Dave's Transformers Kingdom Rant: Commander Class Rodimus Prime (sports car/truck) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/CommanderK1 CAPSULE $80 price point. Rodimus Prime: A good update of the G1 concept with modern designs, but it suffers from widespread assembly issues and some dubious design choices that make it too much hassle to feel like good value. Recommended, but could have been higher if not for some design issues. RANT So, Hot Rod is in Studio Series, but Rodimus is in Kingdom. Another split like the Cyclonus/Scourge bit. Important Note: the trailer doesn't like to stay all the way closed, and I've confirmed this with several people. In one case (Ben Yee), more careful positioning of the cannon inside fixed it, but mine wouldn't close all the way even with the cannon removed entirely. My guess is that the very long metal pins on either side need to be placed with way more precision than Hasbro's factories can manage, resulting in a tiny amount of torque. The tabs on top aren't strong enough to hold, but I was able to make it work by adding a couple layers of Future polish. If you want to live dangerously, you can use superglue instead, but make sure it's dry before you leave the trailer closed for any amount of time! Packaging: Like previous Commanders, it comes in a non-window box due to the high odds that such a large window would get easily damaged in-store or even before reaching the store. A regular rectangular solid 13" (33cm) tall, 11" (27.5cm) wide, and 3.5" (9cm) deep. The front art wraps around to the left side, and has robot mode Rodimus wielding a sword and running through the lava fields at the base of the Ark's volcano, with his truck mode to the left. The remaining sides stick to the trade dress style of other boxes. The back shows robot mode, separate car mode, truck mode, and call outs showing some of the accessories and the robot manning the battle platform (which clearly has AIRport connectors). There is no glyph, that space is taken up by a call out box. The instructions and Fate card are loose behind the inner cardboard tray. I got the Autobot Ark with the Fate "Autobots awaken in 1984" (they don't bother using the more obscure Cybertronian numerals, just regular "1984" digits). AUTOBOT: RODIMUS PRIME Assortment: WFC-K29 Altmodes: Sportscar, Truck Transformation Difficulty: 34 steps (robot to car), 8 steps (car to truck) Previous Name Use: G1, Titanium, MP (others are just Rodimus, or the more recent Evolution Rodimus Prime) Previous Mold Use: None Packaging: Five pairs of ties hold the trailer in the cardboard tray, two double ties on the trailer's cannon rig, two pairs on the car, and one pair around the baggie holding the rest of the accessories. Two long rubber bands keep the car from popping apart. The accessories bag has the sword, rifle, a clear blue version of Omega Supreme's Fire Blast set, and rigid clear blue plastic smokestack smoke and Matrix flash. The Matrix itself is stored inside the car. (Why a sword? It's likely a reference to the Sword of Primus from the ReGeneration One comic.) The package renders show the smoke pieces as light clear gray, but the actual toy has them painted almost entirely black. The trailer is packaged in a flattened mode that's not quite what the instructions want for battle station mode. Note, while packaged in the car mode, it either shakes apart a bit in transit or was never quite transformed properly in the factory. I couldn't get all the seams flush or all the tabs to stay in just messing with it right out of the box, but when I transformed to robot mode and back to car mode, it was a lot more solid. Robot Mode: Fairly stable once you figure out all the tricks of transformation, although the back of the right boot won't stay locked down on mine. Still, it's a pretty good representation of the character. The backpack is a bit bulkier than the "Romita-ized" animation design, and the exhaust cannons on the arms aren't quite the right shape, but those are minor quibbles. They get the colors almost completely right, although they have to use a LOT of paint to manage it. The main missing color is on the wheel hubs, which are unpainted rather than being silver as in the animation model (and yeah, the trailer also lacks painted hubs). A minor difference is found in the pelvis, which is unpainted and doesn't try to manage the two-tone effect the animation did, although the lines are molded for it. Oh wait... they DID paint those parts, it's just not apparent under normal light levels, because the paint is so close to the shade of the plastic. Finally, while the animation model was a bit inconsistent on the "grown up Hot Rod" face design, sometimes making him look as old as Kup, this toy strikes a nice balance. He does have a touch of "bags under the