Two new variants for the FANtastic Exclusive 2007 have been announced!

Tuesday brought us The Club of Thraugnn, “the crimson combatant sworn to do Ramathorr’s bidding.” The Club will be an exclusive through Fwooshnet.com. He will come with a removeable helmet, long handled battle blade, and a war hammer.

 

Today brought us the Shield of Draumm, the heroic hippopotamus. The head sculpt on this, as described, is not only different from Ramathorr, but is an entirely different animal! The Shield will be an exclusive through Raving Toy Maniac. His hippo-ness will come with a spear/halberd of the type that come with the FE2006 figures, and another war hammer.

 

See here for Part 1, The Hammer of Gholl and the Mace of Broggah!

The FANtastic Exclusive 2006, Xetheus, Champion of Mynothecea, received a resculpted variant painted in six different flavors, each a different exclusive to a different online e-tailer (can you have an offline e-tailer?). For more information on that (with video!) you can check here and for more on the FANtastic Exclusives in general you can read some of these posts.

This year, for the FANtastic Exclusive 2007, we finally have news on the variants for the Elephant Swordsman. Not only that, but he now has a name! Ramathorr: Captain of the Anitherian Guard. Ramathorr will have 8 variants collectively known as The Anitherian Nine (A9). Each revealed on Tuesday and Friday for 4 weeks, starting this week. To keep the front page a little cleaner, I’m going to update once a week (thats two variants per post, for the non-math majors).

So without further ado, here are the first two variants:

The Hammer of Gholl, Ramathorr’s most trusted enforcer.
Previews Exclusive

 

The Mace of Broggah, the dark disciplinarian.
October Toys Toy Break Exclusive

 

The Four Horsemen revealed this year’s FANtastic Exclusive figure on figures.com today.The character has yet to be named, but will be available for purchase at the San Diego Comic Con, in addition to their online store at StoreHorsemen.com for a paltry USD$25.00.

The ever observant Baena of the FANtastic Forums noted that the two hand swords, when placed side by side, form the shape of the very large buster sword, which you see mounted on the figure’s back.

  

The FANtastic Exclusives are voted on by fans at many different steps in its development. This year’s polls included determining the series the figure would come from, the character itself, the figure’s size, articulation and finally, weapons. Last year’s exclusive was Xetheus the Minotaur, Champion of Mynothecea. You can see a full gallery I put together for that figure here and an edition of PowetToys featuring Xetheus and his limited variants here.

The fifth and final figure in the Botcon 2007 Exclusive set was revealed today. Dreadwind will be a repaint of Classics Jetfire with a remolded head designed by fan club artist Dan Khanna. As always, I have mirrored the images below.

When I first heard that Dreadwind would be one of the exclusives, I hoped that we might get a Darkwing to go along with him. I was a big Darkwing fan when I was younger because I had the toy and he had an unusually cool transformation for the time. If you compare the two G1 characters in jet mode to the jet mode of Classics Jetfire, Darkwing is actually a much closer match. Going by robot mode, though, Dreadwind wins out since he has the cockpit on his chest, while Darkwing’s chest is the underside of the plane.

Source for image of G1 Dreadwind head: TFU.Info.

“We’re Doomed. Not that it matters.”
  

Botcon.com has posted the fourth figure in the Botcon 2007 exclusive box set of five. Bugbite is a straight repaint of Classics Bumblebee. He is another Decepticon and supposedly the leader of the pack. Bugbite is actually not a new character. Similar to Sunstorm, the Bugbite character originates from an E-Hobby Exclusive repaint of the Generation 1 book-format reissues. In the reissue set, six minibots were included with Bumblebee featuring a retooled, cartoon accurate face (see post banner). This set’s E-Hobby exclusive counterpart featured repainted versions of the six minibots with new names and some new alliegances. It is also worth mentioning that the names given to the repaints were all former Go-Bot names with similar alt modes (Pathfinder, Smallfoot, Bug Bite, Treads, Bad Boy, and Road Ranger).

 

Bug Bite photos from Botcon.com
Bug Bite E-Hobby Exclusive face picture from tfu.info.

Its about that time of the year again.

All the toy companies gather in New York to unveil their plans for the coming year. The event doesn’t actually start until tomorrow, but information and pictures are already making their way to our little set of tubes on Inter-net. We’ll try and do one Toy Fair post a day and maybe one wrap up post for the event so as not to clutter the news page.

Read on for info on GI Joe, Transformers, Marvel Legends, and more!

[Read the rest of this entry…]

The Four Horsemen have posted the fifth round of their FANtastic Exclusive polls to determine this year’s action figure. This round focuses on weapons. The Elephant Swordsman will feature two large swords as seen in his concept art, but this poll will determine a third bladed weapon. You can check out the next round at the FANtastic Exclusive site.

Some of you may remember a little video I made on the 2006 exclusive.

ActionFigureeXpress comes through with yet another hot exclusive. This time in the form of a King Randor staction. Masters of the Universe officianados may remember that King Randor was an SDCC exclusive for 2005 from the Four Horsemen. You can see a review of this convention exclusive Randor here. This time around Randor is sporting a new head sculpt, cape and shield. The shield replaces the staff accessory that came with the convention exclusive and if you look closely sports some memorable acid burns. His color scheme also matches that of the original Randor figure from the 80’s line.

(Classic Randor picture from He-man.org)