Goodbye Binaltech

From the very beginning I've been a fan of Binaltech and Alternators, and even when I sold off the latter in one of my many culls, the Binaltech survived. They survived everything, the Diaclone sales, the G1 sell-off, the Animated, CHUG, Movie, artwork and reissue clearouts...you name it, Binaltech stayed. They were at the core of everything I held dear as a Transformers, Generation 1 and model car enthusiast. I even wrote a slew of detailed articles on TFSource Blog to summarise the series up to BT-18 here, here, here, here, here and here, and made a lot of friends by writing the articles at the time of release for TF-1.com here. Having previously declared to the world why I would never sell them here, I have now put virtually all of them up for sale and already said goodbye to a fair few. 

Human Alliance Autobots (Pre-Completion)

I know what's going to happen. I'm going to buy that Hasbro Asia Human Alliance Barricade and Soundwave 2 pack, and within 4 weeks of that I'll have bought the black and then Flash Freeze Human Alliance Sideswipes for the complete set. So in advance of that, I took a shot of all my pre-completion Human Alliance Transformers from across ROTF and DOTM, minus regular Bumblebee and Barricade as I didn't bring them out of storage for the shoot. I didn't even foresee this shoot until tonight.

ROTF Human Alliance Mudflap

It's dawning on me slowly that the Movie Human Alliance line of larger figures could actually be - across the board - a 100% run of successfully excellent figures. Bumblebee, Jazz, Sideswipe (good luck convincing me otherwise, flaws and all), Barricade and Skids from ROTF and Roadbuster from DOTM have all been excellent figures. They've each had shortcomings and difficulties, but on the whole none have left me cold or unwilling to praise them overall. The strongest is still Jazz, and the hardest to justify to others Sideswipe - and even then the latter has one of the most beautiful alt modes ever seen on a Transformer. With all sub-lines of such quality, the demand is high and collectors tend not to sell the toys often. Add to that short-packing or bad distribution of particular releases and you have astronomical aftermarket 2nd hand prices and a lot of incomplete HA collections. Mudflap is a fine example of this. This year I decided to finally plug those gaps, and finally Project Human Alliance Mudflap is complete.

New Arrivals - Mid-September 2014 (Part 1)

After buying every comic-related appearance of Shane McCarthy's brand new IDW Transformers character "Drift" in almost every cover variant available, it was about time I bought the toy! But that's for a different dedicated post, I also came into possession of my seemingly favourite thing in the world, more repaints.

DOTM Human Alliance Skids

The Human Alliance series of Transformers Movie toys are widely regarded as the very best to have come out of the Bayverse group of releases, premiering around the time of Revenge Of The Fallen (ROTF). Bumblebee, Sideswipe, Jazz and Barricade are utterly magnificent creations, but none of the others ever got my attention, so were never bought. I think it is also accepted that after the ROTF range, the HA toys went slightly downhill, I know upon seeing Soundwave I lost heart for the line completely. Recently I purchased the above Dark Of The Moon (DOTM) repaint of the Human Alliance Skids. This toy is now a black vehicle with green stripes, seen for a micro-second in DOTM, and the same mould as the all green version released during ROTF. 

New Arrivals - Mid July 2014 (Part 2)

Yes, there's more Animated, but there's also considerable variety. A trip to see Paul "The Spacebridge" Hitchens for a family day out would not be complete without a look through his Transformers stock, and with my new ambition to complete Transformers Animated, I knew I'd find some modern specimens in his reserves. I also used the opportunity to pick up things I'd looked at briefly on line, but couldn't resist in the flesh.

Selling Art Is Hard

When Alternators and Binaltech were huge, I bought as much original box artwork for the Alternators toy line as I could get my hands on. Why? For investment purposes? Hell no, have you seen the artwork for Alternators? Created by Transformers comic and toy industry legends Marcelo Matere, Alex Milne and Guido Guidi amongst others, they were the lovechild of the best official TF artists around and the best looking Transformers toys we'd had in years. If I had not bought them at the time when they were offered by the artists themselves at conventions, I might have lost the chance to get them forever. Having these pieces of unobscured, full-size history was the mightiest honour and pleasure an Alternators/Binaltech fan could experience. And I loved them, and displayed them fully.