Air Raid [Age of the Primes/Deluxe Class]

Rounding out the second new Aerialbot available as of this writing is Air Raid. Air Raid, like his team mates, is a butt head. He's fearless, reckless, and often in some sort of trouble. While that doesn't sound so fun to most folks, Air Raid couldn't be happier. I've actually got a bit of affinity towards the little shit. When I was younger Air Raid was my first Aerialbot outside of Easter Basket bootleg sets.

I had acquired him for cheap and happy to finally have an official member of the team. Those G1 toys are actually pretty small, and Air Raid found himself in my bag for a little while. I still remember a late night visit to Dunkin Donuts with friends after work with Air Raid getting passed around. Good times.

Air Raid is very faithful to his appearance in the original Transformers cartoon. He's well articulated and just overall pleasant. To be fair, the Aerialbots are pretty plane looking... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *cries*.  Originally, the Scramble City Combiners and Metroplex were designed to be Diaclone toys, but were released as Transformers only. I can see that Diaclone heritage in this Air Raid toy a lot. Makes me wonder what if Transformers never happened. Imagine if Diakron and Kronoform had lived and this was a new updated toy from those series? Air Raid has two blasters that can connect under his wings for alt mode firepower. That's a small thing that's done often... but I like it.

Transformation to his black F-15 Eagle jet mode is pretty easy. Everything just goes into place easily. The only place where you've got to be careful is when folding his legs into the rear of the jet. There's nothing too hard about it, but it's another one of those exactly right or it's not working type spots. It took me a second to get the two sections to snap together out of lack of wiggle room. Not a deal breaker and or a dark spot. Just a brief moment of saying dammit. Air Raid's mix of white, red, and black looks great. It gives a fairly simple looking bot and give him some visual pop. It's funny that a team of butt heads have such simple looking figures. I guess the old mantra 'keep it simple stupid' is always true for a reason. Air Raid looks great in his simplicity and jet mode is fun. Maybe I'll take him with me to Tim Hortons and relive some old memories. My local Dunkin sucks.

Optimus Prime [Galaxy Version 05-One]

Being the main character of my main subject matter, I talk about a lot of different Optimus Prime toys. I don't even talk about all of them and there's still a lot of Optimus talk around here. Fortunately he gets some really cool toys. In Transformers One, we got another version of his origin that was pretty great with some pretty great toys as well. I've been praising these Blokees takes on the Transformers One characters and Optimus is no different. Peanut butter and jelly, Blokess and Transformers One. Some things just go great together. .

In addition to the parts that your standard Galaxy Version kit offers is that way cool take on his energy axe. It's always looked good, but was downright awesome the way they used it. Because of that, it stands out to me more here than the normal inclusion would. He's also got that cool generic rifle the various Trackers carry around. It's dumb, but for some reason I just like these generic guns. Of course there's the standard set of hands and display base to stand on. Don't forget that new Galaxy Version build that debuted in this series. It's so much sturdier and better. I can't express just how much better it is. So much. One thing I enjoy is his smoke stacks. Thanks to the way they attach, you can flip them around to simulate when he used them as a flamethrower.

It's just a coincidence, but a cool accident is still cool. I mainly liked that part as when I was a kid and playing with the original Optimus Prime toy, his smoke stacks often got turned around to be used as little gun turrets. Newer editions lack that ability, but my 1984 one could do it. Optimus has a standard Optimus color set, but it's a good color set. So of course it looks great here. Of note is the Matrix shining through his chest windows, which is a nice touch. I like it when there's something going on in those vehicle windows in robot mode. In the end, this is another Optimus... but not just another Optimus. It's a good Optimus. Nice things are nice.

Slingshot [Age of the Primes/Deluxe Class]

The other day I was at Walmart with the Mrs and my Mom. When we had walked out to my car, a Slingshot was parked next to us leading my Mom to marvel at how neat it looked. That lead to me remembering the Age of the Prime toys I've been sitting on without posting about.

