ROTF Deluxe Smokescreen

Repaints or redecos will always be apart of Transformers, redecos are a great way to squeeze every bit of money out of a mold. The most notorious offenders of this are the seekers, who usually have around 6ish toys per mold, if not more! But one of the more surprising toys who has a lot of redecos is the 2007 Deluxe Jazz mold, which was used for over 10 years. The latest one being released in the 2018 line, movie the best.

Now today we're looking at a Jazz redeco from the ROTF toyline, Deluxe Smokescreen.

Smokescreen has all of the silver from Jazz replaced with this beautiful dark blue color with red accents making him way more interesting to look at than Jazz is.

The details on this guy are amazing, I love all the random techno stuff he has, from his inner legs to his chest.

One thing I don't really like is how jank his arms are, because of his forearms being just two panels folded on top of each other it just results in them being very hollow and ugly, those weird hands don't help either.

Smokescreen's head sculpt is absolutely amazing, with a great helping of light piping.

Smokescreen's posability is very limited, the way the arms are formed make it impossible to get him into a lot of poses.

His transformation is fairly simple, it does have this one interesting part where his arms folds out to become the hood, which I already complained about earlier.

He turns into this great looking Pontiac Solstice. The red and white stripes on it really make it look way more interesting than the plain silver of Jazz.

ROTF Smokescreen is a pretty good redeco of a pretty good figure, is it better than the original deco? That's for you to decide.

Cyberverse Warrior Dead End

I see Cyberverse get a lot of hate, but I actually quite liked the show! And the toys were pretty good too. In that toyline they had the Warrior class, a cheaper lineup featuring most of the characters you would want, but they were, for the most, very good! Just simple transformers fun, just like the guy we're looking at today, Warrior Dead End.

This figure actually closely represents the on screen model pretty accurately, baring the head being the wrong color. Despite that he looks great, the red is vibrant and grabs your attention and the white breaks it up giving it detail.

The head sculpt looks fine, as mentioned before the outer part of the head should be black, but honestly it doesn't bother me really, other than that I really like the expression he has, I don't know why. It's just a neutral face, but I like it.

Like all other Warrior figures he does have a little gimmick on the go, if you push down his left arm his right will spring up, making it look like a quick draw, thankfully it doesn't interfere with his articulation.

Speaking of which, his articulation is pretty good, it's not missing anything important like knees or elbows like some of other Warrior figures are.

Dead End's transformation is simple, no real surprise there, another non-surprise is that the windshield is a faux part, no real big deal, just kinda annoying.

His car mode is just an average nondescript sports car.

Could use more paint. Not much else to say about it.

Overall Dead End is just a fun little guy. I totally recommend this dude. If you want him I'm pretty sure he's still being sold on Amazon, same with a few other of the Warrior toys if you want them too.

ROTB Voyager Optimus Prime

The ROTB mainline has been pretty good so far, and most of the gimmick toys are fairly good. But if you just wanted a good old fashioned transformer without any gimmicks the "core" line up is here for you. Which just doesn't really fit in, because if you just wanted good toys of these characters you'd just get studio series which are not only higher quality, but the same price as these.

Nonetheless mainline Voyager Optimus Prime is a fantastic figure.

This figure was actually based off of a earlier design of the ROTB Prime, but I can't really tell the difference between that and the final one anyway.

The detailing on this guy is amazing, especially in that lower body area, just some great techno stuff

The paint is a bit sparse on him but it still looks great, just wish most of it wasn't this model kit gray

His head sculpt is certainly Optimus Prime 

Which is to say it looks fantastic.

His head actually has some light piping, but for some Primus forsaken reason they painted over it, some light can still get through but it's not the same.

Prime's posability is insane, it has everything you'd want, and more. It has all the stuff you'd expect from a really good figure, like waist swivel, ankle pivot, but also has stuff that's usually only on things like masterpiece like an upper torso swivel and a goddamn ab crunch, all of this combines to make a figure that is an absolute dream to pose, I only have one real issue with its articulation, his head is only on a swivel, so he can't look up and down, not that big of a deal but still annoying.

Transformation is pretty standard Optimus Prime stuff, no real surprises here.

The truck mode looks fantastic. Most Optimus toy's truck modes look the worst at the back, and that's no different here, but it is handled better than most. And it has a trailer hitch!

Overall this figure is amazing, but you probably shouldn't get it, the studio series version of this guy looks way better and is the same price, but I suppose that's subjective, so who am I to stop you?

Earthspark One-Step Wheeljack

One-step changers are a Transformers guilty pleasure of mine, they're usually terrible but I just love them, and earthspark Wheeljack is no different, especially because he's my second favorite autobot.

Now this Wheeljack is actually using a one-step body type that is widely used by many toys from various other toy lines, I like to call it the "switchblade" body type. I believe it was first used by Drift in the AoE toy line.

Wheeljack doesn't exactly look the best, its obvious that hasbro cheeped out with the paint on this guy. He has lines molded where his stripes should be so I guess you can go in with a paintbrush and fix it up yourself. The parts that do have paint looks solid though.

His head looks good, but again suffers from a lack of paint, also I'm disappointed that they used his masked design, I just want a toy that actually uses his mustachioed face (I know a Scout in Cyberverse did, but that figure sucks)

In the subject of posability, he has no posability.

Wheeljacks transformation is so fun to do, and it better be! It being "one-step" is the whole gimmick of this guy! All you do is press a button on the back of his leg and it'll untab everything then it'll spring into car mode, or you can push him over to make him fall into a car.

Oh! Here's the paint!

The car mode looks great, the red and green stripes makes it obvious that this is indeed a Wheeljack, making it that much more awkward that he lacks them in robot mode.

One-step Wheeljack is a great little fidget toy, I usually have him on my desk just so I can grab him and do a quick transform before getting back to what I was doing.

If you like fun simple transformers you'd love this guy, I 100% recommend.

ROTB Beast Alliance Arcee & Silverfang

Arcee is my favorite autobot, so when I heard that she was appearing in the next movie I was excited to see what her new design, and the toys that intail, looks like, and I quite like it! (Could use a bit more pink though)

As of now there are only 3 toys based off this design, and today we're looking at easily the worst of them, by a lot.

I mean you can tell it's her, but really? This is just awful. It also has ZERO pink, I know this design doesn't have much but it still has some. The detail is incredibly simple, only having it in very few places.

The head sculpt look pretty nice at least.

Her posability is also very bad with only 7 points of articulation, one of which is for transformation. Most crucially she's missing elbows, making it impossible to do almost any natural looking poses.

Arcee's transformation is very simple and very unsatisfying to do, resulting in this "motorcycle" if you can call it that.

That just plain sucks. I don't really have anything else to say about it

Arcee come packaged with Silverfang, a character who doesn't appear in the film itself 

Silverfang also has almost no articulation,  he can only move his legs back and forth, but if you do this he'll fall over, and he can move his head, but only to the right. His tail can be detached to become Arcee's sword as seen above, and honestly the sword is pretty cool, it'd look good with some other figures.

Silverfang doesn't have a robot mode, no instead he turns into armor for Arcee to wear.

You fold out his back, tuck in his legs, rip his jaw In half and you're ready, slot him on top and now you have this... thing. I feel this would look really cool if only they executed it right, but as it is, it sucks, the head still looks pretty good though!

I might be going crazy, but does the face look like it has a hint of pink in it?

Overall, don't get this, it sucks, and they expect you to pay a whole $25 for it, I only got it because I'm a huge sucker for Arcee. Don't be like me.

Studio Series 15th Anniversary Jazz

Jazz from the 2007 movie is one of my favorite designs from the Bay movies, it perfectly translates his G1 design into the hyper realism of the movies. And they WASTED IT BY KILLING HIM OFF.

Because of that Jazz only had like 5 different toy molds total in total until the studio series figure came out. I mean hell, they were still releasing new redecos of the 2007 deluxe toy up until 2018!

For the 15th anniversary of the 2007 movie hasbro released a box set of all the Autobots from the movie in new decos that supposedly make them more screan accurate, and in the case of Jazz, they gave him more yellow I guess?

This figure represents his on screen appearance extremely accurately with stunning detail that the movie figures are known for, although this does have a catch

Another thing movie toys are known for is the backpacks they carry. Now Jazz's isn't that bad compared to something like Studio series B-127 and it honestly doesn't look to bad from most angles. That's one of my major problems with a lot of movie toys, the designs are so extremely complex that no toy has any hope of being able to recreate that look without huge sacrifices.

This head sculpt is perfect though, I love the ear wings he has and the vizier looks really cool, my only problem with it is I wish the vizier was a bit more opaque, but it still looks great!

Jazz has fairly average posability,  nothing mind blowing but nothing horrible, although I do wish he had a waist swivel.

Jazz's transformation does have quite a surprise though. There's a step where you turn the whole hood of the car upside down and that's really cool, I can't recall any other figure doing anything similar to that.

Gotta love movie car modes, they're practically just scale models of cars that just happen to turn into robots.

And Jazz is absolutely no exception, turning into a beautiful Pontiac Solstice.

Studio series Jazz is an amazing figure, and one of the better figures from the early years of studio series, if you see this guy for a cheep price go ahead and pick him up.

G1 Seaspray

Seaspray, a mostly well-known character in Transformers that never really appeared outside of G1 in any major fashion.

Despite that almost every single Seaspray toy is fantastic (despite there only being like 3) and the original G1 toy is no different

Seaspray is one of the best mini bots from G1, up there with Powerglide, Beachcomber, and Bumblebee. I also love that color scheme, the yellow and blue compliment each other very well. He doesn't have that much detail on him, but he does have some stickers that add a lot to him.

Speaking of stickers, Seaspray also has a rub symbol, it works like those mood rings, when it's high enough temperature it changes color, in this case showing an Autobot symbol.

Seaspray has a very basic head sculpt, only really having a visor and a mouth plate. Nonetheless I love it.

Posability on this guy, much like the rest of G1, doesn't exist. All Seaspray can do is move his arms in a circle 

Another thing about G1 is you never realize just how small most of them are.

With being a G1 toy his transformation is extremely simple but also like most G1 toys his alt mode is very good.

Seaspray turns into this little hovercraft that is just so cute, it even had wheels on the bottom so it can roll!

And the propellers on the back can actually spin giving this guy so much character.

G1 Seaspray is one of my favorite G1 figures I own just for how much simple fun he is. If you like G1 I totally recommend you pick him up, and unlike other G1 toys this guy is actually reasonably priced on the second hand market!