Radio Free Cybertron Brian Kilby

Radio Free Cybertron was among the invitees to a special conference call with the Hasbro Transformers Design team, including members Mark Maher, Evan Brooks, Sam Smith, Delaney Norris, and Ben MacCrae. Over the course of a nearly two hour call, everyone got to submit at least one question, but more importantly we got a lot of interesting responses from the team members. In this special extra-large edition of the RFC News Desk, we recap the highlights, and let you hear some of the answers right from the team themselves.



At the end, we got a special exclusive first look at Buzzworthy Bumblebee Origins Jazz, an entirely new mold figure based on Jazz's Cybertronian appearance in the first episode of the G1 cartoon. Publicity photos were sent out a little later that day, but we also were able to get some extra looks through screenshots from the call for a little extra detail the product photos may not have covered. Ben tells us preorders should open later this month.







































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TFW user Max Tower uncovered a pair of stock image renders giving us our first look at the previously unknown Buzzworthy Bumblebee Studio Series G1 Hound and Dark of The Moon Hatchet!



The toys are retools of Siege Hound and Studio Series Crowbar, respectively, and from what we can see right now appear to bring a healthy amount of new parts to the table! We can't see a whole lot for Hatchet, but I have a semi-detailed rundown of the evident changes to Hound in the News Desk episode.



According to JTPrime, this new Deluxe assortment, which includes reships of Cliffjumper, Kup, and B-127, is expected to hit sometime in December at US Target stores. And hopefully on Pulse at the same time to cover everyone not served locally by any Targets.

The second wave of the Velocitron Speedia 500 Collection has started to hit shelves. In New Zealand, to everyone's surprise. This has given us the chance to both verify that the previously leaked Crasher is in fact being sold as Crasher! Plus it gives us our actual first look at the toy known in listings as "SHADOWS", which has been believed to reference the legacy name Shadow Striker. Except it turn out it didn't. It actually meant G2 Dragstrip. Or maybe a new character inspired by G2 Dragstrip? We don't really know what's up with this, especially since we didn't even know this specific thing existed before about five minutes ago. But hey, at least the age of surprises isn't totally over, right?



Photos thanks to python5003.

Remarkably we got a ton of legitimate first looks at upcoming toys before the leakers could get to them!



First, the teased Robosen reveal was not a Bumblebee - I guess that was a bit of an April Fools - but instead a trailer and Roller is being released for Robosen's Optimus Prime. And it costs just as much as Optimus Prime did, while seemingly doing notably less.















































Legacy's reveals included Deluxes Elita 1, Tarantulas, Knock Out, and Wild Rider. Elita 1 is known to be a "pretool" for Minerva, who is due to be a Walgreens exclusive late this year. Knock Out is a retool or "partial" of Studio Series Jazz with many new parts, and Tarantulas replicates Blackarachnia's engineering, but with entirely new parts.




































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Brian shares some non-spoiler thoughts in his quick review of the Botbots Animated Series on Netflix! (Spoilers: He really liked it.)

Walmart Collector Con is coming once again, bringing us reissue Beast Wars reissue Cybershark and Wolfang, Legacy Beast Collection Sandstorm (based on an old Botcon toy!), Nightprowler (based on an obscure cancelled Walmart exclusive!) and Buzzsaw (based on an old ordinary recolor), and two new RED Collection figures: Shockwave which looks surprisingly nice, and Galvatron, which from what we can see looks a lot like a RED figure.



Walmart will be putting up preorders (for whatever they're worth) Thursday the 24th at 1pm Eastern time. Good luck if you decide to try, but you'll probably be able to just go grab these from your local store just as easily anyway.























More importantly...



Today we got our first look at BotBots series 6, being debuted to coincide and tie in with Netflix's BotBots cartoon which will premiere on Friday, the 25th!



Unfortunately, series 6 will not be available until literally this time next year, and is, according to Screenrant, exclusive to Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon seems to be selling the series as full sets of the different ordinary price points, with a set of 20 (4x 5 packs), set of 32 (4x 8 packs) and set of 24 mystery figures (the display carton of singles). For online purchasing, this is probably the best we're gonna have it for avoiding duplicate packs, though if these are just regular retail packages being bundled together, it could still end up accidentally happening... And along with them, the long-awaited BotBots vehicles are also finally coming out with series 6, after having been inadvertently revealed what seems like a really long time ago in some art assets.



In all, there are said to be 70-something total characters in the series, and surprisingly few duplicates among the sets. There is a lot of reuse of older molds though, but with a healthy portion of all-new things in the mix. But even so, being sold in this format, if you want every unique, or even just every new mold BotBot, you'll have to buy every single set, at a cost of $220 before tax. If you're interested in preordering these, you can find them via our affiliated links below.

























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