Listicle: Top Five Non-Transforming Toys of Twenty Ninteen

And now we come to the last list of the set – the one that’s for all the stuff that was awesome in 2019 that ISN’T some kind of transforming toy. There’s a lot of neat stuff that came out, and plenty of things that I’m going to highlight here and there. Bandai, GoodSmile, Hasbro… between the three of them (and other companies of course) there’s so much cool stuff that came out.

So one last time, ZE GROUND RULES, and then the list.

Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2019. A preorder does not count as a purchase in this case; purchase means it’s available to buy now.

Toy does not have to have been released in 2019 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year

Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

I will say too that the “received in the calendar year of 2019” was a big limiter on this list. As there’s a bunch of tail end of 2019 figures that I didn’t get until 2020 that would have been contenders to make it onto this list.

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Listicle: Top Five Unlicensed Transforming Toys of Twenty Nineteen

Time for another one of these list things! This time, it being all of the various awesome unlicensed transforming toys made by companies that aren’t official by any means, but are (most of the time) of pre-existing characters. This list is honestly always one of the hardest ones to make, because of how many outstanding expensive entries there are in this field every year.

Interestingly, the hard part was once I got OUT of the top three. Those were pretty definitively set in stone as soon as I got those respective figures, which meant that it got HYPER competitive in all the other slots. I left out a lot of really good figures that I loved this year, like the X-Transbots G2 Stunticons and all of NewAge’s 2019 output, to name a few examples.

Like the official list, this one has ground rules too.

  • Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2019
  • Toy does not have to have been released in 2019 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year
  • Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

And with those out of the way – onto the list proper.

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Listicle: Top Five Transformers of Twenty Nineteen

Oh hey! Another post! One of those things I rarely do!

This one being yet another listicle – like I did about a year ago, it’s time for another Top Five (plus one) post of the Transformers that I enjoyed the most from last year. This doesn’t necessarily mean I think they were the Absolute Objective Best of the year – there were a LOT of great toys after all – but these official Transformers releases (Hasbro & TakaraTomy) were all were among my favorites and are of note.

As for the ground rules for this list:

  • Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2019
  • Toy does not have to have been released in 2019 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year
  • Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

And with that said, I guess I’ll start with the list, then…

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Quickie Review Photodump: Planet X Triton

Or, well, PADDLES!

To provide a super quickie history course… Paddles is the sixth Dinobot. From a UK short story collection. Who turns into, well, not Champ. Not Nessie. But OGO. POGO. A Plesiosaur.

A ****ING PLESIOSAUR
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Quickie Review Photodump: MP-10 SG Optimus Prime

Or, should I say, Masterpiece Akane Shinjo.

This next Kaiju’s gonna light our darkest hour!

This was one of those figures I had no interest in, really. And then within an episode of Studio TRIGGER’s “SSSS Gridman” premiering, everyone realized that virtually all the characters in the cast were stealth Transformers homages – mostly of the Shattered Glass variety. And the main antagonist, who was awesome in her own right (seriously, what a fantastically realized character) was SG Optimus Prime.

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