'I' On Malaysia

Fresh from Japan and Hong Kong are some new exclusive releases from the Tokyo Toy Show 2010 and Toys’R'Us (America).  The Tokyo Toy Show 2010 gives us a rendition of G2 Dreadwing and Smokescreen using the Revenge of The Fallen NEST Global Alliance pairing of Mindwipe and Skystalker.  Mindwipe was always a great looking mold resembling a stealth bomber of some description (I can’t remember off the top of my head exactly which real world plane it looks like) with a very imposing, almost vampirical, robot mode.  Skystalker is just some random other plane, almost like a mini-Mindwipe at scout size, which can sit on top of his Voyager sized companion.

Depending on your perspective, this is either Deluxe Wave 7 or NEST Deluxe Wave 1 (or 2010 Deluxe Wave 1).  In the same way that the first Transformers movie toy-line spawned a secondary line in its ‘Allspark Power’ series to prolong sales, the ‘NEST Global Alliance’ series is Revenge of The Fallen’s way of doing the same thing – and times its release to coincide with the pre-Xmas spending period.

Paring back on releases even further than in Wave 5, Wave 6 contains only two ‘new’ figures which are both repaints of previous movie ‘off-screen character’ molds.  As well as containing less new figures, the wave also seems to be receiving a smaller distribution with only department stores and, strangely, hypermarkets being good places to pick these up.

I’m not normally one to publish gossip on my blog or reprint articles from other web sites, but I thought this was quite funny really and the ‘response’ post by Michael Bay’s crew has already been removed from the ‘Shoot For The Edit‘ site in the interests of keeping the peace (I presume).

At this point in the release schedule for the Revenge of The Fallen line, I’m starting to get a little bit concerned – mostly because there doesn’t seem to be much new stuff coming along and there hasn’t been anything seen regards to the next new line to replace this one.

Hoping to carry on the success of the first figure in the Human Alliance line, Bumblebee, we have a Voyager sized version of what was probably one of, if not the most, sought after figures from the first few waves of Deluxe figures for Revenge of The Fallen – Sideswipe!

Getting towards the end of the Deluxe waves which contain in-movie characters means that the number of desirable characters in each wave has dropped to one, and the specialist shops have begun selling figures like animals in The Ark – two by two!

Wave 5 of Revenge of The Fallen Voyagers marks the last wave to contain characters from the movie with all subsequent waves being repacks, repaints, reworks of previous molds or new characters akin to the ‘off-screen’ characters seen during the first movie’s toy-line.

The first of the exclusive repaint repacks contains two characters that didn’t appear at all in the Revenge of The Fallen movie, and both re-hashing molds from the first film.

The two characters in this pack are Autobot Whirl and Decepticon Bludgeon – in case you’ve ever wondered, they need the faction prefix on their names to cater for trademark registrations which prevent Hasbro from registering a common English word as a trademark.

Being released on his lonesome in Wave 4 is Stratosphere.  The first of the Voyagers to not make an appearance in the film itself, though the vehicle upon which the alt mode is based did appear during the Shanghai scene dropping Optimus Prime out of the rear of the plane before he parachutes down to land on the highway below.