#55: Hosehead (1988)

Hosehead, like all of the small Headmasters of 1988, hardly got any fiction. This was mainly because by the time he came around, the cartoon had been finished for a number of months, and the comics were focusing on the bigger Powermaster toys of the period. If you want to see cartoons of the toy, you have to go to Japan and Masterforce, but that's a completely different character. A really whiny character.

Hosehead himself didn't fare too badly in the comics though, it would seem, gaining an origin story of sorts, and even joining with Siren and Nightbeat to defeat the Creation Matrix powered Deathbringer, setting off soon after on the Matrix Quest to find the said Maguffin to destroy the planet-eater, Unicron. Hosehead helped defeat the Matrix infused Thunderwing, before being transported to Cyberton to fight Unicron. Sadly, although Unicron was eventually defeated, Hosehead wasn't one of the survivors, his wreckage being shown as part of the 'this planet is screwed' montage.

In the IDWverse he is still alive (as far as I know); he just hasn't really done anything yet.

I like the Headmaster Jr (as they were known in Japan) toys. They're not as good as their larger counterparts from a year earlier, but they certainly have their charm, and they're cleverly put together. I like the way that their helmets (arf) become the chairs for their Nebulan partners, and I like the fact that they transform into rescue vehicles instead of the Cybertronian forms that had previously been the norm. These are toys that I definitely want to own sometime, because they're kind of awesome.

Hosehead, like Kickback, suffers from third wheel syndrome; in this case Siren suffered from it too. Nightbeat was the star of this set, mainly because Simon Furman loved the fact that he was a bit of a gumshoe. Hosehead couldn't compete, being a fireman. I suppose he could have written him as a character from London's Burning, but...well, that would just be silly.