eyes," but leadership was always a real drag for him. 6.5" (17cm) tall at the head, 7" (18cm) at the tops of the wing piece, in the classic red, orange, yellow, black, and some silver. Thing is, there's no yellow plastic in this toy. And while there's some orange plastic in the trailer, there's none in the robot. LOTS of paint. Dark red plastic is used for the torso (absent a few internal hinges), upper arms, head, forearms, pelvis, thighs, and vehicle bits mostly hidden inside the boots. A slightly lighter and more giving red plastic is used for the elbow joints, shoulder joints, some panels near the elbows and a few bits inside the torso. Light silvery gray plastic on the hands, wrists, neck, some struts inside the torso, hip joints, and the knee joints. Black is used on the wheels, the boots, the socket inside each forearm from the elbows, a hinge in the forearm panels, and the weapons other than the sword's 5mm peg. The entire wing on the back and the roof part of the backpack are made of clear medium blue plastic. It took a little careful paint scraping on a section that's only visible during transformation, but the arm pipes are black plastic. (I didn't have to scrape the thighs, removing a screw showed the underlying plastic well enough.) So much orange and yellow paint. Almost the entire wing is painted yellow, and it's fairly thick. There's also yellow (more likely printed than painted) on the chest flames, and yellow painted on the headlights on the abdomen and the details on the tops of the forearms. Orange paint is found on the chest and outer collar, completely covering the thighs, and down the centerline of the wing. Silver paint covers the arm pipes, the face, the helmet tablet, and the headlight-like details on the tops of the shoulders. The blade of the sword is also painted silver. The eyes are painted metallic blue, a red Autobot symbol is printed on the sternum, and a black line is printed between the yellow and orange on the chest. And then there's the red paint. The almost invisible, slightly warmer red paint that's on much of the abdomen and the helmet front. It's only really visible under really bright light ("tactical flashlight" levels or sunlight) or under UV. They really should've dropped the red paint apps and used the budget to make the wheel hubs silver. Ah well, painting the hubs shouldn't be too hard for any reasonably crafty owner. Inside the torso, the Matrix holder area is painted silver. Loads of articulation. The head is connected to the top of the neck by a ball joint, and the neck itself is on a hinge that can rock forwards and backwards. The waist is a smooth swivel. The shoulders are universal joints plus the roots inside the torso are on transformation swivels that do not seem intended to be locked in place. Double hinge elbows with a swivel in between the two hinges, which gives a better range of motion than the usual bicep swivel. The wrists are universal joints that can rotate freely around swivels and also bend inwards about 45 degrees on hinges. The index fingers have two hinges each (one hinge is kinda in the middle of the finger rather than at either regular joint), and the rest of fingers share those two hinges. Thus, the hand can go from flat to a "closed but with the trigger finger poking out a bit" configuration. (The thumbs do not move, and the 5mm sockets on the hands depend on the thumbs not moving.) The hips are universal joints, using the common trick of having part of the pelvis move with the upper leg, plus flaps on the sides that get out of the way if the legs kick up to the sides. There's swivels where the orange thigh pieces connect to the pelvis-as-hip pieces. The knees are double hinges (they don't bend 180 degrees for car mode, rather you get a collapsing action similar to a lot of Combiner Wars limbs), the ankles have dual hinges (side to side at the instep, forwards and backwards at the front of the shin), plus the toes can fold down for that Don Martin look. The chestplate folds down on a hinge, and there's a hinge near the sternum so that the chestplate can bend in a bit to solidly press into slots on the inner torso. The Matrix itself is held in pretty firmly. It's not the same as the Studio Series Hot Rod Matrix, although it's similar in size and the fact that it's made of clear blue plastic with a lot of silver paint for the handles and gold paint for the housing. The openings are pretty small, the figure has to hold the Matrix by its thumbs, and that's tricky if you have the custom energy effect attached. The Matrix is an inch (2.5cm) across, and unlike Hot Rod's version the back side hole is smaller than 5mm so it can't attach to any pegs. The hands can hold 5mm posts. There's a 5mm socket on either side of the backpack and one in the center of the back-wing. There's