Club Magazine Issue 65

[griffin]

It pains me to say it, but credit where credit due - I think this is probably one of the best issues of the Club newsletter.... at least since the early years.... because there wasn't a page in it that I didn't feel the urge to skip or ignore.

Just like my Subscription Starscream toy, this issue arrived fairly fast, ending up in my mailbox yesterday... considering the last issue only arrived in my mailbox 4 weeks ago, making it 4 weeks late.

Speaking of the last issue (#64), it was probably the worst they've ever produced (having 9.5 of their 10 non-comic pages dealing with BotCon)... so this next issue being one of the best makes it a confusing sudden turnaround, and a worry as to the unpredictability of future issue quality.

Contents...

Page 1 - Cover - full page artwork of Skyreign as it will appear on the packaging.

Page 2 - Info page - Noting the attendance of Pete at the UK convention, and telling people to go to Seibertron, Allspark, BWTF for details (again being selective with their partnerships in the fandom). Also mention of next year's BotCon location and dates, plus promoting the new "Legacy" boxset of four of the 2014 unsold toys, as well as the 2016 Subscription and Store toys (Ramjet & Skywarp).

Page 3 - Voice Actor interview - Mitchell Whitfield, the voice of Fixit in Robots In Disguise. I think if there are voice actors of minor roles or not likely to be a BotCon guest, then having short interviews in the Fan Magazine should be a priority.
Mitchell is noted as doing live acting and voice acting, and says that he has been a fan of Transformers for as long as he can remember, with Beast Wars being his favourite. He really enjoys voicing Fixit, embracing the whole glitch speak element of the character.

Page 4 & 5 - Hasbro Designer interview - John Warden. The pages have some really nice artwork of Sky Lynx, Victorion and a toy image of Victorion which looks a lot darker and not too bad if the actual toy comes out like that. He talks about the ideas behind having a whole year of combiners for Generations, plus the reasons behind having other characters become combiners for the first time (Cyclonus, Sky Lynx), with a few references to the IDW comics (which I've heard has been causing some criticism from fans for being bound by what Hasbro wants in the comic, spoiling the natural flow of the story). Unfortunately, by the wording he uses, there are not going to be any beast/animal combiners (in the foreseeable future), as he says that he wished he could do Predaking, but the focus was on Earthen vehicle modes while RID had a heavy beast theme (in the cartoon at least... as we didn't have many Decepticon RID toys this year). His favourite team that he worked on was the Protectobots.

Page 6 - Creation Process episode 1 - Punch/Counterpunch. This was the highlight of this issue because I learned something really fascinating that I did not know about before of a Gen1 toy.
Written by Andrew Hall who lived and worked in Japan with Transformers products, has given us details and prototype images for the Doublespy Punch/Counterpunch. Hasbro asked Takara to create a triplechanger that had two robot modes and be a spy, and the original prototype figure that Takara did for them was nothing like the actual Punch toy. The main joint in the toy was deemed too fragile, so the entire toy was re-engineered from scratch... and was then further altered due to the call by Hasbro to cut costs with the toys currently in production (which saw a lot of diecast and rubber tyres replaced with plastic). As such, Punch had a few gimmicks removed along with the diecast parts (that we never got), and smaller weapons.

Pages 7-12 - Comic - Another Light part 5 - still imagining the 1986 Movie in the mirror-verse, with the reformatting of the evil bots (including the use of Combiner Wars moulds as the new bodies of some).

Page 13 - Character/story details - Marissa Faireborn and Old Snake. Yes, it is essentially just a plug for their two club exclusive toys this year, but done a lot more creatively than a full-page advertisement of just toys like they usually do. This is a full page write-up with sample cartoon images of the two characters from their appearances or relatives in the GIJoe and Transformers cartoons, giving more of an incentive to buy these toys. (don't worry, they still have a regular toy advertisement for these toys on the back page, which they note on this page to check out to "keep the story going" but a much more interesting effort with this write-up)

Page 14 - Character/story details - Shattered Glass Soundwave. A full page detailing the comic backstory of mirror-verse Soundwave (the white one), which is pretty much the FunPub story universe, and the Ehobby comic that came with the redeco reissues from about 3 years ago). Again, a readable page of info to catch-up or refresh our memory of a fairly obscure character that has been floating around for about 8 years now.

Page 15 - Bio - Shattered Glass Soundwave. They have been pairing these up for a few issues now, so this might feel like a redundant duplication, but this bio is like a regular toy bio in that it is about character traits and not referring to actual story events (which was the purpose of the previous page).

Page 16 - Mini-Comic & advertisement. Two-thirds of the page is a new mini-comic of Superdeformed Shattered Glass bots, written and drawn by Josh Perez and Jesse Wittenrich. It has three SG characters, but I can't work out the one that is using the 2013 Hoist/Trailbreaker mould.
The bottom third of the page is a toy advertisement for the Marissa and Old Snake.... still having trouble selling them I guess.

[MayzaPrime]

I like Marissa and Old Snake, but I can understand why people would skip them especially us Aussies given the shipping rates TFCC charge.

They are cool figures and they look good next Serpentor and Viper

[BigTransformerTrev]

This is one of the few issues I found somewhat interesting. I quite enjoyed the look into how they developed Punch/Counterpunch and it was good to get an idea of the thought processes behind the Combiner Wars toyline from one of the designers, even if it did confirm some things we were afraid of like no animal ones planned.