#42: Blurr (1986)

At the time of writing, Blurr is the only one of the trifecta of Hot Rod, Kup and Blurr that I don't own, in G1 terms, anyway. I always did want to own a Blurr, though. My schoolmate Jeremy had one, and I was always very jealous. I loved Blurr's character from his Tech Spec bio, that he was a courier, a messenger, and not so much a fighter. I have to admit though, his motto sucked a little bit.

Blurr was an ever-present in the G1 cartoon from the movie onwards. His introduction was, like many of the 'new toy' characters a case of 'He's been here all along! Did you not notice him? No? Losers...' which was suitably brief and to the point. Blurr even had a storyline all to himself in 'Five Faces of Darkness', the post-movie miniseries that continued on from where the movie had left off. Blurr was definitely a big part of the new order in the Transformers universe. True, he never really did anything of worth or even note apart from talk fast like that guy from the Micro Machines ad (mainly because they were the same person, natch), but he was always there, and that's what counts.

In the comics, it was very much the same story. He was there, and he did stuff. Nothing that was particularly noteworthy, unless you count being slaughtered by Galvatron and being decapitated. Mind you, that timeline ended up not having ever happened, of course. In the UK comics at least, Blurr was around quite a bit, Simon Furman utilising pretty much the whole movie cast in lieu of having lots and lots of US material to play with - this was actually manna from heaven for Furman, because he could use the movie characters and not have to worry about messing up the US continuity, which took precedent. Blurr therefore turned up in lots of the UK-produced tomes, and is possibly better loved in the UK for it.

Blurr's toy is pretty standard for the era - not very articulated, transforms into a Cybertronic vehicle that doesn't really look like anything and could therefore BE anything, and is therefore cool. To me, anyways. I think that's just envy again. Seriously, I would have done anything for this toy in 1986. I always liked Blurr's colour scheme, too. Mainly for the fact that there's about a million shades of blue in there. There's a crappy fanfic BDSM book joke in there somewhere.

Blurr holds of a lot of happy memories for me. Mainly of the early 90's, watching Transformers: The Movie with my mate Andy, who also owned some of the Transformers VHS tapes with season 3 stuff on them. Plus, the UK Marvel comics where he featured heavily, and where I first started to love comic books as much as I do now. So, thanks Blurr. Even if you ended up being nothing more than a secretary in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon.