Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Target Exclusive #68 Leadfoot (Chevy Impala "battle mode") http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Leadfoot Leadfoot is an interesting example of natural product placement in a movie via using blatant product placement on something that's expect to have it, to wit, a NASCAR racer. And since one of the cars selected for Dark of the Moon had Target as the main sponsor, that made it a natural for a store exclusive. (Not that the Lowes-branded car resulted in an exclusive toy at that store.) While the other two movie-Wreckers got some versions with their sponsor logos sold at other stores, all the versions of Leadfoot sold outside Target left off the logo. I never reviewed the Target exclusive redeco of the Legion class one (not sure I even own it, I wasn't impressed by the mold's robot mode). I did get, and was unimpressed by, the Human Alliance Leadfoot, https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/DotM/HALeadfoot (mold was never released without the logo, presaging this toy's exclusive-only status). There was a 2011 Deluxe mold, but the Target exclusive version was cancelled and the non-branded version only sold in Japan. As with the Human Alliance set, this comes with the Steeljaw junkyard robot dog. CAPSULE $20 exclusively at Target and Target.com. Leadfoot: Decent for a Studio Series Deluxe, which is admittedly somewhat faint praise. Bonus for the Steeljaw accessory, demerit for it really having no way to connect to the toy or interact with it. Cool weapon assortment, uncool non-standard attachment points that fail to stay attached. And so forth. For everything that might bump it up in my esteem, there's something that drags it back down. Mildly recommended. RANT Packaging: For the most part, this is standard Studio Series Deluxe packaging, with no "Only at (o)" sticker...maybe they figured the big Target bullseye on the toy itself would serve that purpose. All three pieces of art (front, left side, right side) are unique, none of them is just a crop and zoom of one of the others. Interestingly, in addition to the GM and NASCAR logos and legalese, there's also stickers (one matte and one holofoil) with QR codes for GM and NASCAR websites respectively, which lead "for the parents of the child who owns this toy" websites. Not that this line is really pitched to kids young enough that their parents would be going over the packaging before it's opened. The NASCAR one leads to a badly-formatted-for- phone page advertising kids' tickets to upcoming events, while the GM code leads to a product validation page that asks you to rate the product and help them make sure the license is being treated properly. (The legalese covers all the GM brands used by Hasbro, not just the Impala, so it's a bit boilerplate.) AUTOBOT: LEADFOOT Assortment: #68 Altmode: Chevy Impala-based NASCAR racer in Battle Mode Transformation Difficulty: 18 steps Previous Name Use: G2, PCC, Classic, DotM, BotShots Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Dark of the Moon Scene: Battle of Chicago LEADFOOT and the WRECKERS turn the DECEPTICONS into scrap. Poor Steeljaw doesn't get mentioned on the box. Or in the instructions, although he is pictured. In fact, there is no indication on any of the packaging what to call him. Oops. Packaging: There are no ties on the robot or on Steeljaw, but the two missile pod weapons are held down by one tie each. Everything else is held in by blister shape, and the tiny guns are just asking to fly across the room and get lost upon removal. Slicing up the blister with a knife first helps free the guns. The backdrop is a partially damaged Chicago street, the same scene used for Sentinel Prime (and also used on Topspin in the non-exclusive wave that came out at the same time). The instructions include a mysterious 7 step sequence that mostly involves opening up the torso and closing it again, possibly meant to make sure nothing came loose in shipping? It also has unnecessary instructions for folding down the feet (maybe original packaging plans were different) and actually useful instructions for pulling the toes down so he's not flat-footed. For all that? The toy is still mistransformed in package. The instructions don't actually highlight the one step that actually needs to be done to get it in proper robot mode: lift the legs out to the side so that the hinges on the hips soft-snap into place, then rotate the ball joints down. This makes him about 1/4" (0.5cm) shorter, with a wider stance. The blister is molded to accept his legs closer together, but if you don't make this alteration the hips don't have much meaningful range of motion. Robot Mode: A pot-bellied, balding robot with a scraggly beard and either meant to have a bald top of the head, or a "bandana to cover the baldness" effect. The NASCAR Wreckers are nothing if not Southern Good Ol' Boy stereotypes. If you forget to straighten his knee joints out, he has a sort of digitigrade stance as the knee strut flows into the back of the calf pretty well. Stability is okay, but the fake doors that make up the chest are supposed to peg onto irregular quadrilateral tabs on the shoulders and transformation joints