Zobovor
2024-12-02 23:19:59 UTC
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Permalinkare very specific things that I like, and I already own the vast
majority of them, so good gifts for me are typically a) something that
just recently came out that I haven't had an opportunity to buy myself
yet, but also b) something on a list I have given you. That does make
it disarmingly easy, but it allows for very little wiggle room.
So, my wife recently said she was concerned that she had hardly gotten
me anything for Christmas yet (there were a couple of LEGO sets that I
told her I wanted but that was about it), so I sent her some Big Bad Toy
Store links with some Super7 stuff that I hadn't gotten yet. Problem
solved, right? Well, one of the links was for Transformers Ultimates
wave three, and I guess she didn't realize it was four separate toys.
So now she had too *many* gifts for me. What we're trying to avoid here
is when somebody in the family is still opening gifts when everybody
else is already done, so she's trying to do an even number of presents
for her and me and the kids.
So her solution to this was to hide some of my already-wrapped presents
and turn it into a scavenger hunt. If I found them before Christmas, I
got to open them early. All this to say that the Alligaticon was
technically a Christmas present, but I found him tucked inside a
hidey-hole in the laundry room so I got to open him early.
So for those who may not know, in the G1 cartoon episode "City of Steel"
the Decepticons take over New York and basically transformerize it.
They turn taxi cabs into battle taxis. They rebuild the Empire State
Building and make it their main headquarters. They put robot alligators
in the sewers. It all made sense to somebody at some point, no doubt.
And because Megatron loves irony, both the main gun on the top of the
Empire State Building as well as the alligator in question were both
made out of pieces of a disassembled Optimus Prime.
There has never been an official toy of the Alligaticon until now.
There have been a couple of third-party versions, I believe, and at one
point I took a stab at it when I took a spare G1 Skullcruncher and
repainted it. But those were all transformable toys, and none of them
were specifically modeled after the Alligaticon as it appears in the
cartoon. The advantage of doing a non-transformable version is that
they could eschew having to figure out a robot mode for it and just make
this awesome, screen-accurate robo-gator.
So, this guy is about ten inches in length, with four and a half inches
of that being his tail. He's roughly the size and scale of
Skullcruncher, but with a longer tail and a smaller snout. I don't
believe the official model sheet for the Alligaticon design has ever
surfaced, so Super7 sculptors likely had to work off screenshots from
the cartoon episode. They captured the look of the creature very
nicely. He's made from obvious Optimus Prime parts (the smokestacks on
either side of his tail; the chest windows visible on either side of his
body) and not-so-obvious Optimus parts (his tail and hind legs are
entirely blue, despite Optimus Prime's legs explicitly not being used in
the creation of the Alligaticon, so where did they find all these blue
parts?) I love how he's got Autobot-blue eyes but Decepticon-red
pupils.
He's got a surprising amount of articulation. His neck is on a very
limited ball joint, and his head can pivot up and down and he has an
opening jaw. All four of his legs move at the base, the knee, and the
ankle. He has a mid-body ball joint and his tail is articulated in four
places including the base. He's made of solid plastic, too, not hollow,
so unlike a comparable Hasbro toy, he's big *and* heavy. From the looks
of it, I'd say a little of both.
He also comes with some goodies like an extra Optimus Prime head, which
has wiring poking out of the bottom from when the Constructicons
dismantled him. This head features light piping, so his eyes look
strangely dark until you hold him up to a light source. It would have
been amazing if Super7 had really doubled down and had sculpted this
Prime head the way AKOM drew him in the episode, but sadly it was not to
be.
He also comes with a battle taxi, which includes a deployed gun on the
roof and evil red headlight eyeballs. The battle taxi gun actually had
a much longer gun cannon, but maybe they left it off for fragility
reasons. The car doesn't have working axles (the wheels don't even
roll) and I can't help but feel like maybe Hasbro should have gotten
Mattel and Super7 to collaborate somehow and done a die-cast Hot Wheels
version of this thing instead.
There is also the top of the Empire State Building, the centerpiece of
the rebuilt city of New Cybertron. It's purple, covered in
techno-greeblies, and has Optimus Prime's arm mounted to the side. You
can put Prime's rifle in his hand, of course. One would probably need a
scale model of the Empire State Building to mount this thing to. Scale
models of the building exist, but they're hella expensive. I would
probably need one that was like three feet tall in order for this piece
to scale properly.
The Alligaticon now has official tech specs! He has a Strength of 6,
Intelligence of 6, Speed 7, an Endurance of 8, Rank 5, Courage 5,
Firepower 8, and Skill of 6. I question a few of those stats, myself
(he has no ranged weapons in evidence so I think his Firepower rating
would be 1, at best) but it's the only official stats we've ever gotten,
so we basically have to accept them.
Well, the Alligaticon retailed for $55 when he first came out, but BBTS
was selling the entire wave for 50% off, so either everybody is $27.50 a
pop, or you pay full price for G2 Megatron and the Alligaticon but you
get Tarn and Wreck-Gar for free, depending on how you want to look at
it. I love this guy to pieces. I'm so glad he exists. I'm going to
display him with my vintage G1 toys, because there's no other official
version of him but he deserves to be represented somewhere.
Zob (come to think of it, I need to find room for the Impossible Toys
version of the Allicon somewhere, too)