The Terrordrome has relayed information on next year’s JoeCon. The 2011 GI Joe Collectors’ Convention will be held in Orlando, Florida at the Dolphin and Swan resort hotels. Sound familiar? That was the location of this year’s Transformers Convention, Botcon, hosted by the same company, Fun Publications. The dates for the convention will be March 31 – April 3. Should be a lot more pleasant than the ridiculous humidity and heat encountered at Botcon this year.
This year’s JoeCon was held in Providence, RI, hometown of Hasbro HQ and former Botcon host city. It looks like Joe fans have started a trend following Transformers fans as far as convention locations. Will JoeCon 2012 be held in Pasadena, CA, the 2011 Botcon location? Only time will tell and I’m sure that will have a lot to do with the progress of the second GI Joe movie.
In 2002, it all started out so innocently. Takara was reissuing some of the original line of Transformers. As an E-Hobby exclusive, special variants were made of brand new characters that never appeared in the original show. The result was Road Rage and Crosscut. After that, what followed could only be described as a wave of repainted G1 molds as new characters with new stories inserted into the Generation 1 canon. This is what we may call a ‘retcon’ since the books were more or less closed on new stories from the original canon up to that point. Repaints of Hound, Sideswipe, Starscream, Grapple and more would follow with new color schemes, names and bios. If a mold had been part of the Diaclone or Microchange line, that original paint scheme would be used as an option as well.
Yesterday, we posted some of the first images of the Masterpiece Rodimus Prime unpainted prototype. There were only a three pictures and they left more questions than answers. Today, a TFW2005 poster, posted new images of the unpainted prototype that give a better idea of what this toy is going to be like. I have mirrored them below.
The trailer pictures seem to confirm my underwhelming initial impressions. The robot looks fantastic, with what appears to be a rotating face gimmick to show Hot Rod’s face, similar to the gimmick on the Masterpiece Starscream mold. Overall, the figure looks entirely too short though. We don’t know for certain yet, but he looks much shorter than the Masterpiece Optimus Prime mold and that is a disservice to Rodimus as another Prime. Let us know what you think in the comments!
Auto Assembly, a UK Transoformers convention released a statement saying that they had a partnership with Hasbro to give away 30 sets of the highly anticipated 3-pack featuring Classics Rodimus (Hot Rod), Classics Cyclonus, and Classics Galvatron. The set is called Challenge on Cybertron and currently was only known to be a limited exclusive to a convention in Hong Kong. The set will not be released in the UK, so this will be the only way to get it that market. The press release went on to mention that it is not even available in the US, where it will be a Target exclusive. That, right there, is the kicker because thats the first announcement of who the distributor will be for the US release.
You can all rest easy now and while you do check out some of the great pictures from the Animation-Comic-Game Hong Kong (ACGHK) event’s toy displays.
XBox.com has news that some of the Game Developers from High Moon Studios will be online tonight (7/29) from 9PM EST until Midnight, playing mutliplayer matches on War for Cybertron. Dev Gamertags will be
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so send an invite or friend request to one of these gamertags to get in on the action!
This weekend will also play host to the second double XP multiplayer weekend for the game. This will last from Friday at 9PM EST through Monday at 3AM EST. Play any matches during this time and earn double the experience points. This is sure to help any players having trouble racking up those multiplayer achievements based on levels.
Word had it that we would be seeing some of the first pictures of Masterpiece Rodimus Prime this weekend because it would be on display as an unpainted prototype at a large Transformers convention in China called Transformers CybertronCon. Sure enough, the convention is being setup right now and some helpful fans in attendance snapped some pictures. You can see those pictures and many more from the convention setup here. Check out that thread because there are some other neat things on display including a gold lucky draw Brave Maximus among other things.
As for Rodimus, the pictures of the robot look fantastic. The trailer is leaving me a little disappointed. I was really hoping they would do more with it than just make it bigger, but there isn’t much to go on just yet with these photos. We’ll know more as we get it.
Hasbro and Marvel held their panel for their various action figure lines and there were some surprises including a promise to return to Marvel Legends in a big way in 2012. I take back what I said in this post, but I hope we are back to full waves of single figures and not these 2-packs. Its certainly a way off, but any news is good news at this point.
In the meantime, lets look at some of the big reveals for everything else they had to talk about after the jump!
Image in banner and where watermarked are mirrored from MarvelousNews’ Gallery here.
More images will be added as things are put in display cases and pictures of those start coming in. [Read the rest of this entry…]
The Transformers Panels have come and gone for the opening day of SDCC and we have nothing to really show for it.
There was very little discussion of toys. The War for Cybertron figures were shown briefly during discussion of the game. Some time was spent talking about the Powercore Combiners line, essentially reiterating that this line wasn’t replacing anything, only supplementing. They wanted to expand the world of combiners. When it came to talking about Generations, some of the new figures were shown including Hailstorm, Breacher, Seaspray, Terradive, Tomahawk and Highbrow. None of the showstopper reveals that happened at Botcon were shown here. No Jazz. No Thunderwing. No Scourge. No Windcharger. No Tracks. No Perceptor. No Grapple. No Lugnut. No Skullgrin. And what a lot of people were waiting for, No Kup.
Most of the discussion on both panels focused on Transformers: Prime. We got to see some new slides of what Ratchet, Arcee and Cliffjumper will look like (pictures after the jump). We also get our first look at the human characters. In addition, we were shown Decepticon troopers, which were described as being similar to Storm Troopers from Star Wars. No names. Just generic Decepticon bodies. Some avid fans may pick up on the fact that the Autobots had their own version of storm troopers in Transformers Animated in the form of AutoRoopers. Google that one, kids. Animated got that inspiration from another special place in Transformers history.
From what I can tell, it sounds like some very rough footage was shown as well, but there isn’t much on that. Frankly, it doesn’t feel like this show is as far along as they wanted it to be on the production side of things. They compensated for that at Botcon with lots of new toy reveals, but that was absent here.
[Update! – Crazy] IGN posted the teaser test footage from the panel! Added to top of post.
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