So recently I said something here about how I had put Kickback in my shopping cart a while ago, but I couldn't quite bring myself to spend $30 on him. I realized I had better just do it, because these things won't be available forever... and I discovered to my utter horror that Hasbro Pulse was sold out. In fact, every online retailer was sold out. Well, after a very minor #FOMO panic attack, I managed to find an eBay auction where the seller was offering him for slightly less than MSRP. With tax and shipping I ended up spending like a dollar more than I would have through Hasbro Pulse. Indecision tax, one supposes.

But, the important thing is that I have a new toy to add to my collection, and something to talk about for a little bit.

(As an aside, I really don't have a proper place to put my G1 retro reissues. I already have regular-colored versions of Hound, Thundercracker, etc. on my G1 shelves, so obviously they can't go there. For now, I have them on the bottom shelf of my Detolf cabinet for 1990 toys, living on the bottom floor beneath my incomplete set of Micromasters and Action Masters. It's kind of interesting from an academic perspective how the toys run the gamut from movie characters to Headmasters to Pretenders and everything before finally coming full circle. But, the vintage G1 collection continues to swell and grow, and there won't be room for these interlopers forever...)

So, Kickback comes in a box which uses the same background artwork as Shrapnel, with the entrance to Autobot City displayed prominently and a visible hole chewed into the fortification. (I wonder if they'll do the sam thing for Bombshell, even though he didn't actually take part in the door-chewing scene, and indeed, hardly did anything in The Transformers: the Movie at all. We all talk about how Snarl disappears for most of the movie, but Bombshell manages to get turned into Cyclonus without ever having to lift a mandible...)

Like Shrapnel, the toy is mostly a dark charcoal grey, not the classic G1 black, and as a result is slightly closer to his cartoon appearance. In grasshopper mode, Kickback was designed to resemble an insect but is also a Diaclone vehicle, complete with cockpit and wheels. The wheels were retained as part of his design, but the front wheel is now purple to more closely match his front insect legs. Inexplicably, the back wheels are still black, despite his rear insect legs also being purple. As a retro reissue, the toy has no factory- or consumer-applied stickers, but the cleaner look is more consistent with his animated appearance. He has a big Decepticon symbol on the top of his grasshopper head, which is correct to the placement in the show.

The wings are painted a metallic silver this time instead of vac-metal chrome. They're the same wings we got the last time the Insecticons were reissued as a Toys "R" Us exclusive, with the pointed Diaclone wing tips rather than the rounded nubby versions that Hasbro created in 1984 (back in the day, they did the same to Swoop's beak and tail). So, it's more authentic to the way the toy was originally designed by Takara, and it's closer to the way he actually looks on the show. He does have the square-shaped spot for the heat-sensitive rub symbol on his left wing, but it remains undecorated. The screws in his grasshoppper shoulders and hips are also painted black now, which helps to hide them a bit. This was not done for the metal rivets holding together his front grasshopper legs, so they're still visibly silver.

Transforming him is the same, of course, and will be familiar to anyone who bought the Legacy toy, which was based directly on this design. And, it's weird. I'm very familiar with G1 Kickback, because I've owned the toy for 39 years, and yet it feels exceptionally small. Pretty much every modern Transformers toy has been scaled up, compared to the G1 release, so I think that when I see a toy in these modern colors, I expect it to be bigger. He's not even four inches tall at the head, and then I suddenly remember why I wasn't too keen on paying $30 for a G.I. Joe sized figure. But, these are the things we do when we love to do the things we do.

As a robot, he has a silver face, red-painted eyes (the bridge of his nose is also painted to give him the visor-shaped eyes he's got in the show, rather than the triangle-shaped eyes that are actually part of the G1 head sculpt). He's got a tiny Decepticon symbol on the top of his chest, just above the yellow chest door, which is correct for the Sunbow animation.

Robot mode doesn't have much in the way of articulation, certainly. It's not zero, which already puts him ahead of a number of vintage G1 toys. His arms move at the shoulders, his elbows can bend slightly if you pretend that they're a single joint instead of two different hinge joints moving in tandem, his head rotates as required for the transformation, and his legs move at the hips. That's actually above par for the time period. He has claws instead of hands (he's got Brawn envy) and his rifle slips over his claw, G1 Aerialbot-style, in lieu of him actually holding it.

