New Arrivals - Early January 2015

An extraordinarily short post about new arrivals in 2015. It's been mostly Masterpiece, which has reminded me why I shy away from that line so often, it's left me penniless. Some Animated gaps got filled too. This post will cover the early part of January. What you see in the middle above is the 2014 TF Expo convention exclusive Masterpiece MP-12 Lambor (Sideswipe) featuring...nothing. Read on...

This was a fascinating exclusive, It was offensively simple and lazy as well as quite fantastically niche in equal measure. The Autobot symbol - yes that gigantic disguise-foiling logo - has been removed from the bonnet bringing Lambor in line with Tigertrack and to a lesser extent, G2 Lambor. Diaclone fans rejoice, you can now have a totally street-accurate version of the Lamborghini Countach for the blossoming Masterpiece Diaclone range, now featuring Silverstreak (I know I know, not really Diaclone), Tigertrack, Sideswipe and of course, the upcoming Marlboor Wheeljack "Exhaust" figure. This Diaclone-like Sideswipe MP comes with the regular accessories and Tigertrack's optional Autobot logo stickersheet. 

My Transformers Animated Activators collection is now comprehensively complete. The later repaints of Armor Up Optimus Prime (Star Convoy homage) and Battlefield Bumblebee must surely have been poor sellers first time out, and they are pretty hard to find sealed or even loose, so to snag these off eBay for something less than $20 each was amazing. You can see Battlefield Bumblebee's siren paint is already imperfect even when sealed in blister. Weird that they chose not to paint Armor Up Prime's head at all. Anyway, Activators done, group shot soon!

And finally, something I should have bought on release and not cancelled my pre-order for, Masterpiece MP-13B Soundblaster and Ratbat. It's every single bit as beautiful as I had figured it would be, and I have regretted dropping my pre-order for this for some months. Nearly a year in fact. The Ratbat is an engineering marvel, immeasurably more attractive and of higher quality to me than the recent bootleg. Soundblaster himself is positively regal in those colours and has actually forced me to look very seriously at post-MP-10 Masterpiece completion. Oops.

Happy oops.

Many thanks to Ben Hazard and Shanti Seigel for being awesome.

All the best

Maz