Here’s our first look at the toy version of Victorion, the first all-female Transformers combiner. Fans voted on her name, gender, modes...color scheme. Maybe this fan voting thing isn’t so great after all.
Now before we criticize, let’s get a good look at this close-knit group of female robots. Victorion is six separate entities that form into one, after all.
First we have Jumpstream, a Stunticon repaint with a slightly more pronounced chestpiece and very pronounced lipstick. With its odd, wobbling back-and-forth legs, this is my least favorite Combiner Wars series cars. Note the blue and silver accessories, which do not clash with the red and teal at all.
Dustup I like. She’s another Stunticon retooling, but that face is evocative of one of the earliest female robots from the cartoon series, Nightbird.
Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it and they just chopped the ears off of Wheeljack.
Then we’ve got Stormclash and Skyburst, who I am going to guess are sisters of some sort, because there has to be some justification for minor retools of an existing mold.
How many helicopters does that make for the Combiner Wars line? All of the helicopters? Yes.
Red Dust here is a Legends-class figure that forms Victorion’s chest shield. She’s a repaint of sadness.
And finally we have Pyra Manga, that core of the group. She’s a retooling of Hot Spot, leader of the Protectobots.
These red and teal robots combine to form the mighty Victorion, the most color-coordinated Transformers combiner of all-time!
It really hurts to look at her, those colors. I love the mechanic of putting together all the smaller weapons into a bigger one, but the giant She-Ra-looking sword clashes even further.
Oh well, it could be worse. They could have done her up in Generation 2 colors.
Nah, I take that back. Generation 2 colors are awesome, and I might like the upcoming Generation 2 Stunticons better than the first release.
For those of you unfamiliar, Generation 2 denotes Hasbro’s first attempt to resurrect the toy line. Launched in 1993, some two years since anyone cared, the Generation 2 toys started off with wonderfully ghastly recolors of Generation 1 toys before moving on to feature unique molds. Its where my green, blue and red Dinobots and bright yellow Devastator come from, and it’s the reason Hasbro is releasing G2 recolor sets of Combiner Wars Menasor and Superion.
So the Combiner Wars line comes down to a choice between horrible fan-chosen colors and horrible nostalgia-fueled colors, but there are still more combiner teams left to revisit. What about the Technobots, who combine into Computron?
Hi there, Scattershot.
All of these fresh reveals and new images come courtesy of Hasbro’s presence at Comic-Con 2015, where they also showed off Platinum reissues of Blaster and Perceptor, the three best seeker jets (Ramjet, Thrust and Dirge) and Decepticon dinosaur city Trypticon.
In closing, Victorion may have high heels, but kudos to Hasbro for not falling for the old “women are more fashionable than men” stereotype, I guess.