Dave's Movie TF Rant: Deluxe Wave 2 Arcee 2009 Bumblebee Dreadwing Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Movie/Deluxe2 This is actually the third wave, for those being strict about things. Also, to judge from the co-sells, this shipping wave has the three new toys plus re-ships of Bonecrusher, Wreckage, Swindle and Scorponok. I'm guessing there's either doubles of one new toy, or a fifth old toy in the case...and since Arcee was the only one I saw in stores initially, it seems reasonable to have had two Arcees in there. Update 8/24: Got Dreadwing thanks to Hachiman and found BB09 myself, rejiggered my estimates of the case assortment above. CAPSULES Arcee: Very nice vehicle mode, decent transformation (albeit similar to Energon Arcee), kinda fetished and ugly-faced robot mode. Pretty good overall for a motorcycle, though. Recommended. $9.96 at Wal-Mart. 2009 Bumblebee: Pretty good in both modes, lots of Automorph that's smooth and unintrusive. A good toy. Recommended. $9.96 at Wal-Mart. Dreadwing: This is kinda like the somewhat plain cousin at the family reunion. Nice enough, but overshadowed by the rest of the family. Not really that BAD, exactly, but.... Mildly recommended. $9.96 at Wal-Mart. RANTS Packaging: Same as with "wave" 1. Co-sells as mentioned above, comes with the "Ultimate Bumblebee" catalog version (described in my Robot Replicas wave 1 review). As before, there's no function or motto listed, so I provide my own (or use the mottos of previous versions where I feel they fit). AUTOBOT: ARCEE Altmode: Motorcycle Licensor: None Previous Name Use: Energon, Heroes of Cybertron G1, Sector 7 Movie Package Callouts: "Converting Crossbow!" "Firing projectile!" Function: Hunter Motto: "Fight or run away, the only difference is which side of you I fill with arrows!" ARCEE is a born hunter. Before joining the AUTOBOTS, she passed her time tracking turbofoxes on CYBERTRON with some of the other speedsters, taking great pride in approaching as close as she could to them, quickly and silently, before tagging htem with her bow. She's brought these skills with her to Earth, where she passes the days stalking unsuspecting DECEPTICONS until she draws close enough to strike. STR 8 INT 6 SPD 8 END 5 RNK 5 COUR 7 FRB 7 SKL 9 Avg 6.875 Definite Artemis vibe here...took 'em long enough, given how her previous mass-market iterations have been bow-users too. Also nice how they tied her into the G1 Mirage backstory. Packaging Notes: Two easily-removed twist-ties. No rubber bands, no blister deathgrip. Insert your own joke about Arcee being easily stripped out of her packaging. The missile is not packaged separately, it's in place as her exhaust pipe. Vehicle Mode: A generic street racer motorcycle, I don't know enough about crotch rockets to even start to guess at what the influences are (although I'll probably hear some guesses after I first post this!). Poking around a bit, it seems to me that it incorporates elements of various Suzuki street bikes like the SV1000S and the FXR150. [Update: Veloxiraptor notes that the original design sketches based her on the 2006 Buell Firebolt, it was later tweaked when the license didn't happen.] 5.5" (14cm) long with a 4" (10cm) wheelbase, it's somewhere around 1:12 to 1:16 scale (it looks a bit stretched compared to similar street bikes, hence my pushing the upper limit to 1:16). The wheels spin freely and the kickstand moves, but it's not jointed to be able to steer. As long as you position the kickstand carefully, it stays upright easily. [Later note: I looked at some 1:12 scale motorcycle toys, and they're all taller and beefier than Arcee, so she's probably a 'stretch' street bike closer to 1:16.] The dominant (if not majority) plastic color is a cool magenta (CC33FF) with a metallic sheen to it, with black as the secondary color of plastic. The windshield is a somewhat dark clear blue. There's magenta and black paint on various parts to blend the design, plus some dark silver accents. The wheelhubs are painted bronze metallic, and there's some stripes of that color on the flanks as well. The taillights are painted red, a silver Autobot symbol is printed on the top rear. On the right front bottom and the left top rear are printed "RC 1100" in white with silver borders. The license plate is for Massachussetts, with "TF" vertically along the left side in red, and the actual license number being 7407 (reference to the movie's originally planned release date, before it crept up to July 2). About the only robot kibble is the hands flanking the license plate. The missile is cleverly disguised as the exhaust pipe, and it can be loaded (at the back of the seat) for backfiring action. Loading the missile makes bowstaves extend from the sides, and pressing back on them (or pushing the intended firing button) makes it fire. Oops. The extended bow is 3.75" (9.5cm) wide. Transformation: Similar in many ways to Energon Arcee, actually. Torso from fuel tank, front wheel stuck in her back, flanks turning into legs, arms along the seat. However, her bow forms the seat top, and the rear wheel splits into C shapes rather than into thinner circles. Also, the gas tank has a covering panel that folds up into a spider-butt, so her robot chest isn't simply her gas tank top. The