If Jetfire is the holy grail of my collection, Devastator is perhaps King Tut’s Gold Death Mask.

Devastator was the first of the “combiner” transformers: individual robots that combine together into a single large robot à la Voltron. Devastator is made up of 6 Constructicons, construction vehicles that transform to robots.

Hook was nearly impossible to find, being both the coolest and necessary for attaching the other five; I had slowly amassed all 5 but could never find Hook. When I finally found him I simply had no choice but to buy him. If only we had the internet in the 1980s.

Hasbro unleashed several more combiner sets after Devastator, but in my opinion Devastator was the best. Each Constructicon had more detail and slightly more complicated transformations than later combiner sets, and the later sets only used 5 robots, one of which was always a larger robot that formed the torso. The 6 constituent Constructicons were all the same size.

As I unpacked my Transformers to display them, I was surprised at how many full sets of combiners I had. I was disappointed to find that I had fewer first generation Transformers than I had thought, but having these full sets of combiners somehow made up for that.

When my brother went to college, he gave me all of his Transformers. Pretty cool, huh? That’s where I got the Combaticons who form Bruticus.

Here are the lamely-named Protectobots who form Defensor.

The next lamely-named combiner set is the Technobots who form Computron.

Superion (the Aerialbots). Not such a bad name, I guess. One of the few examples of Autobot jet aircraft. This is the only set that I bought together in a box.

Predaking is perhaps the lamest of the combiner Transformers. While the big combined robot is ok, each component is a joke and far too expensive. I remember buying all 5 members of Predaking and feeling completely ripped off. Transformers had evolved from really cool, die cast metal licensed versions of real vehicles with complicated robot transformations to asinine plastic approximations of animals with simplistic robot transformations.

Unfortunately, my collection consists mostly of the latter, and as I unpacked my Transformers I felt sad and more than a little bit betrayed that I had wasted so much money on a product line whose quality had nosedived. When I get around to showing my Optimus Prime, I’ll show you exactly what I’m talking about.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed my early sets of combiners.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 10:09 and is filed under Transformers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.