Star Wars Transformers

Star Wars Transformers (SWTF) have been around for a couple of years now, we now also have Marvel Transformers and together they are known as Crossovers.

Despite growing up with Transformers I missed out on the Star Wars phenomenon by a few years. I saw the original films, I have a vague memory of watching the Empire Strikes Back at Christmas one year but I wasn't really a fan particularly.

I watched Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and quite enjoyed them (perhaps because I never felt so attached to the original trilogy!), and over the course of having a couple of weeks off work ill, watched all of the other 5 films before watching Revenge of the Sith. Combined with watching the (original) Clone Wars cartoon I started really getting into Star Wars. By the time I saw ROTS I had then started thinking about getting some of the figures.

Then Hasbro announced that they were creating Star Wars Transformers. It couldn't have been better timing if they tried, it was a way of getting the vehicles and characters from the Star Wars universe without deviating from my Transformers only toy stance. In addition I wasn't too keen to get lots of figures of the exact same size. One of the things that I like about Transformers is the variety of figures, size, colour and bulk. I didn't perceive that other lines had that variety.

So the figures, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi and General Grievous. The figures represented a couple of firsts in my collecting - the first time I bought figures in person and not on the internet and secondly Transformers that had nothing to do with G1. These figures were posable and highly detailed, something which I hadn't experienced before.

Reading various online views of these figures you'd think they were absolutely terrible. As I've said they came along at the right time for me. Granted they probably don't compare too well with the likes of say the Cybertron line figures but at the time for me they were cool. There seems to be a perception that Hasbro made these figures at the expense of other Transformer Universe figures. Given that these figures were Star Wars figures that happened to transform makes that highly unlikely.

Anyway, I really like these figures and was glad that the original three were followed up by Luke and Anakin Skywalker, Darth Maul and Boba Fett. Inevitable repaints followed, and now we're at the stage where most of the main characters in the films have a figure. (Leia and Padme are notable exceptions.) They also made Han Solo and Chewbacca into a combiner, and did another Darth Vader as a Death Star planet-former.

I really liked the little pilots that (originally) came with the figures and it occurred to me to get mini figures for the characters that didn't have any representation (such as Leia). After a bit of research I eventually came across Star Wars Miniatures created by Wizards of the Coast. The figures were non posable but were well designed with good levels of detail.

(Some are classified as rare and so are somewhat over priced but that aside the figures fitted the bill.)

I've got most of the figures so far but I think I'm almost done with the line, I don't particularly want multiples of each character (such as Episode II and III Obi-Wan) and so pick and choose (mainly getting the original). The Clone Troopers have repaints which I've largely ignored although I got rid of the Republic Gunship in favour of the Clone Wars cartoon redeco. The robot mode is pretty awful as it has tiny little legs but it's a cool vehicle.

The new AT-TE figure looks pretty cool so I'll pick that up but I'm not familiar with some of the new vehicles which are getting figures so I'm just getting some of the new Jedi figures (the Plo Koon and Kit Fisto Episode II Starfighter repaints) and that's it.

The Star Wars Transformers aren't my favourite bots but they represent an interesting idea and ultimately characters and vehicles I like and are an easy and relatively cheap way of collecting them. Collecting them led me to the idea that I should get some representation of all of the characters I like from various different franchises (outside of Transformers) and so were another step to having a serious plastic crack addiction!

I gave some thought to getting the Marvel Transformers, they seem to be viewed more favourably by Transformers fans but for me the thing about the Marvel Universe is the characters and I want toys which accurately represent them. By getting the Star Wars miniatures I was getting accurate representations of the characters, by getting the SWTF I was getting accurate representations of the vehicles. Marvel Transformers don't give me accurate representations of anything and so they're not for me. I might get a few for some customs though........