AUTOBOT COLLECTION

welcome to the good half of my Transformers collection! not qualitatively good - god, no, way more of my favorites are over on the Decepticon side. good as in righteous! primary colors and 'freedom is the right of all sentient beings' and robot chest cavity talismen and all that. obviously, this predominantly means Autobots, but i'll also go ahead and lump in any Maximals or other unaffiliated goody-two-shoes until further notice, because it's not like i have that many.

i've been playing with Transformers basically my whole life, but obviously, a lot of my childhood figures are in poor condition, or in storage, or in poor condition in storage. these collection pages cover what i would consider my 'modern' collection. these are the figures that i keep out and about on display and take nice care of like a proper hobbyist. everything gets at least two photos for the two main obvious things that any Transformer is going to do, and a short little overview going over what i personally think about it. these are living documents, so check in every now and then to see what i've added to the collection lately!

as the first figure i picked up from the Siege line, Sideswipe is definitely one of the first toys that comes to mind when i'm thinking of broad examples of the modern era of Transformers. after the ups and downs of the Prime Wars era, it seemed like Hasbro were coming out swinging with a bit of a soft restart on CHUG, standardizing a new approach with smaller, denser figures, emphasizing articulation, and finding a way to incorporate heavy play potential without intrusive gimmicks just by leaning hard into the mix-and-match appeal of the standard 5mm port and post. i don't have much attachment to Sideswipe as a specific character (he sat out several of my favorite pieces of Transformers media, after all), but i can't deny that he's a solid standard slab of Autobot and an excellent representation of the War for Cybertron design ethos.

in robot mode, Sideswipe wears the classic 80s 'robot with a car hood chest' body-type with surprising finesse. he's got a bit of a backpack, but it's wide and flat, so it doesn't interfere at all with his excellent balance and posability. he's done up in one of the nicest matte finishes i've ever seen on a Hasbro figure, and aside from the hints of Cybertronian detailing and the battle damage scuffing that would spread across the entire Siege line, he looks remarkably close to his on-screen appearances. he's an absolute joy to handle thanks to a robust set of nice tight universal joints, and he's definitely got a particularly solid feel, much more than his predecessors and even some of his WfC contemporaries. conversely, he's a little light on accessories, but even his classic G1 shoulder cannon has been given a fun split in the middle to play into the whole customizable weapon schtick Siege was all about.

i remember feeling very strongly that i had to make sure i got my hands on Siege Ironhide. for starters, he's pretty remarkably big for a Deluxe-class, so i guess it seemed like a good value to put some heft into the Autobot side of my collection? on a broader, more 'nerd minutia' level, though, Ironhide is just one of those characters who's had a pretty infamously rough history when it comes to his toys, whether it's having a droopy head or having no head at all. even shortly after the release of this toy, that quest for the perfect Ironhide has continued, whether it was Earthrise coming around the very next year to try hiding his lumpy sci-fi bod in an Earth minivan cloak or Studio Series deciding that the solution was to step him up a pricepoint just to get the engineering benefits of a $35 toy.

enough about other Ironhides, though, how is this one? definitely an odd one. he's not quite the full-blown G1 cartoon extravaganza that a lot of Siege was dedicated to, but he's also quite firmly too much of a big clunky spaceman to be the sort of mid-2000s 'what if G1 but the vehicles were newer' reinterpretation i enjoy. he's doing a bit of his own thing, and i'm here for it. you definitely feel that imposing stature, for better or for worse - he easily stands well above similarly priced toys of his era, although that comes at the cost of feeling a little more hollow across the board. if i had to sum him up, i'd say he feels very weird and maybe even a little flimsy in-hand, but when you find the right pose, it all comes together and he's just full of personality and presence. it certainly helps that he has one of the best accessories in all of Siege, with his excellently titled 'Doomblast Forge Launcher' pulling double duty as a missile launcher and hammer, pictured here on HYPERFIXT with its superfluous but greatly appreciated carry handle.

while Siege seemed mostly concerned with going back to square one and building the foundations for a definitive G1 cartoon roster, plenty of modern figures inevitably end up with a second lease on life through extensive retooling, and War for Cybertron came out swinging on this front. by taking advantage of Ultra Magnus's 'guy inside another guy' design, Hasbro managed to give the figure an entirely different feel by leaving the core robot intact and dressing him up in some 'Optimus circa 2005' armor. nowadays, in a world where Hasbro seems like they're ready to cash in on zoomer nostalgia and redo just about the entire Unicron Trilogy from scratch, there's something a little quaint about Galaxy Upgrade Optimus Prime. back in 2019, though, this was pretty much the first time Hasbro was paying tribute to the toys i personally grew up on, and i still have a lot of fondness for this weird half-step of a design.

without his new set of big boy parts, GUOP's inner robot mode takes on a distinctly un-Cybertron-ish vibe, winding up as the chunkiest Optimus we've seen in quite some time. it's not perfect, but it's at least servicable, and i do find something charming about the way it harkens back to the character's roots, without any of the heroic proportioning we see today. you're definitely not here for the little guy, though - he's a formality, a leftover from when this toy was a distinctly different guy.

coming in right alongside Bumblebee as part of the first wave for 2024, Legacy: United Animated Universe Optimus Prime - yes, i know the name's ridiculous but they keep making these in such a way where i will have to keep labeling them like that - kind of wound up with some big shoes to fill. obviously, when you're opening up Pandora's box and digging through 40 years of Transformers history, there's going to be a lot of Optimus, but so far, they'd all wound up as pretty major collection centerpieces. Animated Optimus has to come in and get us back to basics at a relatively modest pricepoint while also setting the stage for the actual brand anniversary we've all been waiting two years for. and i won't even try to be all coy and wait until the end of this entry to make my point, he totally does all that, he's so cool and so Animated and so Optimus and i love him a whole bunch! let's get into why!

Animated's take on Optimus Prime might be one of the things that really sets it apart as a chapter of Transformers history and makes me love it so much - you think of this character archetype and think of something like harsh stoicism or the dad jokes of G1, but this Optimus has a more youthful energy to him, having to prove himself as a hero after ending up in a dead-end job cleaning asteroids. he's maybe gotten a touch beefier while making the jump into Legacy, but this whole figure does a fantastic job capturing that personality, from his crisp head sculpt right down to having noticeably softer tones of red and blue compared to contemporary figures of other Optimuses. he also maintains a surprising amount of Derrick J. Wyatt's iconic shape language while also posing up a storm, and he doesn't really have any bad angles. if i have to say anything about him is less than perfect, i guess sometimes his axe's extending handle feels a little janky to work with, but that's already above and beyond for a modern Transformers accessory and that transparent blue blade looks just as good no matter how you display it.