Dammit.  Yes, dammit.  I’ve got enough stuff to spend my money on these days, and now Hasbro has to go and reinvent  Transformers again, and once again make them bad ass.
I’m kind of a backwards Transfan…sure, I was fascinated with Generation 1 like any other kid of the 80’s, but my addiction to the toys began with Beast Wars, mostly due to the fantastic animated series that was running at the time.  I managed a pretty close to complete domestic release collection of the Beast Wars line, and it remains one of the prides of my collection.
So, when Beast Wars morphed back into the more familiar vehicles and robots, while most Transfans cheered, I shrugged and moved on.  The new stuff just didn’t seem to have the same magic to me.  It started losing it during Beast Machines, and by the time the next run came out, I was surprisingly uninterested.  Armada, Cybertron, Energon…all looked pretty neat, and I always stopped and looked at them in the stores, but ultimately passed.
Then, of course…came Transformers Classics.  And once again, the hook was in me.  I got an entire domestic run of the Classics figures (yes even the Botcon Seekers that enraged so many at the time)…and then came the movie.  That damned movie.  Actually, I liked the movie, but the movie designs did absolutely nothing for me, so I quickly let my Transformers fandom fade to the background yet again.
THEN… then came Transformers: Animated.  Now, believe it or not, even though I loved Classics, I never got into Universe.  For some reason, they just didn’t “wow” me.  The Transformers: Animated stuff, though, that really captured my attention, and yes…I now have pretty near a full run of the uniquely tooled Transformers: Animated figures.  No, I didn’t go for all the repaints and off-scale stuff, but I have one of every unique character from the show.  Then Revenge of the Fallen arrived, and Animated slipped away (with the exception of Arcee, who is the last “hole” I consider in my collection).  So, once again, my Transformers interest is satisfied without any cash leaving my wallet.
Now I’m sure everyone knows what comes next…  yeah.  The War for Cybertron.  Dammit, Hasbro, why must you do this to me?

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I mean look at those!  Well, don’t focus on Megatron too much, he’s kinda crappy, but Prime and Bumblebee are both fantastic.  They take some great elements from the classic looks, yet manage to soup ’em up and change them up to fit a more modern space-age aesthetic.  THIS, my friends, is how you reimagine.  Mike Bay… take some notes.  😉
If you’ve been in a cave and haven’t seen the trailer for the War for Cybertron video game, feast your eyes: