MONTH IN REVIEW: March 2018

OK, so despite all my best protestations to the contrary, those who know me may well have noticed that I have been on something of a G1 kick recently. Do I collect G1? Well, you'll never hear me publicly admit that (it's a running joke), but no doubt there's something exciting about the hunt for minty specimens of vintage items that's been captivating me of late. If you read my review of February then you'll have maybe noticed some of the journey I've been on as part of that rediscovery, but things have definitely kicked up a notch in the month since.

So, what did March bring?

REVIEW: TakaraTomy Masterpiece MP-40 Targetmaster Hot Rodimus

One day someone will put together a list of "rather underwhelming new Transformers toy reveals", and I have no doubt that MP-40 deserves a spot somewhere on that list. Seriously now, would anyone have pegged Targetmaster Hot Rod, a seemingly-close repaint of a figure we received almost exactly two years prior as a desirable choice for the next mainline Masterpiece figure? The problem is of course compounded by the lack of other reveals happening at the moment; as it stands this chap is actually the last G1 standard release character on the roster, with only Beast Wars Dinobot and the special edition MP-17+ Prowl left to go before we're potentially in limbo. Whilst that doesn't concern me too much (I have no doubt Takara are cooking up something), I can understand why MP-40 was met with a collective sense of "huh?" when he was announced. After a fantastic last year run with the likes of Grapple, Artfire, Sunstreaker, Megatron... I don't think anyone thought that this is how they'd kick off 2018. But hey, here we are.

REVIEW: Alien Attack STF-01 Firage

Whilst putting this review together, I shared a couple of completed pictures of the figure with some friends of mine. "Who is that supposed to be?" came the immediate response from one of them, despite him having seen Dark of the Moon, the live action Transformers film from which the intended robot hails. Even when I pointed out that the character's name is Dino, they still had precisely zero recollection of him actually being in the movie, and it's perhaps not hard to understand why. If you check on Youtube, you'll find a video which collects all of the Autobot's scenes in that film into one handy package. It runs for a mere three minutes and fifty one seconds (by my rough approximation, that's about one hundredth of the total runtime, no? It just felt like it?), which is especially telling once you realise that most of that is spent in car mode or hanging around in the background. Still, Dino has seemingly made impression enough to be granted his own third party revision, and so here we are. Oh, and if you were wondering about the name, it's definitely not an unfortunate homage to that political pillock, Nigel Farage (puttup!), but instead a mash-up of Ferrari and Mirage, which was rather confusingly the character's name when he was originally realised in official toy form. And with all that cleared up, let's crack on with it!

MONTH IN REVIEW: February 2018

Having committed to doing a monthly round-up of my collecting as of last month, it now appears that I perhaps picked the absolute worst time to start! February has proven to be an exceptionally busy month, and whilst that's mostly because of family commitments and professional circumstances, thus not affording me much hobby time to begin with, there has also been something of a deluge of new additions to the collection. Some of you may be aware that I have been going through a bit of a reappraisal of my collecting boundaries of late, especially with my Masterpiece line-up now complete save for any new releases. You'll no doubt notice a bit of a shift towards reissues of some vintage figures and a few other examples from years-gone-by, and whilst in truth this has been building up fairly steadily over the last six months or so, it's definitely kicked into gear of late! In fact, I actually acquired a number of additional items from my wants list that don't even feature here, mostly thanks to a group buy from a Japanese retailer with some friends, but I'm keeping them safely tucked away for later down the line when I can find chance to appreciate them a bit more!

All that said, what has February brought?