Dave's Universe Classics Rant: Deluxe Wave 1 Sunstreaker - Sportscar Prowl - Police pursuit car Tankor - Transport airplane and tanker truck Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Classic/UDeluxe1 I've decided to "file" Universe Classics under Classics for now, any non-Classics-label Universe recolors under the old Universe directory, and if the Universe line spreads further I'll decide where to go from there. :) I may or may not put 25th Anniversary toys (which are also Universe) into Classics. Case assortment on this seems to be three each of Sunstreaker and Prowl, two of Tankor. Tankor is basically Classics Octane, but they lost "Octane" on its own ages ago, and either also lost Mega-Octane, or felt Tankor was a name more worth protecting. Common fan-names include Tankane and Octankor. CAPSULES Sunstreaker: Fairly impressive design, but some execution issues bring it down to merely Recommended rather than Strongly Recommended. $9.99 at Target. Prowl: Vehicle mode suffers from dodgy paint work and the gun won't stay stored. Good variant on the G1 Prowl transformation, very nice robot mode. Recommended. $9.99 at Target. Tankor: Neither vehicle mode is that good, but I like that the airplane is a prop-driven type and not yet another jet. Fun transformations, so-so robot mode, decent fanmode potential. On the low side of Recommended. $9.96 at Wal-Mart. RANTS Packaging: Blister cards, as usual for Deluxes. The card is 12" (30.5cm) tall and 7.5" (19cm) wide. Both top corners are truncated: the upper right by maybe a centimeter, the upper left a little more than an inch. A shallow isoceles trapezoidal notch is cut out of the left side near the bottom, and a right triangular notch is cut out of the right side at the top right corner of the blister. The card front has the Transformers Universe logo at the top, with a large faction symbol in the upper right. The left top edge has a piece of painted character art...very static pose, and the expressions look kinda dead. I've seen it called "zombie face" or "dull surprise" (the latter in reference to Kathy Ireland's range of emotions in the movie "Alien From L.A.). The background of the card has a sort of starscape fading from black to white through reds and oranges, with a glowing spacetime grid pattern laid over it and implying a wormhole behind the U in "Universe". The card back also uses the starfield/grid background. The TFU logo is in the upper left, with the transformation difficulty ("Advanced Conversion" for 3) at the very top left. Another copy of the dead-face art is in the upper right under a faction logo. The middle left is dominated by a photo of the robot mode with one or more call-outs. The middle right has the name, "Classic Series", the bio note and the techspecs. The lower left has co-sells of the other two Deluxes, and the lower right shows the vehicle mode. Tankor is an exception, showing his ground mode instead of the co-sell, and the flight mode in the lower right. There's no motto or function listed. The blister is 7.5" (19cm) wide, 7.5" (19cm) tall and 3" (7.5cm) deep. The front face is curved convexly. The upper left is truncated by about 2" while the upper right is truncated by 2cm. There's a raised part along the bottom, where the cardstock insert is, as well as various molded tech-y details. The truncated upper left corner has the figure's relevant faction symbol molded into it, and a smaller faction symbol is molded into the right side. There's a rather large amount of tape holding the side flaps to the card back, the top and bottom are glued down. The blister front has a corroded metal pattern in the cardstock insert along the bottom with the name, a call-out, faction symbol and "ROBOTS IN DISGUISE", plus a choking warning. The cardstock goes up the right edge of the front and declares the figure's faction there. The cardstock on the right side of the blister has the faction symbol (under the molded symbol) and a bit of the character art. The bottom has legalese (except for Tankor, who also has the co-sells for the other two figures here), the left side has "DELUXE CLASS" and some vent patterning (and molding). Additionally, Tankor's blister has a "TRIPLE CHANGER" sticker on the front. The instructions are loose at the bottom of the blister, and a catalog may or may not come with them (I got Tankor from a different store than the other two, and it had no catalog, so probably a running change thing). Mottos and functions are my creations. And just a reminder, when I list previous name or mold use, I only mean U.S. mass market...I leave out Japanese and convention-exclusive releases. AUTOBOT: SUNSTREAKER Altmode: Race Car Function: Warrior Weapon: Electron Pulse Blaster Previous Name Use: G1, Alt Previous Mold Use: None Motto: "Live fast, die young, leave a good looking wreck...I just prefer the wreck be yours." SUNSTREAKER is a fighter for a cause, and that cause is SUNSTREAKER. If it's in his best interest (and not too threatening to his paint job), he'll take out