Since I wasn’t able to make to this year’s Toy Fair, I have to live vicariously through social media and the bits of info meted out throughout the weekend by Hasbro accounts. Luckily, they’ve been a gold mine this year!
Hasbro has been dropping a ton of information about its Titans Return line (i.e. “Everyone’s a Headmaster”) leading up to this weekend. The full line was on display yesterday and, suffice to say, there’s a lot to love.
Not only are we getting nearly all of the classic first wave G1 Headmaster characters, Hardhead, Chromedome, Brainstorm (who we’ve seen art for, but no figure yet), Skullcruncher, and Mindwipe, we’re getting beautifully chunky renditions of favorite characters like Optimus Prime, Blaster, Soundwave, and more. Plus, Hasbro is making more add-on heads than we’ll know what to do with! GeekDad Andy Robertson was able to get a quick rundown of the table from Ben Montana, Marketing Director for Transformers (including reveals of some previously unannounced figures!).
There isn’t a toy on that table that I don’t want to get; but what has me really excited is the giant 2-foot-tall behemoth in the background, the double-Headmaster himself, Fortress Maximus!
A gorgeous homage to the G1 city-bot, Fort Max has lights, sounds, and in city mode, he’ll interact with all the Leader-class toys, Wheelie, Rewind, and, of course, the “Titan Master” heads. Based off of the Titan-Class Transformers Generations Metroplex, he’s bigger than Combiner Wars Devastator, this is going to be a massive addition to your Transformers collection. I mean, his head (which on its own is as big as a Deluxe-class toy) has sound effects. His head!
Also announced this weekend as the fan favorite winner is the Decepticon city-bot, Trypticon! Re-released recently on Amazon, I can’t wait to see how he gets updated. Needless to say, I’m going to be prodding my contacts at Hasbro often for updates and tidbits. Really, the hardest thing is going to be waiting till the first wave comes out!
I can see why they decided to make either everyone a Headmaster or interact with the heads in some way, because the selling point of the line is the heads. If you only released a few figures with that gimmick, you wouldn’t get the full effect. So for a year just about EVERY figure will interact with Titanmasters. That’s cool. You might want to check out the Combiner Wars Legends Buzzsaw figure, since it was a sorta preview of their gimmick. He turns from PDA to bird, or a small vehicle that the Titanmasters can sit on.
I saw him! For like two seconds at Target. Haven’t been able to track the bird down since. I love that they’re making all these small characters that are vehicles for the heads as well.
Brainstorm was released last year. Maybe you mean Highbrow?
I very well might – I could have sworn I saw a Blurr retool that was Brainstorm, but I can’t, for the life of me, find the artwork anymore.
And I have that Brainstorm! Amazing figure!
Even though they released Brainstorm in 2014, they ARE doing another one with a Titan Master that is a retool of Deluxe TM Blurr. For now, it seems it will only be sold as part of a three-pack at SDCC 2016 with Sentinel Prime and Windblade.
-source: Hasbro reps at Botcon 2016