Transformers Report: Universe Micromaster Protectobots

Since I’m going back and forth between further going through the Transformers Universe (1.0) figures and other clutter organizing project I’m going to zip through the Micromaster Combiners. This is the last of our Autobots, originally seeing life in Japan as Sixturbo before ending up at KB in America as the Protectobots, an homage to my favorite G1 Combiner team. However, this version really only has three rescue vehicles, the other three being a race car, a sports car, and a cruising motorcycle. It makes for an odd choice for an homage but since the others were homages or namesakes I guess it fits. It’s really just a reason to use names for copyright purposes when you get down to it.

I’m going to be a bit off with the usual renames in the captions. This was the first released set in the Universe line and I only wrote the names on the card back I kept rather than the instructions. Over time the ink has faded a bit. However, some of the names were such odd choices for an homage that they may be the most justified name changes I did for these little guys. Apparently Sears was also carrying them for their Christmas only toy shelves (remember when they did that for Christmas and had barely anything the rest of the year?) while being available in Europe under the Energon banner. So how does this set fare?

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The Non-Fiction Book Stack

old picture

Last week I cleaned up one of the bottom shelves, but I was hoping to get two of them done. It turned out the one shelf was more work than planned. It might be because of my condition lately or that there was more stuff there than I realized but regardless it meant doing the other shelf this week. I stacked this well enough the last time I went over all my books but somehow it ended up in a mess. I don’t even remember how. They were decent enough stacks. Maybe they fell over while I was doing something else? At any rate this week I wanted to turn this…

new picture

…into something closer to the first picture. No, I can’t figure out how it got all messed up. The point is it did and I want to do it over.

Cleaning To Find A Particular Case

The Transformer reviews will resume in a few weeks but I had an actual project this week. My dad was doing a little clutter organizing of his own this week and came across a bunch of photos. I was sure I had taken a similar picture of one photo in particular but I can’t find that photo album. I thought I would check old Clutter Reports to see if I could find it, but I found something else instead, the case in the lower right of this photo. It’s one I’ve been trying to find recently so now I knew where it was. The problem is that area looked like this.

For reasons I can’t explain trying to do one project led to clutter ending up in another area and there are times I remember just how big a project this is. So this week I decided to clean this area up not only to find my case but because it looked like crap. Thus was my mission this week.

Transformers Report: Universe Night Slash Cheetor

Cheetor didn’t fare too well in the Beast Machines series. His original toy has standing issues but many fans complained that he didn’t quite look like he did on the show. Of course the toys are usually designed first (except for maybe the Michael Bay movies and Transformers Animated) so that didn’t bother me and I could work around a lot of the legs issues so I actually like him. Still Hasbro decided to try again in the Battle For The Spark subline, where pressing the spark crystal activated certain gimmicks with each figure. For this subline Cheetor got his “Night Slash” version, a ground-up redesign in a smaller size class. (The original was a “Mega”, with a terrible “Supreme” size made that I never got and I hear I’m better off for it. The thing was as big as a house cat. Now that would take up a lot of space.)

For the Universe line Night Slash Cheetor was brought back and given a less nighttime color scheme, something closer to the colors of an actual cheetah. This is the version I own since I already had a Beast Machines Cheetor and even then I was starting to scale back slightly in my collecting. So how does this version fare?