Collection complete

It's been a busy couple of weeks :)

Just as I have reached an important milestone with my Generations collection, I have also completed my Animated collection. The very last item, Longarm Prime (the grey one, not the purple Shockers) arrived today (not the last item I purchased, but somehow the Blackout from the US out-paced Longarm from Singapore, despite being bought on the same day).

This was an interesting one to build. It is all deluxes, voyagers, and leaders, no re-colours / only one of each character (mostly - I have Longarm Prime & Shockwave, and the reasoning for that should be obvious, two Ratchets because one is his Earth form and the other is his Cybertronian form, two Prowls because the one with the armour is different from the one without, and all three Seekers because, well, that's not the kind of re-colour I ruled out - I don't have a 2007 movie coloured Jazz or an Atomic Lugnut or a Stealth or Blazing Lockdown because those versions have no resemblance to anything from the cartoon), that one being the biggest and bestest (which is really only a concern with Optimus and Megatron).

At the point I started, which was late October 2020 (yes, the whole thing took me a tad over a year to get together), I had only just discovered Animated. I don't watch much in the way of TV (not broadcast TV, anyway - haven't really bothered with that for something over 15 years now), so the whole Animated cartoon was entirely unknown to me (as are most of the cartoons made since 1988 - they just didn't get shown here, and I was always into the comics anyway). Fortunately people still mention it, so I looked into it one day. Turns out there are good torrents of it out there, and if you're lucky you can get the three-series collection on E-bay from time to time (which I did at some point).

Anyway, I loved it immediately. It was amusing. It was different. It was well written, and clearly planned (not just stand-alone episodes). It had Starscream, and he was both prominent and not entirely a pointless cliche (did I mention that my Generations collection started with Siege Starscream? Well, Animated Starscream was a very big part in my decision to start this lot). And the art style was not, for me, a turn-off; it appealed instead.

So I decided I might like the toys. And upon doing my research, it turned out that they were pretty highly regarded, those toys. Not only that, there were only so many, a nice manageable little handful, and they still saw plenty of action on the secondary market. Not bad for a line of toys that had been dead for a decade and which came from an apparently divisive cartoon (that art style).

Better yet, there were a bunch of those toys available right here on Ozformers. So... I went for it.

It was fun, putting them all together. They really are good toys; nice plastic, interesting transformations, and good looking bot and alt modes. And of course they're all very screen accurate, having been designed in conjunction with the cartoon models for that very purpose. I'm really going to enjoy being able to sit back and look over this lot, and pull them out to play with every now and then. Finishing the collection is very satisfying; all I really need to do is properly sort out somewhere for them to live (they currently reside in a bookshelf, in the spaces not occupied by books, just plopped there where they'll fit).

Once more I need to thank the people here for the help I was given in putting the collection together - all the toys I got here were in tip-top condition, and everyone was great to deal with. They came in a reasonably steady stream until I had most of my list, and then it became a waiting game for the last few to show up here or on E-bay, which is (the latter part, anyway) how these things always seem to go...

One thing that I thought was interesting to note - I saw every toy I wanted, bar one (Blackout), come up from an Australian seller. That was quite surprising, and I suppose my expectations of availablity have been coloured by what happens now with mainline HasTak toys, where plenty of things never even reach our shores one a grindingly regular basis.

And again luck played its part. Some of the toys I picked up here with apparent ease seem to be relatively uncommon or even rare (for example, the Jetfire/Jetstorm set I got here is the only one I've seen complete - incomplete sets, including very broken ones, have appeared a few times on E-bay, some of them being the same thing re-listed by a different seller a couple of months later). Some of them I got for quite the bargain. I wasn't going to finish off until next year; I looked up what Blackout frequently sells for, and decided to leave that one for a bit. It was going to be a "yeah, one day, maybe, if I have a bunch of spare change" thing :) But then I just happened to look again on E-bay out of idle curiosity (had just bought Longarm Prime, so figured I'd see if I would still bounce off the Blackout prices if it was offically The Last One Left To Get), and lo and behold one had been listed just that day for much, much less than what I considered the usual price. Wasn't going to let that pass...

So here I am, with a finished collection. It could be better; some of the characters really deserved bigger and better toys, such as Lugnut and Sentinel Prime, but they never got made, so I'll make do with what I've got. If Hasbro were to make new Animated toys (as has been rumoured of late) of characters I don't have (because apart from the undersized ones, I feel no need to replace any of what I've got, and find it hard to imagine how they might be topped), I'd certainly give them a go (although it would seem, based on Legacy Bulkhead and Arcee, that new versions would be heavily G1-ified, and so would abandon the aspects I enjoy the most), but right now I am satisfied. Feels good!