anyone he needs too [sic], no matter where he is. Still, he'd rather be back home, kicking back, polishing his chrome and preparing for a good, old-fashioned arena fight, rather than hunting DECEPTICON assault squads across deep space. STR 5 INT 6 SPD 7 END 8 RNK 5 COUR 7 FRB 7 SKL 6 Avg 6.375 I should note that there are plans to use this mold for Sideswipe, with a head swap and some tweaking. Where Sunstreaker uses the roof for his chest, Sideswipe will have the roof as his back, and will have fists on the opposite arms. So you can get some idea what Sideswipe will look like by swapping fists, turning the head and legs around, and adjusting other kibble to suit. This has also led to numerous Punch/Counterpunch kitbashes using this mold. :) Seriously, I've already seen three just on the AllSpark boards. Packaging: 2 twist-ties hold the vehicle into the blister, his gun is held in the blister separately. One rubber band holds the rear together as well. Vehicle Mode: Sunstreaker is a Lamborghini hybrid. No, not a fuel system hybrid, I mean he has a Murcielago front end, Countach rear. Of course, no Lamborghini model these days has that weird supercharger intake characteristic of G1 Sunstreaker (Lambos have rear-mounted engines), so they just sort of tack one onto the rear roof. At 5" (13cm) long, it's roughly 1:36 scale. The gun pegs onto the underside, becoming the exhaust pipe and holding the rear halves together. It stays in place VERY well, in contrast to Prowl's. The supercharger is a bit more loosely connected. You can pull the rear bumper sections apart to more fully reveal the gun, a sort of "discourage tailgaters" feature. Most of the toy is a bright yellow plastic. The wheels and the body of the supercharger are black plastic, as is a small tab at the front that makes up the grille. The intakes of the supercharger and the gun/exhaust pipes are light gray plastic. The roof section is a very dark smoky plastic, so dark I had to use a laser to be sure it's transparent. Clear colorless plastic is used for the headlights. The roof is painted with bright yellow paint that's a poor match for the yellow plastic, and has a pattern of parallel grooves as well as a few rectangular notches (used for attaching the supercharger in robot mode). A dark red Autobot symbol is painted on the roof. Orange-red paint with a strong UV glow is used for the turn signal lights and the tail lights. Hubcaps and details on the supercharger are painted silver, most of the rear side is painted gunmetal. A white-painted rear license plate has "WE R 84" printed on it in black. Other than the supercharger tending to pop off fairly easily and the rear section folding apart easily, the car mode holds together solidly. It rolls well on the wheels, and the gun doesn't come off. Transformation: Remove gun and supercharger. The rear half becomes legs, the arms fold out from the sides, the roof becomes the chest. Fairly standard. Except...you twist the roof around to make the head automatically pop up, which is nifty. And the "ears" of the helmet are on springs and pop out automatically once the head is up. The back is supposed to snap into place, with the front grille area folded up to let the bumper slide around the waist. But at least on mine, it won't stay securely together. There's several interlocking tabs on the door panels which can be a bit tricky to get all back together when going back to car mode. [Later note: turns out that the waist clipping is a red herring. The actual torso-lock comes from having the various sliding bits up near the shoulders in the right configuration, something I discovered by accident while trying to get the gun to peg onto the shoulder.] Robot Mode: 6" (15cm) tall and pretty well proportioned. A little kibbly, with car doors on his forearms and the rear chunks of his vehicle mode acting as big kneecaps. A pretty good mix of plastics here, including, oddly, clear colorless plastic on some of the internal torso bits. Black plastic: head, internal torso bits, upper arms, elbows, fists, door-holding struts, pelvis, hips, knees, feet. Yellow plastic: shoulders, car kibble on back, boots, forearms. Light gray plastic: forearms, thighs, gun, internal torso bits. And, for some odd reason, clear teal plastic inserts on the thigh fronts. The smoky plastic isn't just on the chest, there's a little piece of it bolted onto each door, so that there's a little bit of a notch at the top of the chest to avoid shoulder interference. The roof is now the chest, putting the Autobot symbol front and center. There's yellow paint details in his horns, silver face and bright medium blue eyes. No lightpiping. The orange-red dayglow paint from the taillights is used on shoulder stripes and a panel line in the pelvis. Gunmetal paint is used on some mechy details on the backs of the legs, although it doesn't fully distract from the big gaps in the backs of the legs. Still, I appreciate the effort put into painting parts invisible in vehicle mode and marginally visible in