A Look Inside the Chaos

I had a little rare time on my hands on this Friday afternoon thanks to my work email and phone all the sudden being eeriely quite. Looking at my office I figured this was a good opportunity to work some more on getting some order to this chaos. Working from home most days you would think I have all the time in the world to get stuff like this done, but between my job and my family I often find myself with little free time.

Take this and combine it with one other aspect...procrastination. Yes, I'll come out and say it...I procrastinate opening new toys. I know some people can't even wait to get to the parking lot to crack up their newest plastic crack purchase, but for some reason I put it off to the side. It may be days, months or sometimes years before I get to opening it...if it ever gets opened. I know that may sound odd or down right dumb to some of you, but that's me in a nutshell. I can't really explain why I'm this way so don't bother asking.

However over the last year or so I have been (slowly) working on getting the office set like I want. I culled a lot of toys from the collection to pair it down to what I like the most. I bought a lot more Detolf glass display cases from IKEA to house and display my G1 Transformers collection. Where I used to only have two, I now have 9. I just purchased two cases last week and still have one to assemble. I feel like once this is done, then I can get down to opening some new toys.

To the left of my light tent is this messy stack of toys. Marvel Legends, Transformers Legends, Transformers Titans Return and Voltron make up the majority of the stack. I guess one of the reasons I tend to wait to open new items is because of this very blog. I want to photograph the items before I open them and because my lack of time the toys end up sitting there. It's gotten to the point where its really starting to drive me nuts and it's time I do something about it.

I mentioned above that I purchased two more Detolf cabinets last weekend. I assembled one last week and still need to work on the other this weekend. I plan to use them to house my Masterpiece collection. Perhaps one for the Autobots and one for the Decepticons? Or should I pair them up by year like I did w/ my G1 collection? 

Inside the case now are several 3rd party combiner figures that still need to be opened. Again, part of me wanted to showcase these toys on the blog, but now that so much time has passed I'm not sure if it's even worth it anymore. Between YouTube, fan sites and other blogs, all of these has been covered.

Inside my recently re-organized closet sit many, many, many unopened Masterpiece toys just waiting to be opened. Let me just say it's been really hard not busting into these. The more pictures I see of these toys the more it makes me look forward to the day I get off my butt and start opening these!

Surely I'm not the only one that has this "problem", right? Right? I'd like to think things will change soon, but the summer months are the busiest time for me at work and the next month I'm going to be on the road a lot. My goal however is by the holidays this fall to have everything you see that is still sealed, opened and on display. I'm going to continue to photograph certain toys when I can and put up new content, but I thought it may be fun to share a little of the behind the scenes photos of the chaos I call my office.

Now that I've bared my soul to all of you, are there any questions or comments? Let me know!

Transformers Titans Return: Roadburn

Hasbro's Titans Return series has been a lot of fun thus far. We have been given new modern updates to many classic Generation 1 characters that fans have been waiting for. Roadburn however just seemed to come out of left field.

Better known as the Throttlebot Chase, Roadburn makes use of the Bumblebee mold that released first. Hasbro has been making it a normal business practice to get multiple uses out of their new molds. Sometimes this means we get a figure with a new deco and a new head sculpt, while other times we get some slight changes to the mold to create a new character. Roadburn belongs to the latter category.

Roadburn is a Legends scale figure, or what used to be called Basic scale. While the figure is small, it's a great figure in my opinion. The new headsculpt is what sold the figure for me. The blue helmet with the gold face screams Throttlebot to me. It's not a perfect reproduction of the Generation One characters head, but it's close enough for me.

Chase was always one of my favorite Throttlebots. Blame it on his red Ferrari alt mode. As you can see the shade of red on Roadburn is a darker red than that of Chase. While it's not bad, I would have preferred a more vibrant shade of red. Perhaps Hasbro was worried that if they used a brighter red people would have mistaken him for Cliffjumper. Afterall, Bumblebee has been painted red and passed off as Cliffjumper multiple times in previous Transformers series. The Throttlebots didn't have the best defined robot modes so it was fairly easy to give them an upgrade. I wonder if you could recreate the "hood" of the back car piece with Roadburn?

At the time I found Roadburn at my local retail, I had not opened the Bumblebee figure I had previously found. My first exposure to this mold in hand was with Roadburn. Doesn't really matter since it's the same toy, sans the color and new head sculpt. The figure has a good bit of poseability for a Legends scale figure. It features a easy, yet fun transformation. I did notice that both figures had problems with some of the panels lining up and staying in place.

Over all I found this toy/mold to be a lot of fun. I don't always buy the simple color swaps anymore, but I knew I had to have Roadburn when I first saw images appear online. It's sad to think that we probably won't get any other upgraded Throttlebots in the Titans Return series (although Goldbug seems like an obvious choice), but I'll guess I'll take what I can get at this point.