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Remarkably we got a ton of legitimate first looks at upcoming toys before the leakers could get to them! First, the teased Robosen reveal was not a Bumblebee - I guess that was a bit of an April Fools - but instead a trailer and Roller is being released for Robosen's Optimus Prime. And it costs just as much as Optimus Prime did, while seemingly doing notably less. Legacy's reveals included Deluxes Elita 1, Tarantulas, Knock Out, and Wild Rider. Elita 1 is known to be a "pretool" for Minerva, who is due to be a Walgreens exclusive late this year. Knock Out is a retool or "partial" of Studio Series Jazz with many new parts, and Tarantulas replicates Blackarachnia's engineering, but with entirely new parts. a href='https://www.tfradio.

Brian shares some non-spoiler thoughts in his quick review of the Botbots Animated Series on Netflix! (Spoilers: He really liked it.)

Walmart Collector Con is coming once again, bringing us reissue Beast Wars reissue Cybershark and Wolfang, Legacy Beast Collection Sandstorm (based on an old Botcon toy!), Nightprowler (based on an obscure cancelled Walmart exclusive!) and Buzzsaw (based on an old ordinary recolor), and two new RED Collection figures: Shockwave which looks surprisingly nice, and Galvatron, which from what we can see looks a lot like a RED figure. Walmart will be putting up preorders (for whatever they're worth) Thursday the 24th at 1pm Eastern time. Good luck if you decide to try, but you'll probably be able to just go grab these from your local store just as easily anyway. More importantly... Today we got our first look at BotBots series 6, being debuted to coincide and tie in with Netflix's BotBots cartoon which will premiere on Friday, the 25th! Unfortunately, series 6 will not be available until literally this time next year, and is, according to Screenrant, exclusive to Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon seems to be selling the series as full sets of the different ordinary price points, with a set of 20 (4x 5 packs), set of 32 (4x 8 packs) and set of 24 mystery figures (the display carton of singles). For online purchasing, this is probably the best we're gonna have it for avoiding duplicate packs, though if these are just regular retail packages being bundled together, it could still end up accidentally happening... And along with them, the long-awaited BotBots vehicles are also finally coming out with series 6, after having been inadvertently revealed what seems like a really long time ago in some art assets. In all, there are said to be 70-something total characters in the series, and surprisingly few duplicates among the sets. There is a lot of reuse of older molds though, but with a healthy portion of all-new things in the mix. But even so, being sold in this format, if you want every unique, or even just every new mold BotBot, you'll have to buy every single set, at a cost of $220 before tax. If you're interested in preordering these, you can find them via our affiliated links below. a href='https://www.tfradio.

Funko has opened the NFT door for Transformers, with the Transformers X Funko Digital Pop Pack drop coming on March 15th, with a very small percentage of Digital Pops being redeemable for actual Funko Pops. Meanwhile, at the most optimistic calculation, the energy cost for minting these comes in somewhere around a year's worth of power usage by a small town. We can but hope this is not a sign of trends to come from Hasbro directly. But since Funko is a license holder, Hasbro has definitely approved this, and will be watching the numbers closely... Thanks to all of our Patrons who are making this possible! Join our Patreon and let's make awesome stuff happen! Please support RFC by using our Amazon referral link. Canadian fans: please use this Amazon.ca referral link. UK fans: Please use this Amazon.co.uk referral link

Transformers and GI Joe will be coming to an end at IDW Publishing. Confirmed by various individuals with ties to IDW, the news was broken by The Hollywood Reporter late last week. No word yet on what the next home for those brands' comic books might be. Love them or hate them, more ReAction Transformers figures are coming, now featuring Beast Wars! Thanks to Voltrace and Jtprime we have listings for an initial wave of 5 Beast Wars ReActions. Plus Target has a pair of exclusive ReAction redecos, including "Retro" Galvatron, and G2 Blue Grimlock. BeastBot056 shared a first inventory listing for a Buzzworthy Bumblebee release of Kingdom Dinobot. Nothing is known about this one yet, but a toy-based redeco with the Maximal Grimlock head seems most likely right now. ACD Distribution posted new case listings for Authentics, bringing us the first look at Wheeljack in the Alpha assortment, and Arcee in the Bravo assortment. ACD also gives us first looks at the Classic Heroes Team lineup, which may be the successor to Rescue Bots. The wave features reused Rescue Bots Optimus Prime and Bumblebee toys, with new molds for G1-style Grimlock, and Beast Wars-inspired Optimus Primal. Hasbro won't be going to any sort of Toy Fair event, having officially withdrawn from attendance at London Toy Fair. Though most of them have voluntarily cancelled in favor of alternative online formats anyway, London was the last still planning to carry out an in-person show. It looks like fans all around the world will be waiting for whatever streaming event Hasbro pulls out this year in order to get hopefully first looks at the upcoming year's toys. Hopefully they'll make this one feel more inclusive to fans and viewers outside of the US and Canada...

