Transformers: Prime ARCEE!

Three New Figures of Arcee from the CGI hit Transformers: Prime by Hasbro

She's back and bluer than ever.  The most popular fembot in all of geekdom gets a total redesign for the Hub's new action-packed CGI series Transformers: Prime, and much to everyone's surprize, there are already THREE versions of this incarnation in plastic.  Did I mention this series has only been on the air for a little over a year?  It's impressive that Hasbro is including her in the initial waves of all of the toy lines, but it just makes it all the more baffling that they never produced a classic G1 Arcee like fans have been begging for.  They clearly understand the popularity of the character.  My bet is that the Hasbro execs can't risk putting a pink toy in the boy aisle... which is ridiculous, but I almost guarantee that's the case.  If she had to be redesigned in boy colors to get these figures, then it was worth it, because these are some of the nicest fembots I have ever seen.

Mattel's Women of WWE!

The Badass Women of World Wrestling Entertainment by Mattel

I have both fond and frightening memories of female entertainment wrestling.  These are all centered around G.L.O.W., the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling which crept into my television watching schedule in the late 80's to both fascinate and scar me.  It doesn't help matters that my most prominent mental image of this show was an outrageously made-up Mimi-Bobeck-type character that would grab her opponents legs and bite them.  It seemed like American Gladiators on acid, but that didn't stop me from tuning in for more.  A few years ago I started noticing a great explosion in the quantity and quality of wrestling figures in the toy aisles.  I'm not quite sure why the popularity increased, but I quickly realized that Mattel had acquired the toy license from Jakks Pacific and the female figures suddenly looked amazing.  I'm not a fan of wrestling, but these figures really appealed to me and over time I found myself owning four tough little ladies.

The Women of STARTING LINEUP! (Part One)

Flo-Jo & Jackie Joyner-Kersee - Starting Lineup: Timeless Legends - 1996 Kenner

I've always had a certain level of contempt for Starting Lineup toys.  I grew up in the 80's watching all my local comic book shops be slowly taken over by sports cards (and the collectors that came along with them).  Then in 1988 the toy aisles started to fill up with these wildly popular sports action figures.  It wasn't fair!  Sure, it was cool that suddenly collecting toys wasn't exactly the geekiest thing in the world anymore, but the sheer real estate of the action figure aisles was precious in those days and these stactions took up valuable space!  I felt like I was getting bullied out of new superhero toys by little plastic football players.  Grrrr... Well, needless to say I became a much more open-minded and accepting person later in life, and now I can appreciate my former angst in a purely nostalgic way.  But I still didn't like Starting Lineup.  Then I discovered that it wasn't quite the boys club I had always assumed it to be.  In fact, they produced Eight female athletes over the years.  The hunt was on.