Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Okay, I mentioned this show way back when I was talking about how awful Grimm was. How time slips away! So, this is the other "fairy tales are real!" show to hit the fall lineup, and it's corny, I'm not going to pretend that it's not, but corny can be good. There's been a "lot" of controversy over this show, saying that it's a rip off of the comic Fables , and why didn't they just do a serial adaptation of that?  So, let me spell it out for you, other than there being fairy tale creatures in the real world, there's not much of a connection between the two. In Fables, all of the fairy tale characters have fled their home lands, and they're hiding out in our world as refugees from some despot or another. In Once Upon a Time, the Evil Queen from Snow White has cursed everyone to live a life of tedium in our world, they are trapped in a podunk town where nothing changes and they have no memory of who they were. The only ones who se...

I've already done a review of Machine Wars Optimus Prime, so instead of re-doing it, I'm just going to post a link to the old review , and give you a new shot of him in the lineup. Unfortunately, I'm quite busy with the first week of the new quarter, it took me a week and a half from the point of taking the pictures of Scourge to actually finishing the review. So I've hit quite a snag making it through my Prime Tour, but it will happen, just not as quickly as I'd hoped.

Picture shamelessly stolen from Seibertron.com Generation 2 was a relaunching of the Transformers brand. In the US the toyline had been completely retired for about three years when Generation 2 launched in 1993 (it had been going strong the whole time in Japan). The cartoon for Generation 2 was just the Generation1 cartoon, with redone splash pages. The comic was a direct continuation of the Generation 1 comic. As such, the majority of the toyline was reused molds from Generation 1, sometimes with a few tweaks or color changes. The original Optimus Prime toy was re-released, this time with a black trailer, and the addition of a sound box and spring loaded missile launchers. Sometime later they released Laser Optimus Prime, a completely new mold (in between there was another new told mold, Hero Optimus Prime, that I sadly don't have to review). I don't have an actual Laser Prime either, the first use of the mold that I was exposed to was when they repainted it for ...

As I mentioned in the last post, Powermaster Optimus Prime was the body that Optimus was resurrected into in the US/UK comics, but in Japan it was an entirely new character. Star Convoy here is how Optimus was eventually resurrected in the Japanese continuity. At this point that Japanese cartoon line had ended entirely, and interest in the toyline was fading, both in Japan and in western countries. One of the last gimmick lines they created was the Micromaster line. It seems like it was pretty obviously inspired by the success of Galoob's Micro Machines toys. Micromasters were a little bigger than Micro Machines in vehicle mode, and they transformed into robots of a pretty uniform size. They were released with a number of larger transforming vehicles and bases.  In Japan they had an additional type of figure, which was a large transformer, which in addition to having vehicle and robot modes, also had a micromaster base mode. It would be similar to Trypticon and Metroplex, wh...

Powermaster Optimus Prime was the first major revision to the Optimus Prime character, he came out long after the 1986 animated movie, and thus after his death in the cartoon. The powermaster line never appeared in any American animation, but it was featured in the US/UK Marvel comics. In the Marvel books, Optimus Prime died under much different circumstances (something about dueling to the death with Megatron in a primitive computer game, it was really very silly). His consciousness was saved, but they didn't have the technology to put him back into a body on their own, so they journeyed to the planet Nebulon. Nebulon is a planet where a human like race is the dominant species, and the Transformers had been there before, resulting in two types of Nebulon/Transformer bonds: Headmasters, where a Nebulon would form the head of a Transformer, and Targetmasters, where a Nebulon would form a gun for a Transformer.  After the resulting wars had devastated Nebulon, a...