one on the back of each boot, and on the underside of each heel. There's a pair of 3mm studs at the front of each arm-pipe section, but they're too close together to fit any single 3mm socket, they only work on the smoke blasts that come with the toy. No usable regular 3mm studs on the robot. The main rifle is based on G1 Rodimus Prime's Photon Eliminator, but with a hinge so it can fold in half for storage. Unfolded it's 4.75" (12cm) long and all black plastic, with two 5mm peg grips (the figure's flexible enough to hold it by both at once, but it's awkward), and a 3mm stud at the muzzle. It folds roughly in half, with both pegs on the back half. It stores decently on the side of the backpack. As noted earlier, the sword is based on the Sword of Primus from Transformers ReGeneration One, a rather forgettable Furman-written coda to his G1 run albeit with all the Marvel-owned bits scraped out. Just over 4" (10cm) long, with the blade part painted silver. The hilt is 5mm, but with a pommel at the end, so only figures with partially open hands can snap it into place. There's a 5mm peg inside the crosspiece and the root of the blade that can be folded out either direction to let the sword store on the robot's back. There's also two slots in the middle of the blade that go onto tabs on the underside of the car mode. While the toy comes with a lot of energy effects, most of them are just unpainted clear medium blue versions of Omega Supreme's energy effects. Unfortunately, the tolerances on these are iffy, several of mine have pegs that are too narrow so they sit loosely in a 5mm socket...particularly the biggest base unit of the combined blast, which is too small to stay in a socket. At best, it sags noticeably. There's a more rigid clear blue plastic burst of light that clips onto the Matrix, and some clear blue plastic smokestack effects that were for some reason painted almost entirely black rather than being done in gray like on the packaging. The smoke pieces can go onto the arm-pipe blasters, or onto the exhaust pipes of the trailer. The non-Omega energy effects have specific places to be stored inside a drawer on the underside of the trailer/battle station, and you can cram a few of the Omega pieces into that drawer too. The rest can store in the overhead compartment in the trailer, or in the many sockets inside the battle station. The toy really only has a use for Omega Supreme's tip pieces, to go into the battle station cannons and onto the rifle. I suppose some of them can be used as "squibs" to represent others shooting at the vehicle mode. And now, some pictures of Rodimus having his mid-life crisis already and getting himself a Harley. (It transforms into a robot, but not a very good one.) http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusHarley1.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusHarley2.JPG Battle Station: Okay, so this is more of a general class of ways to open up the trailer than a single mode. The instructions mostly focus on a version that looks most like the G1 trailer, but the designers clearly planned for some variations on the theme. All versions of this have the roof and sides of the trailer split open to reveal a ramp down the middle and a cannon with small blast shields mounted inside. The ramp at the front end (the back of the trailer) slopes up slightly because of how the various bits are positioned, and ends in an AIR Port connector. The rear of the station (the front of the trailer) is just sort of there, with minimal play value. However, you can fold the back end open to reveal an extra area for Micromasters and other small figures to stand, or to mount weapons. The rear trailer door can also be left vertical to act as a gateway into the battle station. In the G1-style configuration, it is 7.25" (18.5cm) wide, 11.5" (29cm) long, and with the cannon raised it's a total of 7" (18cm) tall not counting the handles being raised or the barrels being elevated. If you fold out the rear deck, the length increases to 13.75" (35cm). It's in mostly the same colors as the robot, but without any blue (unless you count the Fire Blasts). There's actual orange plastic for the underbody and part of the rear deck, silvery gray on the ramp down the middle and some bits at the back ends of the side walls. The rest of the side walls, the front "gate" and the cap of the rear deck are dark red plastic. Dark red plastic is also used for a storage drawer on the underside (mainly meant to hold the Matrix energy effect and the smoke effects, but you can cram some of the Omega Supreme Fire Blasts into it too). Black plastic is used on the wheels, AIR Port tabs, and almost the entire cannon (the peg on the bottom and a tripod leg are silvery gray plastic). While there's paints visible here, they're all meant for