instructions aren't as clear as I'd like regarding where the wheel halves are supposed to go on her arms, but as far as I can tell from looking at them and at various pictures, the answer is "in the way". So I just leave them out to the sides rather than folding them down. Automorph: Well, the package says she has one. As best as I can figure, her bow staves emerging when you load the missile is the sum total of her Automorphing. Robot Mode: About 6" (15cm) tall on her high heels. The head, torso, thighs, forearms and bow are cool magneta plastic, the eyes are (badly) lightpiped dark blue, and the rest (including bow staves and missile) are black plastic. The paint and molding make it look like she's wearing a black corset with bronze and dark silver bits, with pretty significant cleavage resulting. Her motorcycle windshield and gastank cover fold into a bustle reminiscent of Beast Machines Blackarachnia's spider-butt. Her head is an odd mix of movie-ugly facial design and a sort of stylized hairdo of armor plates. Much of her faceplate is dark silver, but she has a black mustache and snout, plus a black bit in her "hair". Frankly, it's a head begging for kitbashing. At the very least, removal of the mustache. The head is on a balljoint atop a spindly neck that attaches to the torso with a hinge. The waist does not turn. Shoulders are ball joints attached to transformation hinges that allow some shrugging. The elbows are ball joints, the wrists are stiff hinges. The bow can be attached to either arm via the pegs used in vehicle mode, but is really meant to go on the left arm using a tab. The left hand needs to be folded in a bit to look like it's grabbing one of the pegs, or it can get in the way and make the bow pop off. Anyway, she can't really pose to look like she's drawing back a bowstring, it's purely a crossbow weapon. The hips are ball joints, the knees are hinges (a little hampered by a reverse joint for transformation) and the ankles are hinges. Despite their big mechanical looks, the feet are too small to support any sort of extreme pose, and the lack of swivels above or below the knees hurts that as well. Overall: Within the restrictions imposed by the motorcycle altmode, this does a pretty good job other than the fugly head. The robot mode is a tad fetishy, suggesting they're aiming at the older collectors here. :) AUTOBOT: BUMBLEBEE Altmode: 2009 Camaro Concept Licensor: GM Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Classic Package Callouts: "Cannon converts to blade!" Function: Bodyguard Motto: "Here in my car, I feel safest of all...." Before he came to Earth, BUMBLEBEE could have cared less about his appearance. As long as his alternate mode kept him hidden, and protected his plasma cannon from the weather, he was content. But not, on Earth, he has found friendship for the first time in as long as he can remember, in the person of Sam Witwicky. At Sam's urging, he scans a sweet new vehicle form. Now, he's still ready to fight to the end against the DECEPTICONS, but he sure hopes nothing too bad happens to his paint job. STR 6 INT 8 SPD 6 END 5 RNK 5 COUR 10 FRB 3 SKL 9 Avg 6.5 I think they mean "couldn't have cared less" in the first line. They confuse sarcasm with standard use. Also, it was Mikaela who prompted the upgrade, not Sam. Techspecs unchanged from the first version, and still fail to give props to his cannon, which seems capable of taking down Brawl. Packaging: One twist-tie, no rubber bands, no accessories. Vehicle Mode: 2009 Camaro Concept ("fifth generation" Camaro), which should hit showroom floors in 2008 (hence the "2008 Bumblebee" label it's gotten some places). 5.5" (14cm) long, making it about 1:34 scale. Most of the body shell is a golden yellow plastic. The doors, windshield (and a bit of the hood), rear windows and just the window parts of the rear side windows are clear blue plastic (they bolted in little triangles for those last ones). The tires are black plastic with silver on the wheel hubs. A very good paint match for the yellow plastic is used on the clear pieces. There's the expected black stripes, plus black on the grille. Silver Chevy emblem at the front (a similar molded one in back is not painted), silver headlights and foglamps, and silver exhaust pipe tips. There's raised "CAMARO" logos on the front fenders behind the wheels, painted silver. The taillights are red. Seams aren't a big problem, although they're visible, especially where a black paint mask doesn't go around an edge and there's yellow in the crack. The side mirrors are actually just winglike bits with no flat mirror surface. The license plate is molded, but not painted...expect that to be painted by just about every customizer. :) The wheels spin freely, and the doors open up, although there's just robot stuff inside. Trivia gleaned from Wiki, the actual car used in the movie was a Pontiac GTO mocked up to look like a fifth-gen Camaro, down to having fake brake rotors on the wheel covers. Transformation: Open the doors, pull the shoulders out, rotate the wings around, and then you can do the chest Automorph. Once that's done, just pull up the pectoral parts of the chest. The rest of the upper body is just fiddling with the arms and getting some panels in place. Pull the legs apart to drop