Reply To: Hobby Weekender 16/11/2018 – Back before you can miss it!

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@rayzryr i’d be tempted to try something like a Carroburg Crimson wash on the hair, possibly just around the roots, but go with what you are happy with. they do look awesome as is 🙂

I think I have some MccFarlane toys figures around here somewhere. I know I have a few that were brought at university when they were cheap from the Spawn range, and I’ve their take on Hicks from Aliens here I’m sure….

@mage Third Party Transformers is a funny area. Hold on ‘cos this is a deep dive:

Knock-offs have been a thing since the Generation 1 era (hells, I had a couple myself brought at markets back when we lived in Hong Kong), and have become increasingly sophisticated to the point that some collectors wait for a figures KO as several companies take pains to improve on the original release, either through paint, articulation accessories, die-cast parts or some combination thereof. Completely illegal of course but the manufacturers are all based in countries where copyright is more a suggestion than a legality. Which leads us to the Third  Party market. The initial instances that I became aware of were folks who were making conversion and add-on kits for existing figure – my profile pic is my Generations Kup figure with one of the heads from the I-Gear upgrade set for the figure to give him a more comic-book accurate head sculpt (cy-gar included). Think how there is a burgeoning market for third-party 40k parts. eventually several companies started to look at designing their own figures for parts of the franchise that Hasbro would most likely not touch, a great example being the Hearts of Steel mini-series that had steampunk takes on the classic cast. Or filling out the Fall of Cybertron designs. Others decided they wanted figures that more closely resembled the designs from IDW’s ongoing comic book series (CHUG style), or decided to fill gaps in the masterpiece range. Still others decided they would focus on producing figures in the smaller “Legends” scale. Prior to Combiner Wars this also meant many, many combiners, in various scales.

Now there is a cost to this. Due to the vastly smaller production runs most third party Transformers figures & kits cost a marked amount more than an official Hasbro product, but in turn they are typically engineered for the older collector. For example – that Overlord I posted a picture of is one of the single largest figures I own, outside of the titan-class figures, and cost me £150. But the engineering is frankly superb, and the company behind it -Mastermind Creations (MMC) –  have filled a lot of holes in my collection through their ReFormatted line. Their take on Impactor (Spartan) is a figure I waited 25 years for, and their Predaking (Feral Rex) is a beast (even if each component was £70 a pop). Equally my shelves have 3 members of the Decepticon Justice Division, a version of Death’s Head and several other characters that I highly doubt will  ever see official figures. I have several Perfect Effect kits for my Combiners that provide vastly improved feet and hands, Planet-X’s FoC Dynobots are the version of the team I’ve always wanted, and several other figures picked up when funds allow because they looked cool and filled holes in the collection. Now, are these legal? Surprisingly Hasbro have appeared to take a rather prosaic approach to the scene, and quite often use interest in a TP product to gauge interest in an official version. This is most apparent in the Masterpiece line where official releases have reduced  the value of an existing third party figure massively.

Now are they worth it? it’s down to you as the purchaser. They are not normally cheap, but I’ve rarely been dissapointed. And in fact a good upgrade kit has encouraged my to buy a Hasbro/Takara figure I’d have skipped otherwise. Toyhax’s reprolabels  have done something similar. I would recommend checking out some Youtube reviews – Bens Collectibles, EmGo, Thews Awesome Review and Bobby  Skullface to name a few, all offer honest opinions, and a number of the companies maintain extensive Facebook pages where you can see how a product develops.

And to go about purchasing said loot? in the UK I use Kapow Toys primarily as they have a good spread of ranges at reasonable prices. Outside the UK TF Source has a frankly staggering range and Big Bad Toy Store is just a monolith. You do end up paying shipping and import fees that balance out any pricing deals they might have. Otherwise Sir Toys is a fantastic source for KO’s and official figures (and have some neat display items for helping with photography….)