Reveal the Shield
Lugnut
Ah, Transformers Animated (TFA).
Fan boys may hate it for its heavily Anime-inspired style and obvious targeting of a younger audience, but you couldn’t deny the appeal of the TFA toyline. The Deluxe Class toys, like the fantastically designed Blurr, got a lot of the attention, but my favorites were from the Voyager size class. Blitzwing and Wreck-Gar were both excellent examples of fun toys with excellent sculpting and some innocuous action features, and despite his cost, so was Black Out.
The beauty of the line was that the character models for the cartoon were designed alongside the toys that kids eventually saw on shelves. This was totally different from the approach of the Generation 1 (G1), which took Japanese toys from disparate lines and incorporated them all into one continuity. Obviously, the result was far from stylistically coherent. Not one of the toys from the old G1 series had more than a passing resemblance to their on screen counterpart.
Though the cartoon and its toy line were short lived, it did have a measure of success. The new cartoon, Transformers: Prime, still shares the anime aesthetic and the extended human cast. Several of the characters have also made it out of the TFA continuity and broken into other sub-lines. Black Out was seen in the lineup for the first movie, and TFA Lockdown got an upgrade to join the Return of the Fallen line.
Lugnut is the latest TFA character to get the Generations/Classics treatment.
According to the biography on the side of the box, Lugnut is as dumb as a stump. If you ask me, being in charge of “gravity generators” that “spawn point singularities on impact” should certainly require some kind of degree, but apparently, our Decepticon friends aren’t so picky.
He’s packaged in robot form, which is a welcome thing. When Hasbro packed these things in their vehicle form, we always ended up with a box that was 2 times too big for the toy it housed. Allowing for wing spans, or tails, or gun barrels really made the required box size much bigger than necessary. Thankfully, the robot forms aren’t all that different in height or depth, so things can still be reduced while remaining standardized. There’s also less room for shifting, so I’ve seen less broken toys with these new packages.
After cutting away a few paper strings holding him in place, our friendly neighborhood atom smasher is free to lay waste to your desktop.
To read more about Lugnut click HERE.