robot mode. The head is on a ball joint, and while the waist has a swivel joint it can't really turn without dislodging bits. I think it's really just there to let Sideswipe turn the legs around for his version of the toy. Ball joint shoulders with a transformation strut that allows a little bit of shrugging. The upper arm swivels are actually disc-peg things that can be snapped out. Double hinge elbows, disc-peg swivel wrists. The arms are fully reversible, so if you want you can try out the Sideswipe configuration with the roof as the back (and the hands can be easily swapped). Ball joint hips, a non- poppable swivel above each knee, hinge knees, and sideways transformation joints just below the knees. The ankles are floppy ball joints on the end of struts, a bit of superglue (and then moving the joint around until the glue dries) stiffened them up. The door panels don't peg or otherwise really lock into place, and easily slide out of place. The gun is held a little loosely in either hand. The supercharger is pretty much just a backpack detail, it can't be repurposed as a hand weapon or shield. You can clip the supercharger around the gun to make a bigger cannon, but it's not always stable (some report it holds together really well, others that it falls apart). The idea is to fold the gray bits on the supercharger around the sides of the gun, then mount it on a shoulder (the gun handle has a narrowed bit at the bottom to fit into one of the holes on the collarbone area). Mine doesn't hold together well enough to bother. Overall: A good vehicle mode with a fairly nifty transformation gimmick, not to mention impressive engineering that renders this effectively a two- robot-mode triple-changer and lets them remold this into Sideswipe with only tiny changes for a big difference. Clones inverted (G1 Clones had "identical" robot modes but different altmodes). Unfortunately, it has a few annoying little flaws in execution, and the paint match on the roof is pretty bad. AUTOBOT: PROWL Altmode: Police Car Function: Military Administration Weapons: Shoulder-Mounted Acid Blasters, pistol (unnamed) Previous Name Use: G1, BW, MW, BMac, RiD, Universe, Armada, Energon, Alternators. Previous Mold Use: None Motto: "Logic is the ultimate weapon." As the right hand man to OPTIMUS PRIME, PROWL is right at home in the thick of the battle against the new DECEPTICON armies. Confused AUTOBOTS are scattered across the universe, easy pickings for the gangs of organized DECEPTICONS. As a dedicated administrator and logician, PROWL feels it is his duty to whip them into shape, and get them ready for a fight. It's only a matter of time until the DECEPTICONS get themselves a real leader, and the AUTOBOTS need to be ready. STR 7 INT 9 SPD 7 END 9 RNK 9 COUR 9 FRB 4 SKL 9 Avg 7.875 So, Classics Megatron doesn't count as a real leader? Heh. Warning: there have been reports of the paint on Prowl's clear plastic parts being sticky and sloughing off easily. This seems to have been only a problem in very early examples, so is likely something they've fixed, but keep an eye out for it. On mine it feels a little odd, but isn't rubbing off easily or anything. Packaging: 2 twist-ties hold the vehicle mode into the blister, his unnamed pistol is held into the blister without ties. Vehicle Mode: Just as the original Prowl was more or less a Datsun Z280, this update is kinda-sorta a Nissan 350Z, which is the modern successor to the Z280. In addition to fairly minor trademark-skirting changes (shape of headlights, changing the wheel hubs from six spokes to five, different tailpipes), a chevron- shaped lightbar is added to the roof and a big spoiler is riced onto the back. The fact that the lightbar is on top of a molded sunroof/moonroof panel detail suggests that we will be getting a Bluestreak/Silverstreak redeco of this mold. [Later note: Yep, such a redeco has already been announced.] At 5" (13cm) long, it's about 1:33 scale for a 350Z. The doors are separate panels, but do not open...there's no action features here other than rolling on the wheels. Although I suppose you could count "gun pops out from under the hood at random" as a feature rather than a bug. The hood and the rear third of the body shell are white plastic with a strong UV glow. The roof, doors and front fenders are clear colorless plastic, with a frosted texture on the window parts. The headlights are also clear colorless plastic (the outer cover is part of the fenders, the bulb inside is a separate piece attached to the hood). The wheels are black plastic. The lightbar and the taillights are made of clear red plastic. But it's not the usual gemlike clear plastic, it's more like gummy bear visual consistency...cloudy translucent and soft. There's extensive black and white paint on the clear parts. The roof is more of a gloss white, but the white along the sides is matte and doesn't match well with the gloss or with the white plastic. The black paint feels a little tacky, but isn't actually sticky on mine. Black paint