So hey, let’s talk Transformers for a bit.  Hey wait, just because you don’t care about the toys doesn’t mean that the punchline here isn’t a rather hilarious double troll job by Hasbro of it’s own fabase.

Let’s start with a little history.  Back in the original 1980s series and toyline, there were 6 main "Seekers" on the Decepticon team.  These were the jets that did a lot of the grunt work for Megatron.  Initially there were three F-15s, Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker and later they added 3 Coneheads with slight variations of the mold, Thrust, Ramjet, and Dirge.  Of all of the original characters, all 6 of these characters probably fall into the category of say, top 10-15 most well known Decepticons.

Several years ago, Hasbro put out the "Classics" line.  A short lived subline to fill space that consisted of updated versions of favorite "Generation 1" characters.  Characters like Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and Bumblebee, all in  versions most reminiscent of their original incarnations, none of this Firetruck Prime or Batmobile Megatron junk.  Over the course of the line consisting of two "waves" and a handful of exclusives, we got Starscream, Ramjet, and Skywarp.  They never released the other three Seekers to retail citing I believe that "We don’t want to reuse a mold more than 3 times because it doesn’t sell well".

Let’s nevermind for a minute the 40 different mold reuses the Movie lines have had for the Bumblebee mold.  Let’s Nevermind that a few years later we’d get two more uses of this mold in the form of a slightly recolored Starscream and the no name F-15 Acid Storm.  Let’s never mind that unlike 3 repaints of the same character we usually get that these were all individual characters with distinct personalities.  But hey, there was hope that maybe in the future we’d get the rest of the Seekers when Hasbro forgot about their bull shit excuse or someone picked them up as an exclusive set.

Well, someone did pick them up as an exclusive set.

So 3 years ago, in 2007, there was the Botcon Exclusive set, Games of Deception, which included the 3 remaining Seekers along side some throwaway nobodies no one cares about.  This was basically the ultimate fuck you to the middle ground fans like myself who can’t afford to spend 400 dollars to go to Botcon and get the exclusive set.  I should add that the $400 price mentioned doesn’t include the cost for travel, hotel, meals, any other spending money for the dealer room.  That cost is more or less the admission fee to get in the door and get the exclusive set.

The Seekers commanded a massive resell price on eBay fro years, some sets selling for several times their initial cost.  Individually they tend to run 150-200 dollars each.  The overall complaint here stems from Botcon’s previous track record of exclusive.  For the most part, they stuck to obscure third rate characters that only the truly hardcore fans cared about.  Some villain who was big in the comics.  characters who were previously big in Europe.  Hypothetical What if Characters like the Evil Optimus Prime we got in 2008.  The worst they had done in the past was the 2006 set where they released all of the Beast Wars characters in their "Pre Earth" forms.  The only real complaint here was that it was such a well done set overall and the cast of Beast Wars is well liked.

The only glimmer of hope for people hoping to complete their Six Seeker set was to import the Japanese releases of these molds.  This would still run you $50 a pop but it was a much better proposition than the Botcon set.  Unfortunately it also meant dealing with the Japanese’s obsession with Chromed up toys.

Well, it would seem that now, in 2010, Hasbro has gotten tired of laughing at the "Casual Collector" group that comes between Hardcore fans with money to burn and the Kids who will but anything with Bumblebee on it.  Now they are shifting their laughing towards the Hardcore fools.  They are releasing, finally, Thrust and Dirge to retail stores.  In fact, Thrust is slowly trickling into a Toys R Us near you as I write this.  Dirge comes later, but he’s been announced.  Thundercracker almost seems inevitable.  Sure,the Botcon set still has it’s exclusivity and they are slightly different molds but the casual collector like myself will never have to worry about paying 150 dollars for a 10 dollar toy again.