If you stay in the toy robot collecting game for long enough, there’ll eventually come a point when it’s over. Finished. Except… it never ends.
Specifically, even once you’ve obtained a battered copy of every single Autobot and Decepticon who ever graced a tiny television screen or frayed comic page, the journey continues. It’s hard to give up the habit of a lifetime, after all. There are several veins into which a spicy new hit of plastic crack could be injected. These include Japanese-only end-of-line releases, European-only end-of-line releases, later lines like Generation 2, Beast Wars or Armada. For some folks, it’s all of them. For me, it’s been unusual recolours aka repaints or redecoes of ‘Generation One’ figures. In other words, princely sums for the exact same toy I already own, but with a different-coloured dye in the plastic.
It’s a trap.
One I can’t escape.
Right, quick bit of history and personal history to set the scene. Generation One aka G1 ran from 1984 to the very early 90s (the exact final year is a bit fuzzy depending on what one does and doesn’t count as being part of the Generation 2 successor line). My own G1 collection now contains almost all of 1984-1987, a good chunk of 1988 and a tiny smattering of 1989.
By that point, the line had primarily become Pretenders (the ambitious idiocy of which I’ve written about before) and teeny-tiny Micromasters, neither of which particularly rang my bell as a kid, so are an easy and blessed line in the sand for buying these bloody things now. (Had I an abundance of space and money, rest assured I would, however, cross this line in a heartbeat).
In other words, my love of these accursed things generally focuses on the earlier years (though I do and have collected well beyond that too). I’ve written about why before, but please trust that I am also painfully well aware of how deeply-embedded nostalgia’s fingernails are in my middle-aged brain. The trouble is, there’s a finite number of such Transformers. Yeah, they made bloody dozens of the little bastards, but now I own most of them (albeit in various states of disrepair, as mint-condition prices appall me on an existential level). And, of course, I want more. Always more.
Enter the repaints. More G1, yes, and entirely familiar toys at that - but usually harder to find than a socialist in Surrey, and with a price tag to match. This is very much the endgame for Transformers collectors, and waters in which I have long feared to swim.
The repaint game is very hard to explain to anyone who’s not deeply invested in this madness. You tell someone casually interested that they could pick up Ultra Magnus in more or less the blue, white and red colour scheme he had in the cartoon and comic for, say, £50, and they’d probably get where you’re coming from. But you tell them you’re thinking about spending £1000 on a black, red and grey version of the exact same toy and they’d probably have you sectioned.
But only 1500 copies of that black, red and grey Magnus were ever made, as a store-exclusive variant of a straight Ultra Magnus reissue in the early 2000s. At the time, no-one particularly wanted said variant, because Transformers nostalgia was new and the collecting focus skewed heavily towards re-buying the toys we had as kids.
The red, black and grey Magnus just hung around for years at everyday prices - a story told again with many alt-colour reissues of that period. Brown Hound, red and green Insecticons, blue and white Omega Supreme… The Shadow Transformers. The wrong Transformers. No-one wanted them twenty years ago. These things that sell for hundreds now simply warmed shelves upon release. I shudder now when I think how many I these I turned my nose up at,, because back then all I wanted was little guys who looked like they did in my precious comic.
Fast forward to Eternal Crisis Year Twenty-Twenty-Five and it’s a very different story. A great many middle-aged collectors now own everything their seven-year-old hearts had desired and so search instead for rarer fruits. A desperate attempt to experience a long-muted high all over again, now only obtainable by spending three figures on a toy robot they’re already deeply familiar with.
Whether by accident or design, there can be a creeping elitism in it too. “I am so far beyond your mortal concerns.” An ordinary retail Transformer is chicken feed, but a Japanese store exclusive from 2002 that no-one else you know owns/can afford? That’s Big Boy Collecting.
And, in turn, when one monied collector is prepared to pay £xxxx to get their next hit before someone else snaffles it, the market responds accordingly. And this can happen so fast, too - exacerbated by the early onset global midlife crises caused by the COVID lockdowns. Repaints that could be had for something resembling original prices even three years ago now sell for hundreds, and only after feverish bidding wars or late-night alerts from obscure Japanese resellers.
I am far from immune, despite long attempting to be - even once pouring scorn on people who did spend the cost of a small holiday on slightly different version of a children’s toy that original sold for £14.99. I do have the excuse that I a) only have a small few b) have only ever pounced on a repaint when it’s a bona fide bargain - but even that is very much relative. I’m talking £200 on a toy originally worth £40, but which others have bought for £500. A glorious, shining accomplishment in the eyes of Those Who Collect, but sickeningly venal to the rest of the world.