out the solar cannon. Pulling down on the feet automorphs the legs, then you just need to tweak the toes. It's all pretty quick once you figure out what parts you shouldn't try to do manually. :) Automorph: He's loaded with it. Pulling down the front of the hood to become the chest makes the shoulders and other upper body stuff rotate into place. Pulling down the feet makes a bunch of panels rearrange into more full-bodied legs, more impressive than the leg automorph on 70s BB. And even the weapon automorophs, pulling the halves apart makes a blade move out on a geared path. Robot Mode: 5.5" (14cm) tall. The clear blue bits from vehicle mode end up as wings, armor on the small of the back and various decorative panels. He also has blue lightpiping. The neck, torso interior, pelvis, thighs, lower boots, shoulders, forearms, hands and centers of the feet are black plastic. The head, sternum "dickie", upper boots, toes and heels are yellow plastic, as are the various vehicle body pieces. There's also yellow armor pieces plugged into the ball joint slots on the shoulders (you know, those slots on the socket part of most ball joints that relieve stress when popping the balls in). These are not glued in, and tend to pop off if you're not careful. The solar cannon is three pieces of black plastic connected around a clear blue blade. While closed, a Y-shaped gap is left open to let light glow through the side of the cannon. There's yellow paint details on the hips and forearms, black on the face and toes, plus a printed black Autobot symbol on his central chest. There's some bits of silver on his face, metallic blue on his groin, and a printed bent license plate on his belt buckle area. The head is on a ball joint atop a stalk that's hinged to move forward and back. The waist is a ball joint that's significantly restricted by various panels, mainly letting him wobble around a bit. The shoulders are ball joints on struts that have some hinged motion for transformation. There's a swivel just above the hinge elbows, and the wrists are somewhat limited ball joints. The thighs are kinda short, and there's no swivels on them. Hinge knees and ankles, and a hinge-up toe joint too. The cannon is gripped by a handle, they don't try to make it look like the forearm turns into the cannon. Folded open it becomes a katar, or punch-dagger. Maybe big enough to be a bundi, it's kinda on that katar/bundi borderline. Either way, he cutchoo, man. It can be held equally well in either hand, the roof panels stuck to the forearms do get in the way of melee mode a little bit. Overall: Significantly closer to movie-accuracy in robot mode, well done vehicle mode, generally poseable and stable. A worthy representation of the character. DECEPTICON: DREADWING Altmode: Fighter Jet (F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, more or less) Licensor: None Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Energon, Classic (Mini-Con) Package Callouts: "2 launching missiles!" Function: Air Support Motto: "Gotcha!" DREADWING isn't terribly intelligent, so no one's certain where he got the teleportation technology that allows him to warp up to two and a half miles instantly. He sure didn't invent it and no one else has it, so he must have stolen it, which makes sense. He is, after all, a born thief. Sneaky and greedy, he pranks and steals from his fellow DECEPTICONS as often as the AUTOBOTS. No one likes him, so he spends most of his time alone, plotting grand schemes and spiking other robots' gas tanks with sugar. STR 8 INT 4 SPD 10 END 5 RNK 4 COUR 4 FRB 7 SKL 6 Avg 6 Hey, he stole Skywarp's schtick! And G2 Hooligan's bio, too! He really IS a born thief! Anyway, he's a "drone head" like Swindle, with a single lens dominating the head and no facial features to speak of. This is a TF video game motif for the drones (well, half of them), so I call it "drone head". (On the topic of drones, can we please have a toy of the fork lift drone?) Packaging: "As seen in the TRANSFORMERS Video Game." Yep, a period, not an exclamation point. Two twist-ties hold the jet into the blister, and one tie per missile. One rubber band around the rear thrusters. Vehicle Mode: Pretty darned close to a MiG-29 although with some changes for lack-of-licensing's sake (such as having the VTOL thruster partially exposed through a hole, a feature borrowed from planes like the F-35) and some to make the robot mode work. (Reference for MiG-29 can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MiG-29_3-view.gif) The biggest change is that he's got a big tube of some sort slung under the middle, like a huge sensor suite or a ludicrously large external fuel tank. The upshot is that the undercarriage junk on Dreadwing is about as thick as the rest of the jet proper. 