Dave's Transformers Prime Rant: Voyagers Thundertron (Lion) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/VThundertron This is a weird toy. It's a beast that doesn't seem to be tied to the Beast Hunters season. It's one of the Star Seeker pirates from the recent novels, which would make it a Fall of Cybertron/Generations character, but it's sold as a Prime toy. I get the feeling that they'd hoped to do more with the Star Seekers at first (and design sketches do exist for other Star Seekers), but then Beast Hunters went in a different direction and Thundertron was orphaned. CAPSULE: Thundertron: You may have already seen some negative reviews. They're pretty much right. This toy may be WHY they made no more Star Seekers, it's that bad. It's like they forgot all of the design lessons of Beast Wars, even before feeding it into the Cheapinator. The robot mode is okay once you figure out some of the ways it may have been mis-transformed in the package, but the transformation and beast mode are both pretty bad. Worth getting purely as a curiosity. $22.96 at Walmart. (Aside: this got a redeco as Leo Prime in Japan. That's one remold I won't lose sleep over if it never gets sold in America.) RANT: Packaging: Same as other Prime Voyagers, but the Star Seekers get their own faction symbol. It's an interesting fusion of Autobot and Decepticon symbols with the 'Con triangular wedges extended and curved to look like crossed scimitars. The lines are given a jagged "torn parchment" effect. The "Try Me" function really just lets you make the LED light up, it's not amenable to actually deploying in the box, as the sword would have to be able to swing through a rather large arc. STAR SEEKER: THUNDERTRON Series 1: 008 Altmode: Lion Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: None Gimmick: Light-up battle sword Function: Star Seeker Captain Motto: "Desolation follows in my trail." Ages ago, THUNDERTRON swore that the creatures that caused the destruction of his world would pay for their crimes. Since then, he has wandered space in search of his revenge. His ship is primed, his crew is willing, and at long last, CYBERTRON is in his sights. STR 9 INT 8 SPD 6 END 10 RNK 9 COUR 9 FRB 8 SKL 7 Avg 8.25 Make no mistake, this is the G1 Seeker Scourge re-imagined as a lion pirate. Between the color scheme and the face mold, that much is pretty clear. Hence my choice of motto for him. While the bio implies that the Star Seekers are from an entirely different world that was done wrong by Cybertron at some time in the past, they're actually Cybertronians who are "a pox on both your houses" regarding Autobots and Decepticons, blaming them for destroying Cybertron. Packaging: The weapon is held in by the same rubber band that keeps it from operating in try-me mode. There's one tie that goes through the tray and is wrapped off like the ones on Ultra Magnus, but the other three ties just go through the blister tray. Also, there's a rubber band through the blister holding in the shoulder claws, and another band through the feet and tray bottom. The package art, in addition to playing up the pirate angle, also depicts some of the fine details on the head as feathers. My copy of the toy was mistransformed in the box. The rear "coat" panel needs to be lifted up and back so that the hips can slide together inside the pelvis. I suspect this might have been intentional, to reduce the depth needed by the toy. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a position of the coat panel that locks the hips in robot position. Robot Mode: Well, in addition to being Scourge, this is also a pirate. The package art plays up the greatcoat and hat look more than the actual toy does, but then you get to the optional peg-leg and it becomes pretty obvious that no matter what his bio note may say, he's also a pirate. A pirate with a kibble issue, unfortunately. Like many versions of Cheetor, he has a backpack containing forepaws curled up on the back, where they get in the way of the shoulderpads when deployed as per instructions. It looks a little better if you point the claws down so that there's more room for the shoulders to move. As noted above, there's an intended greatcoat look here, between the shoulderpads, how the lion head brows are painted to resemble lapels, and the flared out Gundam-skirt sort of panels on the hips and butt. The robot head has a brow piece evocative of a pirate hat, and a long beard and mustache that disappear behind the collar formed by the beast head. The feet are beast claws with spikes on either side in an attempt to make them look less like beast claws, I guess. 6.5" (16.5cm) tall, mostly blue with white and gold. The head and most of the chest parts are white plastic. Pale gold plastic is used for the over-the-shoulder claws and some of the internal struts. Clear light blue plastic forms the forearm top halves, the lightpiped eyes, some panels flanking the head and the center of the back. (Shining a light through the back kind of makes the beast eyes light up, but since it also makes the entire white plastic beast HEAD light up, the effect is wasted.) The fists, thighs, calves and some of the strutwork for the over-the-shoulder claws are made of medium gray plastic. The tail is rubbery blue plastic, and everything else is non-rubbery medium blue plastic. Like most toys made using white plastic, it really needs an ink wash or something to bring out the mold details. The face just looks cheap without it. Heck, even painting white over the white would at least help with the translucency problem. Medium blue paint that's a decent if too glossy match for the plastic is used on the chest and a bit of fine detail on the brow armor. AllSpark Blue paint is found on the beard, sides of the head, and feathery sporran or whatever on the abdomen. The mustache is gold, and there's gold detailing on the shoulderpads, over-the-shoulder claw deco, thighs, hips, toes and the right shin. The left shin has silver detailing instead. Silver is also airbrush-faded onto the tips of the skirt armor. A white Star Seeker emblem is printed on the buttcape. One odd