I think there might have been a mold change made to his antennas. On every other copy of this toy I've ever owned (and I collect Insecticons as armybuilders when it's affordable, so I have a few), the antennas on his head can swivel freely. On this toy, they seem to be locked in place to an extent, and while they can swing down towards his face, they cannot swing back any father than the upright most position in robot mode. He can't pull a Babs Bunny and ask, "Do you like my ears up, or down?" is what I'm saying. But, I'm not certain if it's the result of mold flash impeding the movement of the joint, or whether it was done deliberately. Dismantling him seems like a lot of work, and I don't want to break him trying to force the joint, so it will forever remain a mystery. It does seem odd if they did this deliberately, since it actually makes the toy MORE fragile than before. The antennas will snap instead of simply moving back.

Like Shrapnel, he comes with six pink, rubbery energon cubes. One of them will fit in the cockpit in his chest ("big deal... big spender!") and the rest can sit in a pile on the floor to be stolen by an invisible Mirage at an unspecified future date. They're arguably too small to represent the energon cubes from the cartoon (which were the size of Soundwave's chest window) but of course they need to be able to fit into the Insecticon chest compartments, so this is the size we get.

Also, when I was first examining him, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be funny if they also painted his back yellow?" and then I flipped him around and saw that they did, indeed, paint his back yellow. It's almost certainly a mistake made canon when they were creating his color model, but I love that somebody at Hasbro did the research and included it. (When they do Bombshell, I really wonder if they're going to make his die-cast parts purple or grey. One will be correct for robot mode, but the other will be correct for insect mode... Hmm...)

So, this is defintiely not a thirty-dollar toy. I have Voyager-class Blaster on my desk right now, who is like three times the mass of Kickback. That's a toy I was okay paying $30 for. The asking price on the Insecticons is just insane. If you figure the Insecticons retailed for about $5.99 back in 1985, then in 2024, the same toys should be selling for $18, at most, after you factor inflation into account. (The three-pack of Insecticons from Toys "R" Us sold for around $60, as I recall.) So, this is absolutely highway robbery. But, I guess you get some energon cubes, so that's something.

The number of retro reissues we could realistically get is probably dwindling. There are a lot of good toys that have never been officially reissued. We're never going to get retro reissue Dinobots, for example, unless Hasbro and/or Takara wants to foot the expense of rebuilding the molds from the ground up. It might not be the best investment of their time and resources, if we're being fair. For the same reason, we're not likely to ever get Wheeljack or Sunstreaker or Mirage. Also, we seem to be artifically limited even more by characters who actually appear in The Transformers: the Movie, which means some characters could stand to benefit from this treatment that we might never see, like Bluestreak or Red Alert. But, with that said, I wouldn't hate the idea of getting a retro cartoon version of, say, Jazz or Astrotrain or Kup. The truth is that I'm a sucker and will probably buy any of them that they care to produce.

Zob (seriously, once I get myself an Action Master Gutcruncher, all these retro unstarts are gonna get evicted from the Detolf)

Great review, Zob! As ever, I really enjoyed reading. :)

JB (also hoping that Kup, or maybe Blurr, gets this treatment someday ... )

I just so happen to have a G1 Kickback (who I very rarely pay any attention too, though he does have his gun which immediately makes him one of my better G1 toys), so I got a kick out of reading this review with that toy in hand and learning a bit about why he looks like he does. (Like the rounded wingtips being a Hasbro vs Takara thing.)

Velvet Glove (Mine also has snapped antennae... they don't appear to rotate at all, but I don't know if that's *because* they snapped or if that's *why* they snapped)

JosephBardsley wrote:

> JB (also hoping that Kup, or maybe Blurr, gets this treatment someday ... )

Blurr seems less likely to me, because I feel like if they had access to his mold, he would have gotten a rerelease a long time ago. I think we're probably at the stage where everybody who is going to realistically ever get a G1 reissue has probably already gotten one.

But, maybe I'm wrong, and we'll be pleasantly surprised. I'll bet nobody had Noizu or Guraphi reissues on their bingo card for 2019. Sometimes crazy things happen!

Zob