forms a border about a centimeter high around the entire bottom edge of the car (with that Prowl peak at the front, a la the Japanese Federal Highway Police), with the top being mostly white. A sort of brownish wash is used on the clear windows, and a shiny purplish brown painted on the opaque rear windows. A red Autobot symbol is on the hood, but no blue shield (a regular part of the Prowl deco scheme). A bit of silver is on top of the lightbar, and there's a tiny bit of red on the turn signals. "HIGHWAY PATROL" is printed in black on the white part of each door, and "POLICE" in white on the black part. The main problem I have with the paint job aside from the bad white matching is that the black paint doesn't go into the seams, so you have these bright white lines breaking up the black parts of the car. Amusingly, you can pop the robot head out without transforming anything else, for a sort of hood ornament. Other than the gun falling out, it's very stable in this mode. Transformation: In broad outlines, it's the G1 Prowl transformation (hood as chest, doors as wings, rear section as legs, roof on back), although with the arms to the sides of the car, not folded up under the hood. There's more of those triple tabs on the doors like with Sunstreaker, key to stability in car mode, but also kinda hard to get back together when transforming TO car mode. Note that the feet pull down, and it takes a bit of force to manage. Also, you need long nails or a pry tool to get the heel spurs to flip out. The front fender/door panels pop off incredibly easily, it's hard to transform either way without them coming off, although easier to get them into robot configuration without popping off than the reverse. Robot Mode: 5.5" (14cm) tall and wearing a black cravat. The shoulder launchers fold out from under the roof on struts rather than being removable pieces as in G1. The upper arms, fists, head, shoulder launchers (non-firing) and thighs are white plastic. The forearms, gun, cravat, abdomen, pelvis, hip joints, knees, boot insides and feet are black plastic. There's a nice bit of detail on the abdomen piece that's not even visible in this mode, it's only visible in vehicle mode, oddly. There's light blue lightpiping on the head. Silver paint is found on the face and some "belt" details. The helmet horns are painted the same red-orange as the turn signals (non-dayglow). There's red paint on the pelvis that's either darker red, or a thin enough layer that the black plastic underneath makes it look darker. Yeah, not a lot of paint apps unique to robot mode, they kinda used up the budget on the vehicle mode. Mind you, it doesn't really need a lot more paint, although silver on the "missile" tips of the launchers would be good. Head and waist both turn. The shoulders are universal joints on a transformation strut that adds a little more range of motion. The upper arm swivels are the same sort of disc-peg as Sunstreaker's, as are the wrists. The elbows are single-hinged, since they don't need to be able to go backwards for an alternate transformation (Bluestreak needs to look more or less the same in robot mode, after all). Ball joint hips, hinge knees, disc-peg swivels below the knees (no hip swivels). The ankles have forward- back hinges with a decent range of motion, and side to side hinges with a little range. The launchers can elevate on their hinges. The gun is a bit of an oddity. It unfolds for use at a central hinge, but it has a carry handle on what becomes the underside of the barrel in deployed mode. I guess it's supposed to be carried by that handle in folded mode, but it looks upside-down when unfolded. Overall: The paint job causes some appearance issues in vehicle mode (and be careful of sticky black paint), and the gun just doesn't want to stay in place. But robot mode is quite good. DECEPTICON: TANKOR Homage: G1 Octane Altmodes: Tanker Truck, Transport Plane Function: Fuel Carrier Weapons: Blasters that combine to form Quad Laser, Melee Blade Previous Name Use: BMac, Universe (twice), Cybertron (Mini-Con two-packs) Previous Mold Use: None Motto: "For you, I'll knock ten percent off the price. Cash up front, please." Other DECEPTICONS would call TANKOR a dirtbag, if it wasn't for the high-octane fuel he supplies to them. He's a sleazy liar who will steal [from] or manipulate anyone, so long as it helps him get his way. As such, he fits right into the most dangerous battlegrounds across the universe, where survival depends on maintaining an advantage. The only reason other DECEPTICONS will have anything to do with him is that he always seems to have a supply of fuel when everyone else is tapped out. STR 8 INT 6 SPD 8 END 9 RNK 3 COUR 4 FRB 8 SKL 5 Avg 6.375 Yeah, the bio note is pretty much Octane. And it looks like Tankor gets his weapons from the Mooninites. Packaging: 3 twist-ties hold the airplane mode into the blister. No separate bits, the guns are attached to the wings. Airplane Mode: A four-propellor cargo plane. The sacrifices made in order to