bit of color is some copper on the borders of the triangular deco bits on the shoulder claw bits. Articulation (Arrrr-ticulation?) is pretty good, if hampered by the shoulder claws and the non-locking hips. The head is on a ball joint, but movement is severely limited by the beard. No waist articulation. The shoulders are ball joints, with the claws interfering with them. Upper arm swivels, smooth hinge elbows, and the wrists can bend inward on transformation joints. The hip skirt pieces are on ball joints, the buttcape part is hinged. The hips are ball joints with thigh swivels right below them, the knees are smooth hinges. The feet are not identical. The left foot has a ball joint ankle, swiveling side claws and hinged heel spur. The right foot has a swivel joint that the peg leg pegs into, making for a de facto universal joint, and the heel spur is replaced by a 5mm peg. Same side claws, though. By and large, the joints are stiff enough to support some fairly dynamic poses, although the hips keep coming apart. After some fiddling, I can't really find a good place to hide the over-the-shoulder claws, but they're connected to ball joints on the sides and can just be snapped off at the root if you don't plan to ever use beast mode. I suppose you can also swing them down and pretend they're part of the coat. There's 5mm peg holes on the forearms and back. In fact, there's two peg holes on the back, one above the other. The fists also hold 5mm pegs. Weapons: The main batterychunk weapon is a three-tined claw with a big batterychunk on top and a movie-Optimus-ish blade sticking out the back. Pulling back on the batterychunk makes the blade swing around and the red LED light up. Of course, the blade comes in sideways, so if the figure holds the weapon in either hand, the sword looks wrong. It's really meant to be mounted on the left forearm, with the secondary weapon on the right forearm. Unfortunately, Ultra Magnus seems to be a fluke, and there's no locking mechanism for this one. The blade is 3.5" (8.5cm) long and made of clear blue plastic. The claw base is dull gold plastic with claw tines 1" (2.5cm) long, and the batterychunk is medium blue plastic. The base connector piece is also clear blue so that the LED can shine through the 5mm peg. There's a 5mm peg hole on either side of the batterychunk, because you always want to mount weapons on the part that swings 90 degrees back. The secondary weapon is the right foot of the robot, which can be removed and used as a claw weapon. It has a 5mm peg instead of a heel spur, and is clearly intended to go on the right forearm to balance out the main weapon...but the disparity in thickness keeps this from really working on an aesthetic level. It's mostly medium blue plastic with dull gold for the peg. Transformation: Wow. This was sad. The legs turn into hindlegs pretty much exactly like the original Cheetor did...16 years ago. The Voyager size does mean that the feet spin around to do this, at least, so you're not stuck making one more or the other have stupid feet. The coat sides peg into the hips very weakly to create Zoid-style blades. And while they certainly found a new way to do the forelegs, the reason no one did it this way before is that it's HORRIBLE. The robot arms fold up to become the foreleg thighs, and the backpack bits become the lower legs and claws, connected in such a way that the result is essentially no more articulated than 1996 Cheetor's forelegs...which were at least stable. These aren't. Unsurprisingly, the chest swings up to become the beast head, covering most of the robot head in the process. The lone clever bit that works as intended is that the brow piece of the robot head swings up to fill in a gap in the lion mane. There's also several panels that flip around in the process, intended I expect to make the robot mode look a little less like someone stapled a lion head to his chest. Beast Mode: Really quite bad. The aesthetic, as mentioned above, is Zoid-like, a sort of Blade Liger thing. The tail is connected to the small of the back, the forelimbs' only real articulation is "fall apart" (there's a bunch of joints lower down, but no shoulder motion renders them moot) and the head looks like it belongs on a Deluxe-sized toy. Most of the white is hidden, at least, which reduces the cheap appearance on that score. 6.25" (16cm) long from snout to tail tip, although the tail barely sticks out past the Liger blades. The color balance skews towards blue, and the silver airbrushed tips of the coat pieces are more obvious in this mode. Blue paint on the white mane piece and white paint on the upper back part result in stripes that more or less line up, although the mane colors are much more washed out. The beast eyes are clear plastic painted clear red, but there's no way for light to get through them, so it's a wasted effort. They may have initially hoped for the clear plastic on the back to pipe through to the head so that mounting the weapon there could make the eyes light, but no luck on that score. This is one of those cases where missing one joint can make almost all of the rest useless. The rear limbs have all the same joints as the robot legs, and the forelimbs have hinge "elbows" (really the raised ankle joint), ball joints where the paws meet the forelimb, and hinged claws. But the upper part of the forelegs is fixed in position, so all that articulation only really lets you tweak the "standing there" pose. No head or jaw motion, and while the tail is on a hinge, the hinge is so far forward you're better off leaving it in place. The 5mm peg holes on the forelimbs aren't really useful, and there's only one other, on the top of the back just ahead of the tail root. There's also a 3mm rod section just behind this, so you can attack a Cyberverse c-clip weapon to face backwards. Overall: This is one of those toys where my initial reaction was extremely negative, but it moderated to only mildly negative once I'd figured out some of the ways it was supposed to work. Still negative, though. Dave Van Domelen, got some Rescue Bots figures to cover next, then maybe Bruticus.