On the RFC News Desk today... -Chris Cocks is named as the new CEO of Hasbro, succeeding the late Brian Goldner. -A collection of stock image-related leaks! --New Authentics toys are on the way, seen in stock images provided by Jtprime, including some reused Rescue Bots merchandise! Will these be replaced the Alpha and Bravo lines for 2022? --Our first look at Core Class Studio Series 86 Exosuit Spike Witwicky. It's just packaging images, but it's looking promising at this early point. --Our first leaked look at the second Masterpiece Trainbot, Getsuei. Official information seems to be due on January 13th. Start putting in your bets on the SRP for this one! --And In Demand Toys has dropped a batch of Legacy, Buzzworthy Bumblebee, and Coronation Starscream stock images. We've reproduced the whole bunch here, but the ones that matter are Galvatron, and maybe Cliffjumper. Cliffjumper's certain to be just an error with the production sample, but Galvatron may be a more interesting situation...

From an unidentified shop in Taiwan, we've got first looks at the next Deluxe assortment for Buzzworthy Bumblebee, consisting of at least three Studio Series releases. B-127 comes back around, now using an alternate unmasked head, Studio Series 86 Kup is back again, now in a deco variant designed to look more accurate to animation with and opaque window and some color tweaks, and Earthrise Cliffjumper is now a Studio Series toy as well, since he was in the movie too. Cliffjumper gets grey limbs and opaque windows to be as cartoon accurate as possible - and even gets his own Studio Series product number: 86 13. That's the next in sequence after Coronation Starscream in the regular assortment, which opens up all kinds of interesting questions about the next unrevealed waves of Studio Series, doesn't it? Thanks to all of our Patrons who are making this possible! Join our Patreon and let's make awesome stuff happen! Please support RFC by using our Amazon referral link. Canadian fans: please use this Amazon.ca referral link. UK fans: Please use this Amazon.co.uk referral link

Pulsecon brought us our first look at wave 1 of Transformers Legacy, following the IGN preview of Skids and Bulkhead last week. Not all of the toys were shown, but the entire wave was teased during the course of the stream. Hasbro published the stock photos for the toy reveals, which include Transformers Prime Arcee, Kickback, Drag Strip (part 1 of 5 for the new Menasor), and Leader Laser Optimus Prime. The poster style art shown during the stream hints at the remaining toys in wave 1, with Core Class Hot Rod, Thundercracker, and Iguanus (purple monster on the right) plus the G2 redeco of Core Class Megatron. Also shown is Blaster, who while technically now a Kingdom toy and due in Voyager wave 5, will reship alongside Bulkhead in Legacy wave 1. Preorders for the revealed toys for this wave are open in the usual places, though Pulse had mostly or entirely sold out within the first hour. The ETA for the preorders currently is around July of next year. It feels unlikely that it will actually be that long before the new line starts, and this is probably just allowing for a safety margin against the current shipping crisis. Nothing new was revealed for Kingdom or Studio Series, but an additional, Pulse Premium-only stream was subsequently scheduled for 10/27 with i...

Before the official opening of preorders, TAGhobby jumped the line a bit and released the first info and clean stock photos for Masterpiece Shouki, the first entry in the Trainbots team. Coming with a hurtful ¥18,000 list price, Shouki seems to favor a realistic, and almost impossibly clean-looking train mode, with some small sacrifice of substantial backpack on the otherwise very animation-inspired robot mode. Shouki is the first representative of the MPG subline, which seems meant to give a home to combiners (G is for Gattai!) and large characters (G is for Giant!) which otherwise have gone unutilized in Masterpiece previously. As a team of six, the eventual Raiden looks due to cost solidly in the $1000 neighborhood once completed. (G is for Gah!) This cost mmay end up spread out over an extended period, as we've had no hint yet of Kaen or any of the other five Trainbots being in any advanced state of development yet. While $160 twice or maybe three times per year might not sound so bad, remember that with everything getting steadily more expensive, odds are the longer it takes to finish the team, the higher and higher that final total will go. Thanks to all of our Patrons who are making this possible! Join our Patreon and let's make awesome stuff happen! Please support RFC by using our Amazon referral link. Canadian fans: please use this Amazon.ca referral link. UK fans: Please use this Amazon.co.uk referral link