For example, today we'll be looking at Slingshot the Aerialbot. The Aerialbots, like other classic combiner teams is getting updated with all new and improved toys. It feels like just yesterday that the Combiner Wars version came out... but it sure wasn't. That was 9 years ago. So hey... almost a decade later they're getting updated with new engineering and frankly, they look great!

The Aerialbots are mostly remembered for being butt heads in their initial appearances in the original cartoon. Slinghsot's claim to fame was his adventures with Prince Jumal/Hassan in the episode Aerial Assault. During this episode, the Aerialbots were damaged and got repaired with car parts, leading to Slingshot having an older cars grill for a chest. I think an aftermarket company is making a snap on version of that car grill, which I might be tempted to buy. Slinghsot is also known for his G2 toy being one of the most fragile Transformers ever. It's made of solid gold plastic, which doesn't age well.

Horror stories of fans finding theirs in piles of rubble are well spread. Allegedly newer metallic plastics don't have this problem, but time will tell. Fortunately his newest toy is pretty good. Thanks to advances in toy engineering in the more recent years, the design team is able to make toys that look as if they stepped right off the TV screen. Well, toys that actually physically transform that walked off the TV screen. Slingshot looks like the butt head I just watched the other day. Just so happened Aerial Assault was recently aired on the Transformers Channel. I watch it daily.

In robot mode Slingshot is fairly well articulated. He can be put into a variety of poses and is pretty expressive. It's like the design team made a point to engineer his attitude. He's packing twin double barrel blasted that plug under his wings in jet mode. Transformation is pretty easy and he folds into a jet pretty quickly. Jet mode is the same Sea Harrier you know from his classic appearance. It looks great and is pretty solid. I enjoy how the front landing gear unfolds from the back of Slingshot's head.

Like most jet Transformers, there's a good bit of robot folded under the plane. It's been 41 years, I'm used to it. Thankfully there's not much to really complain about. The bulk of his jet kibble in robot mode is part of his classic appearance. Like I said, transformation is pretty easy. My only gripe is the same I have with a lot of recent cad designed Transformers. There just isn't a lot of wiggle room in the design, so you'll have to get thing exactly right or it's not coming together. Fortunately that wasn't as much of a problem with Slingshot, who being a butt head, you'd expect a little fuss.

Monday Blaster

It's Monday morning again, I'm enjoying a cup of coffee and watching a video on cursed Japanese websites.

Welcome to Zone Base.

I hope everyone had a great weekend, mine was awesome. The Mrs and I did some early Halloween shopping and found some great stuff. Our local At Home hasn't stocked yet disappointingly enough, though plenty others we've seen online have. Michael's, however, had an aisle halfway stocked with the spooky seasons initial offerings. It was very fun and even though summer is just starting, Halloween is coming.

While out Saturday, I picked up a Flame Toys Furai Model kit of Rodimus. It's his IDW design and looks great. I've got a few Flame Toys kits, but with Blokees and Yolopark having such a hold on my attention at the moment, feels weird. I really should get more, they look amazing. BotCon was going on this weekend and I wish I could have visited some of those booths! Both Blokees and Yolopark had solid representation and once again Yolopark made the exclusives. I should really get those.

I'm really looking forward to the new upcoming mini AMK Transformers kits they have coming. I'll be sure to talk about them here. I also picked up a ReAction Universal Monsters blind box from their current Silver Screen set. It's a black and white figure set of the classic monsters and awesome as always. I got The Mummy! I also grabbed a digital download card for Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. It's an oddball mixture of a technical showcase of the new hardware and cozy game. I wasn't going to get it until seeing several people online praising it. It was only $10, so why not? I found myself enjoying it quite a bit and yeah, it's oddly fun. 

