Thursday 22 December 2011

Decoy Ahoy!

Here is a small little side-line from my collection, some of the very few non-Transforming pieces I collect.  I say collect, that's probably not very accurate, as the history of my decoy collecting is limited thusly:

1987 - A young Sid buys a Throttlebot, (Rollbar if you're keepingscount, I'll check my attic to see if I can find the card sometime, if I can, I'll upload it), receives a "free*" decoy.  Again, if you're keeping a record, it was a Windcharger.
This is not the one I had.
1987 - 2006 - Sid has lost the Windcharger, doesn't keep it with the others Transformers.  Doesn't give a shit.
2006 - Sid buys a complete set of Decoys from eBay. He thinks he paid about £60 for all 53 of them.  Sid will now stop referring to himself in the third person.
2006 - 2011 - After sort of being looked at once or twice, the toys remain in two separate polybags depending on faction, on a floor, in  an empty room, unloved.  So much so they auditioned for the role of the villain in Toy Story 3 and were turned down for being, "too evil".
* = included in the price...doesn't it always?


Decoys were packaged in the UK and US with various case assortments of the 1987 Transformers range, as well as the Throttlebots this included other toys which were much better.  What can I say, as an eight year old kid I obviously liked cheap green jeaps which transform into shit robots.  This was done by Hasbro purely as a tactic to fuck over any future MISB "completest" collectors, and not in a bid to boost sales, because including 1.5 inch unpainted rubber figures only boosts sales of Frosties (these are exactly the same as the US "Frosted Flakes" except for our version of Kellogg mascot Tony the Tiger is 12.6% gayer for sharing a cereal universe with Andi Peters voiced Coco the Monkey).

I haven't really been a huge fan of these, I've kind of taken them for granted in my collection, and they are pretty cool as a nice rarity.  Maybe if I had spent years tracking down every single one they would mean more to me, as it is I just bought the collection.  This makes more sense to me than trying to re-create exactly what I had as a kid, as the odds of finding a Rollbar with a Windcharger has case assortment odds of 1:318.
Anyway, I digress...this is my collection of all 53 Decoys.
If you look carefully, one of the seekers is in red.
Yes, unfortunately my #34 Thundercracker is erroneously red.  This renders my collection incomplete and hastens feeling of deep-routed shame and suicide.  I might as well just stop collecting now.  If you guys can help replace #34 Thundercracker in the appropriate purple colour, PLEASE let me know!

So is this red figure an error of production?  The way I look at it the only Decepticon figure that shoudl have been available in red should have been #50 Frenzy, repackaged as #54 Rumble just to really piss people off and divide the fan-dumb even more.

For the sake of having it here, this is a list of the full Western collection of Decoys.

01) Grimlock
02) Snarl
03) Swoop
04) Sludge
05) Slag
06) Ratchet
07) Ironhide
08) Smokescreen
09) Grapple
10) Trailbreaker
11) Sunstreaker
12) Skids
13) Jazz
14) Inferno
15) Tracks
16) Red Alert
17) Hound
18) Sideswipe
19) Prowl
20) Mirage
21) Hoist
22) Wheeljack
23) Bluestreak
24) Brawn
25) Windcharger
26) Bumblebee
27) Huffer
28) Cliffjumper
29) Blaster
30) Perceptor
31) Optimus Prime
32) Megatron
33) Skywarp
34) Thundercracker
35) Starscream
36) Soundwave
37) Blitzwing
38) Astrotrain
39) Kickback
40) Shrapnel
41) Bombshell
42) Hook
43) Scavenger
44) Bonecrusher
45) Long Haul
46) Mixmaster
47) Scrapper
48) Devastator
49) Ravage
50) Frenzy
51) Shockwave
52) Reflector


Oh yeah, and Laserbeak.  They forgot Laserbeak who is #53.  Probably because his swooping engine noise is stolen from the TIE fighters in Star Wars and it would cost a license fee of $14million to George Lucas to include Laserbeak on the list.  But they did make him, unlike the Robot Heroes Laserbeak who got even more fucked over.  If inanimate fictional robot bird cassettes can get fucked over, then trust me, he's feeling it.

