I realize now that this is probably going to give away what the rest of this week is. But that’s okay.
Unite Warriors was how Takara dealt with Combiner Wars. While there was a lot of duplication of characters and teams offered by Hasbro, being pre-Brand Unity, Takara was still doing Takara things and offering different characters and wacky ideas. As well as things like developing whole new molds and retools for other existing characters. I really ought to give some attention to Unite Warriors Computron at some point, come to think of it…
But arguably the best piece of conceptual work that Unite Warriors produced was the Grand Galvatron set. This was the first of two completely made up combiner teams by TakaraTomy; the second would come several months later in the form of Megatronia. It has some really crazy character choices, such as today’s focus, Curse Armada Thrust.
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This is a redeco of one of the Aerialbots, featuring a previously unseen head sculpt. The head is not newly made for this release, it’s merely an existing alternate on the tooling that never got put to use otherwise. But someone at the design phase was thinking ahead to the possibility of making Combiner Wars Seekers, and so a Conehead-based sculpt was bundled in. Otherwise, this just maps Armada Thrust’s deco to the toy, which is more effective than one might expect.
The intent is for this to truly be the same character as Armada Thrust, through universe-hopping shenanigans or something. I guess along the way – or maybe as a result of being adjusted to be a combiner component – Thrust got hands and a full face. In truth that’s probably the worst aspect of this making use of a pre-existing head tooling, since even just having the plated face of the Armada toy would have helped to seal the visual identity much better. But I guess I’m nitpicking a bit.
It’s a fun idea in any case, that Thrust got plucked from another universe and conscripted in to being part of a combiner team of mismatched misfits in a G1-adjacent continuity. It brought a surprisingly nice looking deco on what was already a mold feeling reuse fatigue, and made the whole notion surprisingly desirable!
I guess I can’t just say “what will be tomorrow in Photober,” since it’s probably obvious generally where this week is going, so let’s try this instead: Which part of the Grand Galvatron team is up next? Come back tomorrow on Photober The 6th and find out!