make it hard to get a firm fit without the joint rotating inward. Before getting into anything else, I'm going to delete a bunch of my early deleted comments (yeah, I write these reviews out of order a lot of the time) and condense them into one place and one core complaint: why do they insist on badly reinventing the wheel by replacing effective 5mm pegs and sockets with irregular tabs that inevitably don't work as well? Yeah, there's aesthetic reasons to not want a big round peg on something, but between the transformation tabs and the weapons, the only connection that's reliable is for the one thing with a 5mm peg. The weapons are supposed to all share a common set of tabs with 4mm by 2mm dimensions, but almost every combination of accessory and tab on mine was either too loose (and fell off) or too tight (and popped off). The forearm guns do fit well on the forearm tabs, but not on the roof tabs. And the missile pods don't want to stay on any of the tabs, tending to launch themselves off after a few seconds and getting lost on the floor. I was able to get them to stay by shaving down some of the tabs that were too big, but even then the connection points on the hood where the missiles are supposed to go on robot mode are a bad idea...being under the arms makes them super easy to pop off just by lowering the arms a little. Making all the connections round pegs would have fixed this, and frankly having a 5mm peg or socket over each window isn't that much uglier than having a 4x2 tab there. Failing that, adding some 4x2 tabs to Steeljaw so he could carry extra weapons that won't stay on Leadfoot would have helped a little. 4.75" (12cm) tall in mostly red, black, and a sort of faintly metallic brown-gray (dark taupe), with some bits of silver, white, and dull metallic blue. Black plastic is used for the tires, the shoulders, the little three- rocket pods, and a piece that is the underside of the belly and part of the spine. Slightly metallic dark taupe makes up the head, the fake-engine sternum area, the top of the torso, the forearms, hands, pelvis, knee joints, toes, forearm guns, shoulder gun, and the jet thrusters folded under the backpack. Bright red plastic is used for the belly top, the fake-door chest panels, the thighs, shins, and most of each foot, plus most of the outer surface of the back. There's clear colorless plastic on the windshield atop the backpack. There's gloss black on the fake windows on the chest and on the belly details (grille, bumper), and some stripes along the top edges of the feet (rear fenders). Silver is used for some of the hair and beard details, plus the various weapons poking out the fake headlights and parts of the grille. There's also silver on the outer side of each forearm. The NASCAR logo is printed in white on the black bits on the feet, and the Target logo is printed on the chest. The chest doesn't split apart as far as on the movie model or the Human Alliance toy, in part to keep the logo recognizable. The tires don't have molded logos, but do have "ULTRA WRECKERS" printed on them in yellow. The neck is a restricted ball joint, the waist does not move. Ball joint shoulders on the ends of struts that are hinged for transformation but are *supposed to* be locked in place by tabs going into the chest doors. Bicep swivels, hinge elbows, and the wrists are hinged to bend inwards for transformation. The hips are ball joints once you have them transformed correctly, but right out of the package they are restricted to swiveling around their long axis until you fix the hips. Swivels just above the knees, and the knees involve a middle piece that's hinged on both top and bottom but the bottom hinge is only a transformation joint. The toes are hinged to swing down into intended position, it's hard to adjust the legs without flattening the feet, though. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, there's a 5mm socket on top of the torso on either side of the head, and another in the center of the back. A 3mm socket is located on the underside of the pelvis. Sadly, as complained about above, most of the accessories ignore these in favor of 2x4mm tabs. Leadfoot has five weapon bits. There's a small drum-fed rotary cannon that has a 5mm peg and is meant to go on the shoulder, it's about 3cm long. There's a belt-fed machinegun for each forearm, attaching only via tab and slot, although you can put the ammo belt into his hand and it stays loosely. These are a few millimeters shorter than the shoulder gun. And finally there's two bundles of rockets, three per bundle, staggered diagonally. Each rocket is 17mm long, and the staggered layout makes the whole chunk 1" (2.5cm) long. These look like they have two possible slots each, but the top slot has a big raised "L2" or "R2" inside of it, preventing the tab from going in far enough to be secure most of the time. Steeljaw: An immobile chunk of the brown-gray plastic, it's a robotic bulldog-like critter with two sets of exhaust pipes (rows of 4 each pointed up and back) on the butt rather than a tail. 1.5" (4cm) long, with silver paint on the exhaust pipes and the same dull metallic blue on its eyes as Leadfoot has on his visor. No paint on the teeth, I might fix that. Unlike