6.5" (17cm) long with missiles removed, increases to 8" (20cm) if you load the missiles as engine thrust trails. The wingspan is 5.5" (14cm). That makes this about 1:82 scale Fulcrum. Most of the toy is made of a sort of light denim blue plastic. The thruster nozzles, parts of the undercarriage junk, and the louvers atop the leading-edge root extensions of the wings (LERXes, gotta love Wiki) are made of rigid black plastic. The louvers, by the way, are used as alternate jet air intakes when operating close to the ground, with the main intakes closed to prevent ingestion of debris. Not as efficient, but less likely to snarf up a chipmunk. The nosecone is rubbery black plastic. The cockpit and thrust-trail missiles are clear colorless plastic. There are a few bits of magenta purple plastic, mostly in the undercarriage, but also as the firing buttons of the missile launchers. Gray and ice blue paint is used on the top side of the jet in a camo pattern. Light denim blue trim is used on the cockpit, some black paint can be seen on the wingroots. The base of the thruster nozzles is painted silver. A purple and white Decepticon symbol is printed on each vertical tailfin. The missiles have clear orange paint fading from the root to the tip, as afterburner flares. The missiles can be fired in this mode, and act as "stop chasing me!" weapons for the most part. The pod held on the underside has rollers on the bottom, so there's no need for regular landing gear. VTOL Mode: This is an undocumented feature that's pretty much just taking the first step in transformation. Pull the wings apart, revealing central vertical thruster. Of course, the underslung pod kinda blocks this thrust. Still, reminiscent of Energon Slugslinger's hyper mode. Transformation: Automorph. The rear part splits and folds around to become the arms (much like Armada Thrust), then the wings flip around behind the arms (like Classics Starscream). A couple of panels on the trailing edges of the wings swing up to beef out the shoulder area. Then there's the legs. Which are kinda sad. The underside pod splits into legs in pretty much the same way Cybertron Jetfire's legs transform, but with much less mass to work with. One bonus bit, though, is that he has a flip up purple codpiece. Yes, you may snicker immaturely. The instructions show the bit where the ears are pulled out when transforming the cockpit area into the head, but they're not deployed in the package photo. Automorph: The first step is it. The louvres on the LERXes pop up a bit when you pull the halves of the plane apart, and the centerline clear piece rises up. Robot Mode: He's got the upper body of a large Deluxe or small Voyager, and the lower body of a Scout. It doesn't really work for him. 6" (15cm) tall, with his waist at the midpoint of that...just the positioning of the waist wouldn't be SO bad, but the upper body is also wide and bulky, so it looks like his legs shrank in the wash or something. An aside on the "drone-head" look. Every basic model created for the TF computer game comes in Autobot and Decepticon flavors, and one of each has a head that's essentially a single big eye mounted like a camera. The other version has a more "normal" head, and while this version is no less a drone, the monoptic version is considered to have an archetypical drone head. I don't mind the drone-head look, as seen here, or on Swindle in wave 1 and Payload in wave 3. And it's certainly better than the aggressively ugly facial designs like those seen on Ratchet or Arcee. So, to me, while there's a lot of problems with Dreadwing, being part of the drone-head squad is not one of 'em. Upper arms, "hands", pelvis and toes are black plastic, as are his weird side-of-the-knee caps. His central chest is clear colorless plastic. Most of his joints are bright magenta purple pieces, either ball-to-hinge or double hinge, plus he has that aforementioned purple jockstrap. The "bicep" area is painted silver, as are bits on the front of the thighs. There's light denim blue trim on the revealed central chest piece and some black paint on his flanks. Otherwise, it's all vehicle-mode paint details. Oh, and while he doesn't really have lightpiping per se, his drone head monoptic can get light through from the cockpit on top of the head. The head can turn side to side a bit, the joint stops it just before the LERXes on either side of the head would. It can also look up and down on its transformation strut. The waist turns and he can lean backwards on a transformation hinge. The shoulders are balls on hinged struts. The elbows are similar, but very restricted...the forearms can rotate around and he can cross his arms in front of his chest, more or less. The thruster nozzles actually have panels that fold open a bit, I suppose to make them look a little more like hands. Both the hips and knees are paired hinges at 90 degrees from each other, so the legs can spread apart on the top hinge or move forward and back on the lower hinge. And the knees bend forward and back on the top hinge, bend sideways for transformation on the lower hinge. The toes and heelspurs are hinged, and you have to be careful with them because they're kinda short and the figure is very topheavy. Each forearm is basically a missile launcher. Hey, this is based on a drone, combat drones don't really need fine manipulation. You can sort of rotate part of the tail around to act as a thumb. Overall: Well, they tried. It's a very nice Fulcrum on top of a big chunk of kibble. And it's a nice upper body atop a serviceable but too small lower body. Nothing to write home about, though. (Not that my parents really care about Transformers toys.) Dave Van Domelen, managed to get all the new Deluxes in the two days BEFORE his monthly trip to Topeka for shopping....