Upon coming back to this blog and looking through the last series of posts, I’m actually amazed I never took the time to sit down and chronicle what had to be one of my biggest successes as a collector in my history.
Finding and purchasing a set of carded G2 Stunticons.
In fact, I had to go back and SCOUR my photo stream to even find pictures of these guys.
Which is strange, right? Why didn't I take the time to properly document them, even if I wasn't going to post it here?
I think, somewhere, I always meant to. And in everything else that was happening it just got...forgotten.
I mean…obtaining the G2 Stunticons had been a goal of mine forever. I recall first seeing a set owned by the Hartmans sometime in the early 2000’s. I also remember learning that there weren’t more than maybe ten or fifteen of each figure available, other than Breakdown, obviously. And that told me I would never own them.
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| This picture started it all. |
I even recall watching a few eBay auctions in the early 2010s where the figures sold for between $2000-$3000 apiece.
And then of course there is the infamous $30,000 auction for all five figures, including the incredibly rare G2 Motormaster, though all those pieces were loose. Yet they DID include the combiner parts, with the exception of Menasor’s head, I believe.
By then, I had written the whole thing off. There was no way I could spend that kind of money on FOUR figures. However I had managed to procure a G2 Breakdown around 2015. I can’t remember the exact circumstances of where I bought it, but I know it wasn’t one of the Botcon versions, because it didn’t have the sticker covering up the other stunticonson the back.
It was also missing the sticker from FX95, which meant it had to be one of the unreleased prototypes, right?
At least, that’s what I told myself.
And I was happy with that!
But then a friend reached out to let me know someone had found a few sets. He was prepared to purchase one, another was spoken for, but he wanted to know if I wanted the third. (He also knew how much I loved the G2 figures.) And he was offering them at an amazing price.
Knowing there was no way I could pass something like this up, I jumped on it. And a month later, I had four unreleased, insanely rare, holy grail items in my hands.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Aren’t they glorious? They weren’t in what I’d call absolutely mint condition, but I really didn’t care. Just the fact I could hold and handle them was more than enough. And I was proud to display them on my shelves.
But the more I looked at them, the more I realized something was missing…
No packaging samples of G2 Motormaster exist. It’s generally accepted that the line was cancelled before the Leaders of both the Stunticons and Protectobots made it that far into production. So all that exists out there are loose samples, unlike the limbs.
But that didn’t sit right with me. And I just happened to have copies of both Onslaught and Silverbolt in G2 packaging that I could use as a template. Not only that, but it had been a few years since I'd flexed my graphic design muscles (having used them most prominently for Charticon's exclusives) and I was itching to find a new challenge.
So I spent a solid month designing a G2 Motormaster card from scratch, exactly as it would have appeared had it ever been created. I used Onslaught’s card as a base, and scanned in a high-res G2 Motormaster art from the Transformers LEGACY (The Art of Transformers Packaging) book.
It was painstaking work. But I think the end result was worth it. See what you think.
The sunburst image behind Motormaster gave me a little trouble, as did all those little windows. Trying to 1:1 replicate them was a task in itself. In the end, I had to settle for 95% good enough. That last 5% would have taken much too long.
But once the design was done, I reached out to a friend who could print and cut five of these for me. I figured I’d send two to the people who made the Stunticons happen for me, as it was the least I could do. You’ll notice I even had them cut out where Motormaster would have been in vehicle mode had he been released in the clamshell.
All in all, I had a blast making the card. And honestly, the quality is good enough to pass as the real thing. As close as we’ll ever get, though.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. When I decided to sell off my collection, I ended up keeping the Stunticons for a while, along with my AFA figures. But circumstances at the time told me that selling them was the better move. Would I have preferred to keep them? Definitely. But sometimes we don’t always get what we want.
In the end they went to a fellow collector in Tennessee and given he drove all night to pick them up, I know they ended up in good hands.
All in all, I am grateful that they were part of my collection for a time. In many ways, they represented the pinnacle of Transformer collecting in my eyes. And I think, may have inadvertently contributed to me selling everything off.
Because once you find the rarest of the rare, what else is there?
That’s what I’m on a journey to find out.
See also:
Generation 2 Laser Cycle Soundwave
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