Game Show Board Games: Concentration (14th edition, 1970) and Classic Concentration (1988)

I've been enjoying watching (and re-watching) some of my favorite classic game shows on the 2-year old Buzzr network. If I have any complaints about the network at all, it is the simple fact that, although they theoretically have access to the entire FremantleMedia library of shows (reportedly over 40,000 episodes worth), the actual content shown rotates through a tiny fraction of that, which repeats more-or-less monthly (with occasional refreshes a couple of times a year). Naturally, this means that fans regularly ask Buzzr to air shows not currently available on the network. Concentration is one of these frequently-suggested shows.

Generations GDO Wheelie (2012)

Poor Wheelie just never gets any respect. From pretty much the moment he first appeared in the 1986 animated Transformers movie, he's been considered a joke to many fans. Admittedly, with his penchant for speaking in rhyme for absolutely every little thing, Wheelie made himself a target pretty much immediately, and attempts to use the character in (English-language) fiction over the years have had mixed success with the concept, at best.^* It may thus come as a surprise to learn that Wheelie's 2012 toy (only the third distinct mold to be used for the character in over 25 years) was actually in high demand.

Cloudburst (1988)

This past weekend, the first HasCon took place. It seemed to me that there were surprisingly few Transformers items revealed (and that's not even accounting for a well-publicized leak a few months ago), but one of the items that was was a tiny version of the G1 Pretender Cloudburst, which will host a "Prime Master" version of Micronus, one of the "Primes" for which the upcoming Power of the Primes line is named. This seems a good time to feature the original Cloudburst. Although I've featured Pretenders a few times on this blog in the past, I have never yet featured any of the first wave of Pretenders to be released, and doing so with Cloudburst offers an opportunity to demonstrate how the concept evolved over time.

Action Master Elite Double Punch (1991)

As is well-understood by nearly all Transformers fans who've ever heard of them, Action Masters were Transformers that didn't transform.

Except for the ones that did.

While 1990, the year the Action Masters were released, was the last year of the original Transformers toyline in the United States (they would return by 1993 as Generation Two), the Transformers line never stopped in other parts of the world. Notably, in Europe and parts of Australasia, Action Masters were released for a second straight year, including both repaints of molds released the previous year and totally new molds. Four of these new molds formed an Action Master sub-line: "Elites."

Transformers Collectors' Club Double Pretender Optimus Prime (2017)

Transformers Collectors Club exclusives can be described as coming in one of three different flavors: 1) a new character, never before seen, 2) a new form for a well-known character, or 3) a reference to an obscure character or concept. I suppose one could say the same about all Transformers figures, but it remains a convenient way to discuss exclusives. Oddly enough, the Transformers Figure Subscription Service (TFSS) 5.0 Optimus Prime set actually straddles flavors 2 and 3.

Game Show Board Games: Password Plus (2nd edition, 1979)

Five years ago, when I did a feature on the board game version of the original Password, I promised to do a future post on Password Plus. I didn't expect to take five years getting to it, much less to have moved to a new blog in the meantime, but the future is finally here!

That Time I Found The Quadrovelocipede from Legend

When most people hear that I'm a fan of Legend, they think I'm talking about something else. I can't really blame them. My version of Legend only lasted for 12 episodes, which first aired more than 20 years ago, on a network that no longer exists. The show is all-but forgotten. Indeed, although it was (amazingly) released on DVD last year, they had to change the theme music and some other musical cues for legal reasons, and I doubt it's sold especially well (Indeed, my search when I originally sought to provide a direct link was found on the ninth page of search results for the name "Legend" on Barnes and Noble, after already filtering for "Movies and TV," under the "Top Results" sorting!). So I don't really expect people to quite understand how it is that the impossible happened last week. But first, some context.