let it be a triple-changer make it hard to peg an exact influence, but it looks like a Chinese Harbin Y-8 with the wings of a Lockheed C-130. Mind you, even the Harbin has a larger wingspan than its length (38m span, 34m long), and the C-130 is more of a 4:3 ratio in span:length...Tankor has stubbular wings by comparison, being 6.75" (17cm) long with a wingspan of 6" (15cm). The rotors are about the right place, proportionally speaking, but it needs at least another two centimeters of wing on either side to be even remotely plausible aerodynamically speaking. And the wings could stand to be longer front-to-back as well. Of course, then they wouldn't fit inside the truck mode. The nose section, rear fuselage, wings and horizontal tail parts are very light gray plastic. The propellors, underwing guns, middle fuselage (most of it, anyway) and wheels are black plastic. The obvious truck bits at the tail end and some barely visible bits in the middle are very dark blue plastic. The whole thing sort of rests on a bellyplate made of light gray plastic (that's noticeably darker than the nose section plastic) with a joining piece made of dark blue plastic painted entirely silver. Some of the cockpit windows are painted dark blue, but only the 8 panes that are fully on the pieces that become the robot hands. The other ten cockpit windows, either fully or partially on other pieces of the nose section, are unpainted. The tops of the wings are painted mostly dark blue with a violet stripe along the front of the pattern, but the border around the edge of the wing is unpainted all around. The vertical tail section is dark blue plastic, but mostly painted very light gray (a good match, but a visible "seam" along the joint) with dark blue in the middle and a trailing violet stripe. There's some other paint visible, but it's meant for other modes, so I'll discuss it there. It almost looks better without the folded up blade baseplate, and still rolls fine thanks to the truck wheels along the centerline. But the gappy nature of the midsection is even more obvious without the baseplate. The rotors spin freely, and have four blade each. There's twin- barrelled blasters pegged at the roots of the wings. The wings are geared together so that if you raise one, the other goes up too. A mysterious tab sticks up out of the top of the nose section, and serves no purpose in this mode. However, it's part of securing the baseplate unit to the truck mode. This mode looks okay from above or the front, kinda weak from the sides, and totally bad from underneath. Truck Mode: 6" (15.5cm) long, it vaguely looks like a tanker truck with an angular "futuristic" (but based on real vehicles) cab and 8 wheels (6 of which actually roll). The cab is all dark blue, the baseplate piece more or less looks like the top of a tank. Otherwise, though, there's just a lot of obvious inverted airplane pieces all over the place. And the second to last pair of wheels doesn't roll, being the robot shoulders. It is, at least, pretty stable once you get it all pegged together. The windows and front grille on the cab are painted silver, as are some tech greebles behind the cab. There's an unpainted lightbar on the top, suggesting this is modeled after an airport fuel truck (they can use lightbars for runway visibility) or maybe even an airport safety foam truck. There's some violet paint on the sides, but that's robot mode detailing. If you get it all just right, the six wheels will all roll together, although the propellors on the underside give it almost zero clearance. Transformations: As a triple-changer, there's three possible transformations. Go ahead and remove the baseplate and reattach it when transforming, while it's theoretically possible to leave it on for the Airplane/Truck change, it'll come off unless you're unreasonably careful. After all, it's meant to detach as a weapon in robot mode. Airplane/Truck: Fold the wings together, but be careful to make sure the propellors intermesh properly, or they'll get in the way later. Remove the guns. The nose splits apart and the halves rotate down so that they come back together in line with the wings. The tail splits apart, the halves rotate 180 degrees to turn inside out, and the back bits fold up into truck cab formation. The halves then lock around the wings. Finally, cover up all the mess by attaching the baseplate unit as a tank top. Officially, attach the guns in the visible robot fists on the side rear in an attempt to cover up more kibble, but that's pretty much a lost cause. Better to put the guns on the sides of the cab as smokestacks (in fact, I can't find any other reason for those holes, so the instructions-writer may have simply missed a beat). Oh, and make sure to push the cab section down a bit once you're done, to help the wheels all meet on the table. [Later note: the instructions are wrong about the order of operations for stowing the wings between the cab halves.] Airplane/Robot: The tail end transforms similarly to the Airplane to