The internet has gone absolutely crazy with toys leaks in the past couple weeks, but I won’t waste your time with all of them. Instead, I’ll cherry pick the best, and relevant news, and leave TFW2005 to gobble up every scrap.

First up the comics: The Movie “prequel,” which will be a 4 issue series set before the events of the live action movie. TFarchive has a nice review of the book, which is due on February 21st.

Cover B is something special, showcasing non-movie characters, Arcee, Inferno, and Shockwave (at least one of the hundred one-eye bots HAS to be Shockwave). Don Figueroa is handling the pencils, so it should be pretty interesting to see how the fans’ favorite artist handles some of the fans’ least favorite designs.

Speaking of designs, its about time Dreamworks, ILM, Paramount, or Michael Bay himself fired somebody. Not because the designs are bad (I personally like the fresh approach), but because we have even more spec sheets. This has to be the worst kept secret in Hollywood.
Here are Starscream, Frenzy, Bonecrusher, and Ironhide.

Ok, enough of this concept art, its time for merchandise. [Read the rest of this entry…]

From a couple smaller fan forums comes fresh looks at resin prototypes for 2 of the biggest and most talked about Transformers figures for the new movie.

Gen1TF and Nuklear Power have diverging looks at what may be the Optimus Prime that will populate toy shelves this summer. Also, get a load of Megatron, who definitely takes after his Energon counterpart.

It’s nearly impossible to tell how big these resin prototypes are without comparison shots, but the level of detail leads me to believe we’re looking at something in the $40 range, like Transformer leaders of the last few years.

There’s been a lot of pictures floating around the net of various toys lately from this line, but I didn’t think many of them were that special until I saw these.

A quick update – new images of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime are now available, as book covers. Bumblebee graces the cover of a sticker book, and Optimus is on the cover of the movie novel, sure to be a literary wonder for all time. The synopsis for the novel actually reads:

The Transformers are back – hitting cinemas in June 07 – and this time they have even more battles to win! Now you can read their adventure in this action-packed novel! Get ready for the return of the mighty Transformers in the action packed movie novel! Filled with amazing battle stories, this retelling of the Transformers story is perfect for older fans. It even includes cool movie photo inserts!

Both books should be available for purchase on July 4th.

IESB.net brings us the initial news and the cover images, which are mirrored after the jump.

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You’ve probably seen the trailer by now. What you might not have seen is the Japanese version of the trailer. It contains mere seconds of additional footage, padded out with Speilberg and Bay introducing the movie to Japanese audiences. Check it out.

For those of us who wanted to see more than the back of Prime’s head in the trailer, he stands tall on the cover of Empire in the UK (see left)

And of course we have more toys. Barricade, Starscream, Bumblebee, Brawl, and Ratchet all in deluxe mode. Theres also some prototypes for tiny Barricade, Prime, and Megatron….
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The hotly anticipated trailer for the 2007 Transformers movie from director Michael Bay is now online at Yahoo UK.

At 1 PM EST, this trailer will be available in multiple formats on the US Yahoo Movies site.

In the last few days we’ve unveiled the first look at Scorponok in the movie and Barricade as a toy. I’m happy to report we have the reverse now.

Harbx has posted a wallpaper of Barricade. Its very nicely done, but I can’t help being bothered that maybe they cut some of the model off to make it look nice as a desktop image for a computer.

Infamous Hong Kong ebay seller SPX Toys has an auction for Scorponok. He’s not as monochrome as we thought, but may win the battle for ugliest face.

View both after the jump.

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Nearly finished toys for several Transformers movie characters have made it onto eBay. For the first time we can see what they look like with painted decoration… and in robot mode!

Once again, we are going to mirror these images since eBay auctions don’t last forever. Click to continue reading!
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The car bloggers at Jalopnik have come through again with some CG partial stills of Megatron and Bumblebee, as well as a full body shot of Optimus Prime. Since these images are potential spoilers, we’ll save those for after the jump.

ShootForTheEdit.com, Michael Bay’s site, has an update on the next trailer:

I spoke to Mike about a week ago, and as you can imagine he’s busy editing the movie.

He indicated that the trailer was basically done (minus a little CGI work) and that if all goes according to plan, the trailer should be out by the weekend of the 22nd of December.

Ok, now how about those CG renders….
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