Sunday was Cat Dads Day. The kitties and Mrs suprised me with a gift bag of fun! The Transformers X Sonic crossover set was inside as were some Transformers 5 Surprise mystery balls and a Star Wars Micro Galaxy Squadron blind box. They had made me some awesome cards too... how do our cats have better grammar than me? I'm lucky to have such a wonderful little family and enjoyed it very much. The Mrs and I played Mario Kart and we're steadily working our way though Stranger Things still and on our way for Season 5 this year! 

I've had a fun weekend full of fun stuff, and even pre-ordered the Transformers Godzilla toys. They're due to be shipped soon, so hopefully my history of bad luck with pre-orders doesn't reappear. Well, we've got a new week to get started. I've got a fun week of robots, monsters, and misadventure coming your way! Thank you all for reading Zone Base. Please share with your friends and Mutual High Fives everyone!

Chomp & Battle Grimlock [Cyberworld]

Transformers Cyberworld is the newest Transformers mainstream series taking over for EarthSpark with a new cartoon and toy line. I've been pretty excited for it since the series reveal as it looks really fun and feels like a spiritual follow up to the Beast Alliance toys from Rise of the Beasts that I enjoyed immensely. While the various figures haven't shown up at my local stores just yet, the large sized Chomp & Battle Grimlock is readily available on Amazon.

I got mine during Memorial Day weekend and today we'll be taking our first looks at Cyberworld. The larger toys in Cyberworld are neat as they serve as vehicles for the standard sized toys with the upcoming Scorponok even doubling as a play set. The smaller figures are more basic toys that can interact with these larger toys in a variety of ways. Grimlock, for example, can be ridden in dinosaur mode. Dinosaur mode also forms an exo-suit and arm bits can be removed to form a neat hover bike. Cool huh? Since I obviously don't have any other Cyberworld toys yet, I've demonstrated those features in the post pictures with a Micronaut as Cyberworld has a very 90's Microman vibe to it. This is going to be fun.

Grimlock is 9" tall and of course turns into a T-Rex. In robot mode he features limited, but meaningful articulation. Shoulders, elbows, legs and knees move respectively. He can move at the waist, but it's similar to a classic He-Man figure in that Grimlock will swing back into place giving a punch. His right arm is the T-Rex head, similar to Beast Wars Megatron. It's spring loaded and closes with a snap when opened. I can see some smaller Decepticons being held in it. The left arm features a rotating chain-gun tip. There's a sculpted fist as well, so you can remove the chain-gun barrel for a more traditional looking arm.

The chain-gun rotates with a satisfying clicking noise. Removing the dino head and chain-gun parts at the elbows and combining them gives you a cool hover bike mode a standard figure can operate. Though removing those parts is HARD. I was worried about breaking my figure while doing it, so be careful. Those things are really on there. Fortunately the top half of the dino head comes off easier as that's not only part of the hover bikes conversion, but also for Exo-Suit mode. Fold Grimlocks robot head down and place that dino head on his shoulders. The chest plate folds down to create a seat, there's even a little bar to secure the driver into place. The right hand is a claw of sorts without the head portion and that chain-gun provides some firepower.

Rescue Bots Optimus Primal's design was clearly used as a design template as there's some very similar engineering. It's noticeable when looking at his legs and in transformation to beast mode. While obviously not the same, that transformation is very similar. Not a big deal, but worth noting. That being said, transformation is very easy. The arms are held out with the obvious ends forming a head and tail. You can adjust the legs some to make it more natural and those tiny T-Rew arms move into place. The little cover for Grimlocks robot head forms a bit of a saddle for a figure to ride the dinosaur.

It's nice to see Transformers embrace being toys again and feature all sorts of silly gimmicks. While there still is Generations and other lines more geared with more serious tone... these are toys and I can see children having fun making Optimus ride Grimlock around. As a guy who likes robot toys, Cyberworld is a return to older style toys and gimmicks that I like to revisit. Not to mention, there's nothing like a big ole chonky robot toy. Cyberworld is going to be extremely fun to write about here and I'm really looking forward to it. 

Kanzenban

Summer is a Spooky Season.