the Human Alliance one, it has no articulation at all. While there's some 3mm diameter bolt details on the hips, they're a bit close together to work well for attaching Fire Blasts from WfC toys, not to mention being pointed out to the sides. It'd have been nice if they made a dedicated way to connect it to Leadfoot in either mode, but if there was one intended, the instructions make no indication. Transformation: Remove all the weapons first and put them somewhere safe, lest they fly off and get lost during transformation. Return the hips to the package configuration, flatten the toes, and fold the feet up on the lower knee joints, but don't snap the boots together yet, as the thruster piece needs to go between them. Pull the entire torso front along with the head forwards, then tuck the chest doors in and fold the head (but not the sternum piece) back. The doors may need to be forced a bit to get them past the hood, and getting them back out for robot mode is a hassle. Once that's all compact, the whole thing rotates back 180 degrees and the center of the hood snaps down into place (it needs to be lifted way out to accomodate rotating back for robot mode, then get pushed almost all the way back down). Unfold the backpack and lift up the belly, the whole top part will align and you can snap the boots around tabs on the thruster chunk. This gives you a car with arms. The shoulder struts fold inwards and some weird rotation and folding is needed, but the arms can be left until last to transform without too much trouble. Finally, mount the weapons back on and hope they stay. (I've had the most luck with the arm guns on the doors, which are just the arm pegs but rotated, the rockets on the roof, and the rotary cannon on the roof where it has a nice 5mm socket...nothing at all on the front fender pegs.) Vehicle Mode: As with every other DotM Leadfoot toy above the Kre-O level, these is an attack mode car with panels opened up to reveal weapons and thrusters and general Bay-kibble. The back end has two obvious turbojets and a possible third turbine tucked between and below them, while all the front lights (which would be fake on a NASCAR vehicle anyway) are now various kinds of gun barrel or energy emitter. While the robot mode has fake mesh-net windows, the windows are just open in this mode, aside from the windshield with its strengthening bars. Interestingly, there's some interior detailing that isn't robot bits, but instead of a dashboard behind the window, it looks like more engine block stuff. Maybe some of the engine moved backwards for protection in this mode? Despite the flipped and folded panels, the Target bullseye is nicely visible, as are the number 42 and the NASCAR logo, keeping it clearly the car driven by Juan Pablo Montoya back in 2012. Probably for the best they were going for the movie-era look, since the most recent driver of #42 was fired in April 2020 for being a little too free with the n-word for even NASCAR. 5.5" (14cm) long, making it about 1:36 scale (at this scale, a typical human is about 2" or 5cm tall, so while Steeljaw is a big dog he's not a monster dog). A bit more strongly red than robot mode, but otherwise pretty much the same mix of colors, just without the small bit of metallic blue. Red plastic is used on most of the hood/front end, the roof, the rear fenders and bumper. The rear third of the hood, the sides, and the top of the back third are that metallic gray-brown plastic, and the front windshield is clear colorless plastic. Wheels are still black. There's red paint on some of the panel details between the turbojets in back, but no paint on the jets themselves. There's some black paint on the windshield borders and strengthening bars (already partly scraped off on mine), as well as on part of a side panel (with 42 in white on that) and the rear bits described above on the boots. Hood paint as described on the chest/belly earlier. The molded exhaust pipes and gas cap are unpainted (well, the gas cap is painted the same black as the rest of the fender). It rolls poorly with very little clearance even in the best of cases, and it's hard to keep everything aligned on that best case. There's six 4x2 tabs (either side of the roof, either side of the hood, each side where the doors have been replaced by greebles), plus one 5mm socket on top of the roof. The orientation of the hands on the underside means you could mount the car onto a 5mm peg action base, but that's it for connection points. Steeljaw can stand on the roof or hood, but doesn't secure onto them, so will slide off pretty easily. A pity, a slight tweak to the shape and position of the feet would let it snap over the panels in back. Overall: Some missed opportunities, and at the same time a little too much reinventing of the wheel. It's okay, and certainly not the floppy and frustrating mess that the Human Alliance version was, but it suffers from a lot of the "Lego designs and Block Tech tolerances" issues that plague Studio Series Deluxes. Dave Van Domelen, supposes he should put all three Wreckers together in vehicle mode once he's done with Topspin, since they finally all have attack mode altmodes in the same scale at roughly the same time for once.