I’m well aware a through line of this newsletter has been me shitting on my own hobby - in all honesty, it’s part of how I come to terms with it, and as such I must now do it again. Every time one of these rare repaints has arrived at my door, after days or weeks of feverishly tracking its progress from Japan, Hong Kong, China or a confused Frenchman I’ve tracked down from a local flea market site, my feeling is purest despair.
Oh. Oh no. I already know exactly what this is. I already own this, but with different dye in the plastic. What have I done? What do I say when my partner sees my credit card statement? It’s the dichotomy between anticipation and reality: that I’ve obtained what I long thought to be a Holy Grail of robot-collecting, but in practice nothing in my life changed whatsoever once it was in my possession.
The good news is that the agonising hammerblows of remorse eventually grow weaker, and I become able to appreciate the toy for what it is, rather than for all the impossible hopes and dreams I had hung around it when I placed that too-high bid. It’s genuinely fascinating to experience a toy I’ve known well for decades in this new ways.
Maybe the new colours make it ‘feel’ more or less heroic/villainous. Maybe different paint applications make details pop out in new ways. Sometimes it’s hilariously lurid, like the 90s just vomited all over your shelves. Hell, maybe the alt-colour scheme simply suits that toy better. The mirror universe vibes on something I’ve been aware of for decades give it a delectable wrongness that, over time, do make an otherwise identical hunk of plastic feel profoundly distinct from its ‘correct’ form.
Most of all though, it’s an avenue to stay in the game even after you thought were ‘done’. Dozens, maybe even hundreds more variants to track down. You wanted to stop - but maybe, really, you didn’t. And now you don’t have to. Danger, danger.
Another aspect of these repaints is that many of them harken back to Transformers pre-history, and their well-documented origins as part of the Japanese Diaclone and Microchange toylines. You pick up the noughties eHobby release of the green, red and brown Insecticons (purple, black and yellow in their Transformers release) and you’re getting to see how their designers originally intended them to look, before US executives at Hasbro had them conform to Manichaean good/evil factions.
It’s toy archaeology, essentially. Original Diaclone stuff is functionally unobtainable to mere mortals, so even the horrifying markup on these twenty-year-old eHobby releases keeps them at a fraction of the price of the originals.
But all this stuff comes in waves, and as more people mid-life-crisis their way into a near complete vintage Transformers collection, more heads turn towards the eHobby (and other alt-colour) releases. These things were only manufactured in the low thousands, meaning the vast majority are now in Forever Collections and so the remainder are fast on their way to Diaclone-levels of extreme rarity. It’s very sad how few long-term Transformers gonks are thus able to experience these Shadow Transformers - only either the well-monied or disturbingly committed bargain hunters like myself.
Fortunately, a slow curative is on its way in the form of the Missing Link range, which is re-releases of select original Transformers with new, quasi-modern articulation - and, more excitingly for Seen It All bores like me, alternate releases in different colours. Some are brand new, and some are the otherwise unobtainable Diaclone hues.
We’ve recently had Cordon the Diaclone white, police deco of the traditionally yellow Lamborghini Autobot Sunstreaker, and it’s a sure bet that a red version (the other Diaclone colour scheme) will follow at some point. Missing Link Optimus had a yellow Sentinel Prime version (not a Diaclone thing but nodding to various obscure corners of lore), while many hats will be eaten if the upcoming Missing Link Ultra Magnus doesn’t get that red, white and black Delta repaint somewhere down the line.
Which is perhaps bad news for those of us who spent untold sums on e-Hobby repaints and the like, but excellent (if still very spendy) act of democratisation for that greater majority who’ve only ever stared sadly at The Shadow Transformers from afar.
Me, I just hope they do a yellow Sideswipe (aka Tigertrack) at some point. The third of my unholy trinity of toy grails, to sit proudly (and guiltily) alongside my Delta Magnus and newly-arrived blue and white Omega Supreme. I will, finally, be done.
But then what?
What if I go mad and go even deeper? The tunnel only goes in one direction, and that’s towards luridly-coloured South American exclusive repaints of the 1984 Minibots. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds for £2.99 toys - but with different dye in the plastic.
A sickness. What a terrible sickness.
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