Surprising no one at all, we had the fourth of four reveals for the Amazon exclusive Golden Disk Collection, the eagerly-anticipated Terrorsaur. This toy is an extensive remodeling of Kingdom Airazor, which as far as we can tell right now only shares forearms and lower legs with the bird version of this engineering. Essentially it's an all new toy. I go in to further detail on everything that's new in the podcast episode, so be sure to listen to that to find out more! Terrorsaur is supposed to include a Golden Disk, a duplicate of one of Titan Class The Ark's Golden Disk accessories. But there's a disagreement between the product copy and stock photos as to which one it might be, so we'll have to wait and see. Terrorsaur went up for preorder at $22.99, and quickly sold out on Hasbro Pulse just in time for Amazon to finally open their listing for preorders. As of this writing, it was still available to order, with a provisional ship date of March 2022, just like the rest of the subline. You can click here to preorder from Amazon now! (affiliate link) Thanks to all of our Patrons who are making this possible! Join our Patreon and let's make awesome stuff happen! Please support RFC by using our Amazon referral link. Canadian fans: please use this Amazon.ca referral link. UK fans: Please use this Amazon.co.uk referral link

It looks very much like Amazon and Hasbro will be blowing through the entire Golden Disk Collection's reveals basically all at once. Our third reveal in a row is Mutant Tigatron, a redeco and retool of the still as-yet not officially acknowledged Voyager Kingdom Tigatron. This version of the toy is in orange like a common tiger, and more or less matches the card art for the original Tigatron toy, which presented the character in orange rather than the white the toy would ultimately be released in. This Tigatron sticks close to the design work of Kingdom Cheetor, at a larger scale and with some added complexity thanks to a little more budget flexibility. Like Shadow Panther did for the Cheetor mold, Mutant Tigatron comes with a robot head based on the Mutant Head of the original Cheetor mold family. Mutant Tigatron is up for preorder on Amazon for $31.49, with a release date in March of 2022, but in practice will probably ship sooner than that. Click here to preorder Mutant Tigatron! (affiliate link) Following up on more of yesterday's news, Haslab Victory Saber passed its minimum backer threshold, going from just under 9600 backers yesterday afternoon to nearly 12000 today. Looks like TakaraTomy Mall opening up orders to Japan may have helped a bit! From here we'll be looking towards hitting the stretch goals, but with more than 10 days remaining, hitting at least the first added tier of 14000 seems likely. Please support RFC by using our Amazon referral link. Canadian fans: please use this Amazon.ca referral link. UK fans: Please use this Amazon.co.uk referral link

After knowing about it through Amazon Australia's extremely early publishing of product listings months ago, plus a photo of some production samples just recently, the proper debut of Amazon's Golden Disk Collection exclusive subline has begun this week! Monday saw the reveal off the two pack of Road Ranger and Puffer, retools of Kingdom Huffer and Pipes, respectively. Road Ranger was originally a GoBot, and was first repurposed as a Transformer in a now hideously expensive eHobby multipack with several other likewise adapted characters. Puffer is the fan name for varieties of G1 Minibot Huffer in Pipes colors, which were sold in Europe and Mexico. The name is now canonized thanks to some Star Trek Voyager logic with Puffer being Huffer and Pipes fused together in the next best thing to a transporter accident. This set is still available to preorder on Amazon as of this posting, at $41.99 with a ship date in March of 2022 - but likely to actually be much sooner than that, given manufacturing seems to have happened already. Click here to preorder from Amazon (affiliate link) On the actual Transformers Tuesday, we lucked out and got a second Golden Disk reveal, giving us our very first look at Jackpot! Redecoed from Studio Series 86 Jazz, Jackpot features a new head and redeco of Battlemaster Pteraxadon as Action Master Partner Sights. Jackpot is up for preorder at $22.99, also due to ship in March. Click here to preorder from Amazon! (affiliate link) The remaining two toys for this subline are Tigatron and Terrorsaur, and right now we're just waiting to see if the whole bunch goes up this week, or if the reveals slow down a little from here. Finally, TakaraTomy finally began taking backers for the Haslab Victory Saber campaign. Their support period ends on October 10th, meaning Japanese fans will have less than two weeks to either decide or figure out how to budget for backing the project. While Takara's numbers probably won't be tallied until the end or very close to it, this afternoon had Victory Saber sitting at over 9500 backers, making prospects look very good for at least the minimum backer number to be rea...