Shopping for toys

No, not an EVE post so no new shinies.

My wife and I have recently been looking at Transformers toys for our 4 year old son. I used to be a big Transformers fan when I was a kid (ok fine so was every other male kid in my generation) so yeah my wife blames me for getting him all nerdified even at 4 by showing him the animated 1986 movie, which he has watched like probably 200 times. All the kids in his school probably don’t understand him because he keeps going on about fighting Decepticons all the time.

Originally we weren’t really planning on getting him these kinds of toys, at least not at this age. But during our Christmas trip to my sister’s place her neighbor gave him a Transformers Prime Wheeljack toy, and he was super delighted. Kept playing with it for the entire trip, even though he can’t really transform it by himself (does a credible job but honestly these things are like Rubix cubes…)

What really cinched the deal though was that his grandparents promised to buy him a toy when we go back to visit them in Singapore, and his eyes lit up and he immediately declared that he wants OPTIMUS PRIME! and now every time he talks to them he gets reminded about it and he starts muttering about how he can’t wait to get OPTIMUS PRIME!. So we had to start looking for a nice figure that would look recognizable to him, given that he basically only knows the G1 Transformers instead of the newfangled movies or cartoons.

Looking through modern Transformers toys, it’s really amazing the kind of work these toy designers have done. I remember my old Transformers as these mostly blocky things that tended to look pretty good as vehicles but you had to kinda stretch your imagination for some of those robot modes. The stuff nowadays… by golly the arms flip out and rotate and this hinge opens and this part slides out and tabs in here and you rotate the body with these two hinges and they tab together … these things make a motherboard look simple. I’m guessing that the target audience has shifted from little kids into essentially big kids like me who grew up with Transformers. Probably works too because man I think these new toys are cool, maybe that’s why I kinda want to buy them for him (so I can play with them myself).

So anyway we’ve kinda decided on this Voyager Optimus Prime, mainly because his truck mode looks kinda like the G1 truck mode (kinda) and also because it’s not ridiculously expensive like most of the other Optimus Prime figures. Seriously triple digit prices are insane for a toy figure. The other figure is the triple changer Generations Springer, mainly because Springer was in the movie and it does look a lot like the G1 model, at least in robot mode. Plus, triple changer, value for money!

Still sorta undecided on the last figure to get (need to get a $50 order for free shipping). We were originally debating between Grimlock or Blitzwing, but now we’re leaning towards getting this Mini-Con assault team set of 3 mini Transformers that combine into a bigger robot. I’ve never heard of them before, so obviously neither has our kid, but the combining thing looks fun and the transformations are relatively simple enough for him to manage on his own. So hopefully that will avoid a reprisal of the 1)”papa can you transform Wheeljack into a car” 2) five minutes later : “papa can you transform Wheeljack into a robot”