler, and "Galvatron Unicron". The Sideswipe pair is thought to be the long-awaited Earth-mode Sideswipe retool, coming with a redeco of Kingdom Cheetor as a cancelled Universe toy from 2004. Meanwhile, the Galvatron may be the rumored "reformatting scene" Galvatron redeco that was supposedly coming in addition to the toy-based Selects Galvatron.

The Golden Disk collection adds Deluxe Jackpot, and Voyager Tigatron. Action Master Jackpot could be a reuse of Studio Series 86 Jazz, or potentially even the Earthrise or Siege Datsun-style body depending on what's available to use. Tigatron is a separate listing from Kingdom Tigatron, with the best guess being an orange redeco as a regular tiger, matching the early working deco for the original Beast Wars toy.

Studio Series 86 comes along with a big mislead in the form of an entry for "King Starscream". Based on insider info, though, the Voyager coronation Starscream concept was replaced by Bumblebee Movie Thrust a while ago, so Amazon Australia's information is a little out of date. We do see listing for Gnaw, Wreck-Gar, and the Sweep reuse of Scourge's mold, though.

Regular Kingdom only contributes a listing for an Autobot-aligned Core Class Fossilizer, which is supposedly to be a redeco of Vertebreak.

But there is a listing for "Generations Prime Optimus Prime" which we don't really know what to make of. The immediate implication would seem to be something Transformers Prime, but other than that it's priced like a Leader, there's nothing to go on.

This week: Black Zarak, not an April Fool's joke. Also: Masterpiece Skyfire. Yes, Skyfire. Not Jetfire. Also not an April Fool's joke. Someone pinch us. Wait, Black Zarak can do that. Excellent.

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RFC News Desk 136 – Red Skids, Golden Disks, And Black Zarak!

Optimus Prime Replica Helmet

We had our first look at the Masterpiece Skids testshot in provisional color. Which just means it's handpainted samples, so the exact details and finish may not be identical on a production unit later. But besides Skids looking nice, we got to see the first redeco of this Masterpiece, the brand new character Reboost. This is based on a Diaclone toy previously not utilized as a Transformers character. We presume Crosscut will probably follow along a little later, but at this point, we wouldn't mind seeing the whole Honda City robo assortment get some time in the Masterpiece spotlight!

Along that same line, the Figure King article that showed us the color samples here contained references to other Masterpiece projects in development. This confirms that Raiden lives, after going radio silent since the end of 2019. Plus, an unexpected name has been thrown in the ring, as TakaraTomy seems to be working on a Masterpiece Skyfire! How big and expensive must that turn out to be if they try to get it in scale?

The Golden Disk Collection appears to be one of the Kingdom sublines coming to Amazon this year. Listings were found on at least one international Amazon site referencing toys in this assortment. The simpler to understand is Terrorsaur, who had previously been conspicuously absent among the Kingdom Beast Wars updates. There's no indication at all about what mold or engineering this might be based on, or if indeed it is somehow a brand new Deluxe mold entirely.

The other listing found was for "Ranger Puffer". To make a long story short...er... this appears to be a two pack of what we believe to be Road Ranger, a GoBots character represented in Transformers by a black and orange Huffer, and Puffer. Puffer is best described as "Mexican Pipes", which was in fact just a physically unchanged Huffer in Pipes-based deco, varying between forms of light or dark blue on white, depending if European origin or Mexican, or a third variant of dark blue on dark blue. By the nature of the characters, we're presuming this to be a two pack of the unmodified Kingdom Huffer mold, with a real Pipes retool coming in a regular Deluxe assortment later this year.

Finally, the most shocking news is Hasbro adding a Titan Class toy to Generations Selects, in the form of Black Zarak!

Moderately retooled from Scorponok (obviously), Black Zarak features modifications to the Headmaster units to make the larger head accurate to the Masterforce redesign, and giving the smaller head an eyepatch. This isn't entirely accurate to Masterforce, since Black Zarak's head no longer transformed, but this one of course will remain a functional jumbo Headmaster. The larger head robot's chest also has a prominent scar sculpted in. And of course Black Zarak comes with a huge spear for further accuracy. Now please just don't include gold plastic decay to push the accuracy any furth...

This week: Unicron is shipping and Don has scored! Congrats! Also: Brian decrees that Core Class Starscream is the best itty bitty little Transformer ever.

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Twitter - New Soundwave

May the force be with you

Abominus slipped

Amazon Shipping Kingdom

Seacons before Unicron

This week: Walmart Collector Con was a dud. But, hey, Galvatron looks awesome.

News

* RFC News Desk 134 – Beast Wars Reissues Revealed

* RFC News Desk 135 – First Look At Netflix Voyagers Wave 3

* Transformers WFC Kingdom Galvatron First ‘Official’ Look

* Unicron.com interview with Ben Montano

Jtprime17 on TFW has dug up the first stock photos for Netflix WFC Voyager wave 3, featuring Optimus Primal and the Sparkless Seeker.

Sparkless Seeker is based on the dead or sometimes undead generic seeker bodies seen during the Siege cartoon. Which yes, does mean it's the Siege seeker mold again, rather than the Earthrise redeco many had been expecting. Ironically, it seems like this one that is specifically a wrecked corpse appears the least damaged of any use of this mold to date! The seeker comes with redecos of Battlemasters Singe and Caliburst. Caliburst is a tiny bit more accurate to the G1 Targetmaster color layout than its previous release, but Singe has if anything only diverged farther.

Meanwhile, Optimus Primal's differences are very hard to discern. The colors may be kind of metallic now? Maybe? or maybe the colors are just more saturated? Rattrap may also be redecoed in some way, but that's also unclear because some of the shots look just like the individual release version, while others are blatantly digitally recolored over, making some of the colors look darker. But it's impossible to tell if that's intentional or simply the result of a bad photoshop job.

These two, plus several other Netflix wave 3 toys should go up for preorder on Monday the 15th during Walmart's collector con product launch event, to be fulfilled at a later, currently unspecified date. Or not. We all know how Walmart preorders go by now, right?

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This week: Unicron is coming, but Diecast isn't happy for some reason.

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Walmart Collector Con

Selects G2 Ramjet, and more Commander Class Rodimus