Random Happenstance

This may have taken more time to set up than it would've taken to go see the Transformers movie.

I had the old Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, "Two Tribes" stuck in my head most of the time I was setting this up, and I haven't heard it in years.

I never had Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots as a kid, or Transformers. I'm a hair too old to have got them the first time around. For some reason, my little sister, one of the girliest girls in the history of girls, had the Dinobot Swoop. Friggin' original issue Swoop.

The Oldest got the Robots at a yard sale for under a buck; they're the reissues from a few years back, not a vintage set. Their punches aren't as strong as I somehow imagine an older set's would be. But, we had this idea from the moment we bought them, it just took a couple months to get around to it.

A lot of these guys are garage sale rescues: the Generation 2 Megatron, the Matchbox Voltron (which I never noticed before, still had most of the little pilot figures), Skybyte the crazyass flying shark, Optimus Primal (in black and brown, although I think the brown one might be someone else), the Autobot Constructicons...

The MegaMorph Captain America and Iron Man are mine, as seen here before. Most of the newer ones, including giant Starscream and the Optimus Prime we used for this, are the Oldest's. There are two from the Youngest, however: one of the preschool style Gobots (he says his name's Aerobot if you push his steering wheel, so there you go) and a Ravage from the recent Robot Heroes. Hell, I don't even have a Ravage. Lucky...

We stood them all up and took the pictures, then cleaned up, in about two-and-a-half hours or so. My wife was gonna want the table back, there was no way around that one.

The Transformers figures generally either have big, blocky, sturdy feet; or spindly, wobbly, narrow, or loose ones. For the most part, they all stood and stayed standing a lot more reliably than most toys I can think of. There were a couple exceptions, though, and some of them ended up back in the toybox. From the most recent cartoon, I believe her name was Override: she was one I wanted to put up, but her loose hips made standing her a losing proposition. No jokes about the one female Transformer we had being loose, please; it's not like she's Smurfette...

It didn't occur to me until I was upstairs and loading the pictures: we really should have gotten a head-count while we had them all up...

And for any hardcore Transformer fans out there: I know for a fact I don't know every one of these characters' names. And there's at least four in there that aren't Transformers at all. There are a few others that we didn't use for whatever reason: Masterpiece Optimus Prime would've overshadowed everyone else there, and I didn't want more than one of him anyway, so that left out the three or so versions. Hell, I forgot my Star Wars X-Wing Transformer, that I got for Christmas. We didn't use the Ghost Rider Megamorph, the Oldest couldn't find or transform the Alternators Scion Skids, and I misplaced my World's Smallest Megatron. Maybe next time: I have a ton of Heroclix that have been battling Unicron and Galactus for quite a while, and they're all due for a lot of dusting...