trailer mode, or are on the cannon (see below). There are a LOT of 5mm sockets, really more than you could hope to use. There's one on the ramp meant for the cannon, with four more around it in a "5 on a six-sided die" pattern, and seven more behind it in two lines of three with a single one in the middle up against the rear deck (too close to the deck to let the cannon mount in that spot). Each of the side panels has 11 deep 5mm sockets and two very shallow ones scattered throughout on the upwards-facing side, and then there's trailer mode roof sockets accessible on the side walls (two on the driver's side, one on the passenger side). If you open up the rear deck, there's four more 5mm sockets inside that on the red plastic part. There's a bunch more that are meant for trailer mode and they're mostly or fully blocked in this mode. Note, the ramp is the perfect width for the car to drive on once you remove the cannon. Cannon: There's enough details here to merit giving it its own section. Rather than just have it be a plug-in accessory with no independent existence (the G1 version is screwed in place), this is removable and designed with treads on the bottom and even a little kickstand of sorts so that it can rest stably on a flat surface independent of the trailer. Other than the treaded base, it's a fairly faithful update of the G1 cannon, with the main differences being the black plastic used on the main support, and the cannons being painted silver instead of being gray plastic. The blast shields are on pinned hinges, so they can't get lost like the G1 cannon's often were. Folded down with the kickstand down, it looks almost like a trailer for a Micromaster cab to pull...and there's a 5mm peg in the right place to connect to a tiny tractor. (I tried using the Powertrain truck, but it's a little too short horizontally to work even if I added a 5mm hole in back. The cannon can rest on the heel spurs, though, as seen in this picture: http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusCannon1.JPG ) On the other hand, the tab that lets you pull the kickstand down is just the right size and distance from the 5mm peg that it fits onto Rodimus's wing, http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusCannon2.JPG so who can say? Well, the designers, but I don't have access to them. As a trailer it's 5.25" (13cm) long, and standing up as a cannon tower it's 5.75" (14.5cm) tall including the handles with the barrels horizontal. Other than the kickstand and the fold down peg on the underside of the treads, it's all black plastic. The only paint is silver on the barrels, and the muzzles are left unpainted with an airbrush-like fade to make it look like they're carbon-scored from firing. The lower hinge between the tread unit and the main shaft is a ratcheting hinge that goes from 90 degrees backwards (flat) to 45 degrees forwards. The top hinge is smooth, and can go from straight down (flat mode) to about 75 degrees up...and it swivels. That's important, because all the fiddling around I've been doing trying to figure out the purpose of that peg on the underside of trailer mode? I think it's supposed to let the robot mode wear it as a backpack! It fits perfectly. http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusCannon3.JPG Anyway, the handles are on swivels, and the blast shields are pinned hinges. The barrels end in 5mm sockets for the blue Fire Blasts, there's a 5mm peg on the back of the main shaft just below the cannon, and the fold-down peg on the underside for attachment to the battle station. The handles are only about 4.5mm in diameter, they're meant to be a bit loose so that fists can be slid on and off. There's a bunch of other holes, including screw holes, but none of them are 5mm or 3mm in diameter. While it looks like it should need the peg on the underside to stay upright, the tread base is heavier than the cannon top, so it's not too hard to get it to stand on its own. Transformations: UGH, the little panels that fold out from inside the chestplate to fill out the front end really needed pins, but I guess they used up the pin budget on the hands. They basically pop off at the slightest provocation, regardless of whether you're transforming to vehicle mode or to robot mode. Easily the most annoying aspect of the toy. Since all they do is cover up the tops of the shoulders, I'm tempted to just remove them, stick 'em in a baggie, and stuff 'em in the battle station's storage drawer. One not automatically apparent thing you need to do is curl in the index finger all the way, but leave the rest of the palm flat, to fit around some other bits. It is not easy to get the fingertip in all the way. Another inobvious bit is that there's a joint that lets the arms and shoulder struts rotate 180 degrees without the legs or upper body rotating (the waist does still need to rotate, but independently of the arms, there's a short chunk in the abdomen that stays unrotated). When going to robot mode, doing everything about the chest in the right order is important, because a lot of stuff won't snap into place if you wait too late in the process...some joints can be just a hair out of alignment if you transform out of order, and no amount of force will make the chest snap down all the way in that case. On the fourth transformation I think I finally found the trick of it. There's a detail on the underside of the hood that has to be pushed into a gap in the black strut HARD before trying to do anything else, if you wait until later in the process it won't go in at all. http://www.dvandom.com/images/RodimusTransform.JPG might be helpful. There's a similar forearm exhaust pipe rotation trick to Studio Series Hot Rod, which might mean some communication between the teams, or maybe just convergent evolution. Similarly, the paint on the forearm part of the oval detail is not matched by paint on the folded around part. Folding the rear wheels to go inside the boots requires excessive force, and getting them back out again for vehicle mode isn't exactly a picnic either. The front wheels actually split open to push up into the upper arms, so they have to be rotated the right way first. Transforming the battle station into a trailer is comparatively straightforwards, but as mentioned earlier suffers from some manufacturing issues. For some people, it's the cannon blocking the roof from closing, for others the pins in the hinges are slightly mis-driven, I suppose some people have both problems and others. If your problem is the cannon, pushing hard on its peg to seat it all the way might help, or you might need to fold the peg in and have the cannon a bit loose inside. If removing the cannon entirely still doesn't fix the problem, increasing the friction of the tabs and slots along the top of the roof might work for you as it did for me. Some have had success heating it up while held closed, then letting it cool off while tied shut with string or velcro cable ties. Car Mode: So...credit for trying to make it work independently and not just as the cab of the truck. That's more than G1 managed to pull off, IMO. Still, it's really only meant to be looked at from certain angles, and it has a lot of bloat and "middle-aged sag". It looks less like a sportscar and more like a weird SUV that tries to look cool in front but just gives up and has two rows of seats in the back and lots of head room for the kids. Basically, it's a bunch of compromise made to hide the big boots. Also, to allow clearance for the black strut that gave me so much hassle in going to robot mode, the wheels are rather higher up than looks strictly good. The main body of the car is 6" (15cm) long, with the wings sticking out back another 3/4" (2cm). Same basic colors as robot mode, but the only black is on the wheels, the rear "bumper" (which is just the folded up feet), and the hinge between the canopy and the rear roof. The canopy itself is clear blue plastic with some red paint on the back bit around the hinge and the lower edge. Note, the hinge holds the back part on, not the canopy, and the canopy can't be opened. There's two 5mm sockets on either side under the wing, spaced so that both pegs on the rifle can go into them for storage (one folds over the other in robot mode). There's the one socket on the top of the wing, along with the rectangular slot that the cannon tab used. That slot is part of connecting the trailer. There's parallel tabs on the underside of each leg for storing the sword, and if you flip the robot toes up you can access the 5mm sockets to put Fire Blasts in as exhaust flames. Truck Mode: Once the trailer is folded closed, in principle just slide the car back into it, with the wings going through slots above the side pipe hinges, until it snaps in place. In practice, it might be a little hard to get snapped, and the car could pop apart slightly. Most of the flaws of the car mode are either hidden or look okay in the context of the truck. And the alignment of the front wheels of the trailer slightly behind the car's rear wheels looks plausibly like there's a three-axle tractor pulling a trailer with only one rear axle. Oh, and the side pipes have hinged parts so that when the sides fold down for battle station mode, they don't snap off, since otherwise they'd be forced inwards against the front end. The entire thing, not counting Fire Blasts used as exhaust flames, is 12.5" (32cm) long. There's a bit of orange plastic visible under the front end of the trailer, and the bottom bit holding the wheels is also orange plastic. The foldable parts of the pipes are light gray plastic, while