The big bad guy gets a great, if not especially big, update. Generations Thunderwing!

Of the Transformers that I originally had, the ones that I miss the most come from the later years. Thanks to reissues I have managed to reacquire a majority of the early stuff that I originally had.

However, we don’t see reissues of things like the Pretenders. I had a good portion of them, including Bludgeon, Crossblades, and the original Thunderwing. Now, thanks to various appearances in comics, both Bludgeon and Thunderwing fetch stupidly ridiculous prices on the dreaded secondary market. I miss having Thunderwing in my collection, but certainly not $260 worth. Hasbro feels my pain (or at least I’d like to think so), so they did the best they could with the Deluxes-only mandate for the Generations line and gave this guy an update.

Like Bludgeon, Thunderwing has lost his Pretender capabilities — the original benefit of which was pretty ill-defined to begin with — but gained an awesome amount of detailing and articulation.

This whole figure is worth it just for that chest detailing and headsculpt with its ominous lightpiping. .

However, G1 Thunderwing was a Mega Pretender, therefore his shell could also transform and his inner robot’s alt mode was able to attach to the front.

Taking this into account and, once again, working within the constraints of the deluxe class, Generations Thunderwing quite brilliantly has a detachable drone attached to the front of his alt mode that looks like a miniaturized version of his G1 inner robot’s alt mode.

Even the tiny drone is full of detailing.

Though a lot of people decry his small size — it seems that every time he makes a new comic book appearance, he becomes larger and larger — I for one am glad that Hasbro chose to update him. It may not completely fill the hole of my missing G1 Thunderwing, but it certainly gives a pretty grand update to this pretty grandiose, matrix obsessed villain.