Rounding off the list there is #52 Reflector, as I mentioned in my previous blog this is the only version of Reflector made by Hasbro accurate to the animation model, in a show accurate purple colouration.  Of course, to really finish of the collection, you should buy two more Reflectors and file off the lenses, to make Spector and Spyglass.

So there you go, we've managed to expand and add a few more to the officially available 52 figures:

#52 Reflector Viewfinder
#53 Laserbeak
#54 Rumble
#55 Spectro
#56 Spyglass
#57 Buzzsaw - because, why not buy another Laserbeak you lazy shit?  What kind of Transformer fan are you?

So, if you do all that, can you finally call yourself a completest?

Actually, it's not that easy.  Although in the West we had the aesthetically pleasing faction split of Autobot = Red, and Decepticons = purple.  Nice, easy and simple, although I am surprised Fun publishing haven't re-released the ENTIRE range in reverse colours as Shattered Glass Decoys.  Hang on, I'll just facebook Benson Yee!  You can see at a glimpse the split in my collection, even with my shitty camera skills (it was lack of said mobile based camera that halted this blogs updates for a week).  Do you want to see how the average Japanese person displays their decoy collection?

Using the phrases "average person" and "decoy collection" in the same sentence?!?
You've got to want to be a collector in Japan, bear in mind with the premium cost of actually having space for things in that overly developed small country, storing this technicolour yawn pile of toys would cost a billion yen a year in rent*.

In Japan they think it is a good idea to get rubber toys from vending machines, because obviously it's that or fucking used panties (buying fucking used panties is different to fucking used panties, just want to make that distinction here).  And also, Richard Gere gerbil whatever - the West is just as weird, we just don't talk about it.  The only reason I can think of for blind-buying small toys exclusively from vending machines is because they're fucking tiny and the only thing that you can actually fit on a bullet train in rush hour. It's for much the same reason this sort of item is available in cinema foyers in the UK now, usually advertised with small trinkets of Mario and Luigi to tempt kids into putting their pound coin into the machine only to come away with a badly painted Para-Goomba, which they then loose in the dark cinema only for staff to repackage and re-sell. Bwahahah.

*a billion yen = $12 dollars

To be fair, the Japanese are actually pretty cool, especially when it comes to making Transformers shit I don't really need, but absolutely feel the urge to buy.

Not content with the expanded 52 (not to be confused with the new DC Comics), in Japan they went a bit further, depending on your definition of decoy.  You see, in Japan they weren't content to just have decoy rubber figures for the sake of it, they felt the need to turn them into statistically ranked gaming pieces which you fire out of a cannon in an attempt to knock over other said pieces and ultimately defeat Trypticon.  Sort of  Warhammer meets Pokemon meets pogs.  Sure it wasn't a chess beater but with a recipe like that, how did it not make more money than Catholocism?

Yes, these rubber guys actually did something!  It was only after releasing them in Cybertron / Destron gift sets to tie into the Scramble City themed board game that they moved towards the gachapon capsule vending machine distribution mechanism, so they could re-release them again in seven different colours.  You see, in the UK and the US, distributors and retailers are always looking for that magic product that they can sell to the same person twice, in Japan there were over 550 variations available (and you didn't know what you were getting until you bought it and opened it), and that still wasn't enough. 

I'm not going to own these :(

Although arguably not "real" decoys, these guys were only available in Japan in celebration of the arrival of 2010, their version of post-1986 movie season 3.  I would like these, and include them here for the sake of completion, but as they were not available in the aesthetically pleasing faction colourations, I'm going to skip on them.  Because these and other Japanese exclusive decoys probably cost a fortune.

Some of the figures were also released in over-sized editions, including a version of Metroplex (because he should be big, you know), but in a range where Devastator is literally the same size as all six Constructicons, this feels unnecessary.

Because of my lack of desire for these items, and the 318 MISB Throttlebots, and the 550+ Japanese coloured variations, some Trans-fanboys would say I'm not a true fan.

So I have a choice.  Either I declare myself a true fan, spend the next few decades tracking all these down, have a mental break-down after achieving a balanced state of celibacy and bankruptcy, then use a cheese grater and vinegar to remove my Transformer tattoos to recognise my failure...Or I try and find a way of showing I am happy with the middle ground of not being a "completist".

You know what? I think I'm going to keep my mis-coloured Thundercracker in this collection, I kind of like the intentional incompleteness that error suggests.

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