the rest of the pipes are just part of the red side walls. The lift gate in the rear is red plastic with clever fake hydraulics made of black plastic hinges and metal pins on sliding slots. The ramp inside is light gray plastic with a dark red plastic reinforcing bit (that also provides a gripping location to open the ramp) and a black plastic AIR Port. While the ramp is wide enough for the car in battle station mode, it will not store the car in trailer mode. The interior is 2.5" (6cm) wide by a little under 2" (5cm) tall, if you remove the cannon there's enough room for a narrow enough Deluxe car. Five to six inches (12-15cm) long, depending on how it deals with the front and back shapes. Studio Series Hot Rod won't fit due to the back wing, but the Earthrise and Siege "Not-Suns" like Prowl do fit. (Siege Ironhide almost does, you could probably make it work by closing the trailer halves around him, but he won't fit all the way in the proper way.) Kup would probably fit, but I really don't want to transform him again, it's not worth the bother. There's big orange and yellow flames with black borders between colors painted along the sides, although the car's wing bits poking out in the middle of the orange part of the flames does spoil (no pun intended) the effect a bit. The roof has chunks of orange and yellow paint in a blocky 80s sort of deal, with a red Autobot symbol printed on the driver's side of the orange block, chin pointed forwards. The pipes are painted silver, and on the hinged parts the paint gradually goes away so it's not super obvious that the back sides aren't painted. There's dark red trapezoids painted on the sides between the axles. Interestingly, there's a compartment over the "cab" that folds open and can hold some small stuff (like the rifle if you're careful, or some of the extra Fire Blasts), and there's no mention of it in the instructions. The drawer under the trailer is in the instructions, but even if you take out the smoke blasts and attach them to the pipes, there's not enough space for the biggest chunks of the Omega Surpreme Fire Blast. (It really feels like they were tossed in as an afterthought, because they put so much effort into finding places to store the new pieces, and none for the redeco blasts. The storage drawer can be removed, and has two 5mm sockets inside that don't seem to be used for anything in particular, I guess you could call it an attack boat and mount some guns on those sockets. They're side-by-side rather than on the centerline, so just mounting one gun looks off-kilter. There isn't enough clearance to mount the cannon in either of the sockets. The two 5mm sockets on the back are meant to be used for Fire Blasts as thrusters. Other than the drawer, there's a lot of connection points, but annoyingly none of the 5mm sockets are properly spaced to let you mount the rifle solidly. The rear peg is longer than the front, so it can still sit fine on a single hole, but it's still frustrating that there's several paired sockets that are not quite the right separation to accept both. (Two sockets on the inside in battle station mode are the right separation, but you can't close up the trailer with the rifle there.) One 5mm socket on the centerline of the roof near the back, a pair side by side near the front of the roof, one on each side near the back of the red wall, three on each side of the orange part (two behind the red trapezoid and close together, one ahead), two on the back of the drawer as mentioned. None on the actual ramp, so they missed an opportunity to have a smaller figure manning a gun that sticks out the back of the trailer. The front pair of 5mm sockets on the car's sides are sort of accessible, but there isn't enough clearance to put the rifle on one. There's a single 3mm stud on the center pipe on each side for attaching the smoke effects (which are so black that it looks like Rodimus is one of those jerks who deliberately burns oil in order to belch black smoke). No other 3mm studs for impact effects. Overall: It's kind of frustrating when an expensive toy does a lot of things right, but then drops the ball on a few little things and it sucks so much of the fun out of the toy. The lack of paint on the wheel hubs is minor and easily fixed. The trailer issues are bigger, and something people shouldn't have to repair after spending $80 on a toy. And those stupid flaps that go over the shoulder tops should have been pinned or just omitted, they're virtually guaranteed to get lost. This would be a strongly recommended toy if not for these issues, especially given some of the nifty undocumented features. But the flaws are too endemic to discount. Dave Van Domelen, started this review as the last significant thing in the review pile, now the pile is overflowing again, yay.