Truck version, but don't swing the pieces up to clamp around wings. Instead, just fold out toes from the cab fronts and pull the legs down to telescope the thighs out. Similarly, you stop partway on the nose halves, instead turning them into arms. Pushing up a chest armor piece brings the head into view and the armor pieces lock around the shoulder roots. Officially, the blue shoulder root pieces should be pushed in all the way so that the shoulderpads are flush against the sides, but I prefer folding them forward about 45 degrees to bring the arms out a bit. It also makes the head look a little higher up, which helps (it could stand to rise a little more than it does, and some have fixed this by opening the whole thing up and loosening the screw holding the head on). Truck/Robot: Pull the rear half apart after removing the tank cover, swing the pelvis piece down and transform legs as above. Arms pretty much the same, only starting from the other side of the halfway position. :) And, of course, the head transforms the same way. Generally a quicker transform than the Airplane/Robot one, since the legs are already most of the way there. The guns can combine into one gun, go in the two hands, or peg onto the smokestack position holes. The baseplate can open up as a claw or serrated staff and be held in one hand, turn into secondary wings (see Alternate Melee Blade Storage below), or be left together as a skateboard. Robot Mode: 5.5" (14cm) tall at the head, 7" (18cm) tall at the shoulderpad tips. Yeah, he's got Armada Megatron shoulder action going on. Proportions are a bit off, with short upper arms and short thighs, oversized hands (molded into the inside of the cockpit pieces) and huge boots. The clip for the melee blade piece forms a weird belt buckle sort of thing... fortunately it's too high up to look like he's extremely happy to see you and your friend. The torso, thighs and upper arms are black plastic. The head is all dark blue plastic, but the "lightpiping" chunk is only painted at the front to give red eyes, while the rest of the head is completely covered in paint. Kinda weird. The shoulderpads, forearms, fists and boot tops are very light gray plastic, the bottom part of the feet is dark blue plastic. The main part of the head is painted in violet with silver face, enough paint that you can't see any of the original plastic color unless you take things apart. The violet paint is also on the shoulderpads and the forearms. A very light gray paint is on the abdomen flanks, belt and pelvis. The pectoral windows are painted silver, and a purple and white Decepticon symbol is printed on the center of the chest. The head turns [Later note: you may need to yank up on the head a bit before it'll turn more than a little], the waist does not. The shoulderpads are on restricted ball joints, which gives the arms a bit more range of motion, but looks kinda weird. The actual shoulders, which are fake wheels, are on restricted ball joints. The elbows are ball joints, the wrists are swivels. Ball joint hips with swivels just below the hips. The knees are hinges that only bend 60-70 degrees, and he has a bit of the Road Rocket Syndrome going on with leg proportions in general. You get some ankle articulation from the truck cab transformation hinge. In terms of visual appeal, the quad laser hasn't got much. It looks okay as two double-barrelled blasters, but the staggered way in which they connect looks about as bad as some of those combined Double Targetmaster [Later note: I'm told they're officially called Deluxe Targetmasters] weapons (i.e. Spinister). Plus, of course, while the quad laser fires a huge blast, it moves so slowly that anyone can dodge it. ;) The melee blade can open up into a single sawtoothed blade/staff thing 7.5" (19cm) long, although the grip is a bit awkward. It's more meant to be a jaw weapon held pistol-style. Alternately, leave it folded up and he can ride it like a skateboard or peg it onto one of his forearms (the truck mode connection tabs) as a shield. Alternate Melee Blade Storage: This isn't in the instructions, and is likely not an intended trick, but you can use the wings and "buttflap" piece to hold the melee blade in place as a second set of wings. You can see this at http://www.dvandom.com/images/tankorfix1.JPG and http://www.dvandom.com/images/tankorfix1.JPG Overall: Well, a triple-changer has to get at least some points for trying, especially since the three modes were picked in advance (i.e. they could probably have made a better triple-changer if not specifically trying to reproduce Octane). But the vehicle modes aren't as good as Astrotrain's, and all told I'd say the robot mode is about tied with the older Classics triple-changer. On the plus side, there's a bit more fanmode potential here, and I do like that they took a risk on a prop plane instead of Yet Another Jet. Dave Van Domelen, finally put away all his movie Bumblebees (there's a lot of them, and he had them all on one shelf) to make room for Classics 2.0.