Construction Vehicles

The Constructicons are drawn from the standard vocabulary of a 1980s building site rather than from specific models. Scrapper is a front-end loader, Bonecrusher a bulldozer, Scavenger a tracked excavator, Mixmaster a truck-mounted concrete mixer, Hook a mobile crane and Long Haul an articulated dump truck. Real machines of this type came from Caterpillar, Komatsu, Liebherr and Terex, and the toys deliberately generalise: no maker's silhouette is copied closely, and the liveries are the Decepticon green and purple rather than any manufacturer's colours.

That generalisation is why the combiner works. Six machines of roughly compatible bulk can share a joint standard, and Takara used that to build Devastator, the first combined Transformer, with Hook as torso, Bonecrusher and Scavenger as arms, Long Haul and Mixmaster as legs and Scrapper providing the chest. The fiction made them the Decepticons' engineers, the ones who build Megatron's schemes, and later gave them a grim backstory as reprogrammed Autobot workers.

The toys are small and chunky with a lot of shared architecture, and the combined figure is famously top-heavy. Devastator's arrival in 1985 changed the line's economics permanently: it proved that six inexpensive figures could be sold as a seventh premium one, and every Combiner team from the Aerialbots to the Predacons follows the template.

Diaclone 'Construction Vehicle Robo' (Takara, 1983 to 1984), a six-machine set that combined into 'Construction Robo', sold in a yellow-and-red scheme in 1983 and revised decos in 1984, some predominantly blue. Devastator is the same combination renamed.

Fan lore about these vehicles is unusually unreliable. Where a popular claim does not survive checking, it is recorded here rather than repeated.

• The exact Diaclone release sequence and colour assignments for 1983 versus 1984 vary between collector sources.