Who needs time travel when you have plastic injection molding machines and 25 year old toy molds

There's this one antique store here in Rapid City that I like visiting because their definition of antique covers everything from early 1900's furniture to Harry Potter toothbrushes. They occasionally have stuff I'm into like old Star Wars and Robo Force and even Shogun Warriors figures. But I never in the three years I have lived here seen this or any other antique store with a single piece of Transformers merchandise. That was, until last week when to my amazement I found an Ultra Magnus soap dish on sale for $2. In other cities I've lived they have toy shows at least once a month and I'd usually laugh at something like this but here in Dakota del Sur, Ultra Magnus soap dish is equivalent to finding an Arby's on Cybertron. I thought that's about as lucky as I would ever get in terms of Transformers on the South Dakotan secondary market but boy was I in for a surprise when I went downstairs in the antique store.



There he was, the most wonderful super perfect robot Jesus that has ever lived, reduced to sharing shelfspace alongside a giant smurf, a piggy bank that was shaped like a headphone wearing pig and a ceramic cocker spaniel. Optimus Prime amongst the toy animals was like a pop culture consumerist (per)version of the baby Jesus being born in the manger. In my house Prime gets put up on the high shelves in the fancy glass cabinets with little spotlights shining down on Him in the center position amongst all the other toy robots worshiping Him as He deserves to be worshiped. So it struck me as odd that the antique store would not pay him the same reverence, even if this was only his Generation 2 incarnation. Still, it is Optimus Prime and if the antique store people had any flair for presentation they'd at least put him up on the shelf with the more respected antiques like the talking Mister T doll and the Empire Strikes Back drinking glasses from Burger King.

The antique store wanted twenty bucks for their G2 Prime and that would be great if it WASN'T missing everything except Roller and the sound box. If I saw this same thing at a garage sale I wouldn't pay over 12. I thought it was funny that even this inflated asking price was a bargain compared to what Hasbro expects people to pay when they re-release Optimus this Thanksgiving. At Botcon it was announced the 25th anniversary Optimus would have an MSRP of $69.99. It made me laugh because I remember getting irked when some podcaster guy reminisced incorrectly about Optimus Prime costing $60 back in the eighties. At first I thought he was an idiot, but now I realize that podcaster guy was a fuckin' prophet.

The 25th anniversary reissue comes with a DVD of the first three episodes of the old cartoon and a reprint of the first comic. In other words, recreations of all the things that started my life down the road to financial ruin and made me the robotarded societal outcast I am today. I get the feeling that Hasbro is waging some kind of war against me trying to get on with my life and be a productive contributing member of society. They may as well throw in a cassette copy of Iron Maiden's "Somewhere in Time" and an issue of Playboy from '88 and call it the "My wasted, wasted teenage years giftset".

Well it ain't gonna work this time. I am totally immune to their attempts to get me to rebuy yet again the most overhyped, overproduced overrated robot ever. I'm tired of the retreading this guy keeps getting, from the '93 G2 release to the '02 TRU rerelease to Pepsi Prime last year and all the multiple reissues this thing has gotten in Japan over the last 8 years. Doesn't it ever get old? I'm getting so tired of this that it's getting to the point that Optimus Prime is what I think about during sex to make it last longer. I should go to Wal-Mart and spray paint "BREAK OPEN IN CASE OF ERECTION" in big blocky Army letters on every last one of the damned things.