Dave's Japanese Transformers Rant RM-21 Burning Beast Convoy Revoltech 019 Convoy Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/RM21-Rev19 Thanks to Wonkimus Major again, I have some more Japanese-only toys. BB Convoy was from a used toy resale store, but had everything intact (the twist ties hadn't even been undone). The "Original" mold for RM-21 was the Ultra-sized Beast Wars Optimus Primal, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Phase1/UltraW3 for a review. CAPSULES Burning Beast Convoy: A bit on the cheap-feeling side, and suffers some simply from having tried to reproduce a design at much smaller size. It does have a few nice show-accurate touches the Ultra version lacks, though. Comes with a Region 2 DVD with new CG animation of several of the Robotmasters characters in combat. Mildly recommnded. Regular Beast Convoy was 1554 Yen new, dunno how much this variant was new, but Wonkimus grabbed this one for me for 630 Yen. Revoltech Convoy: Well, the bad news is that it's the Pat Lee design of G1 Prime. The engineering is pretty good, though, despite my constant worries I'll snap something off in a joint. Mildly recommended. I think it was 1995 Yen. RANTS CYBERTRON: BURNING BEAST CONVOY Serial Number: RM-21 Altmode: Gorilla RANK 10 POWER 10 DEFENSE 10 STAMINA 6 SPEED 10 Avg 9.2 The techspecs are, as usual for Robotmasters, on a sticker affixed to the plastic bubble. Behind them is a silhouette of robot mode. There's a cut-out trading card as part of the backing card. The pictures on the package are all of regular Beast Convoy (Optimus Primal), with the group shot and story blurb on the back the same as for the Victory Sabre set (see http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/RM17). Same comic/catalog as with Victory Sabre. The instructions use line art with some grayscaling. Also included is a DVD, listed as Volume 2. This is a Region 2 DVD, so I got some help in finding and installing VLC, a program that will regionlessly run DVDs on my Mac (also have to reset System Preferences so that the regular MacOS DVD Player won't launch, or it tries to eject the disc if you refuse to reset the region on your computer). The DVD is about 12 minutes long total. It starts with a stop motion toy animation ad for the second wave of Robotmasters toys, then segues into what I presume is a summary of the Story So Far using still comic images and a lot of camera panning. The main feature is a new CG-animated piece that's pretty much just a running battle where various characters from the second wave come in and out. It starts with G1 Starscream versus Star Saber, then brings in Victory Leo, Beast Megatron, Smokesniper/Gigant Bomb, G1 Convoy (who actually refers to himself as "Gee One Convoy!"), and finally Beast Convoy. At the very end, Lioconvoy is seen in silhouette. The animation style looks like the Cybertron engine, but with no real time put into the textures, giving it almost a fan-work look at times. The distinction from BWII where beast TFs say "Henshin!" ("Change!") and vehicle TFs say "Transform!" (well, closer to "Turansuforumaa!"). G1 Convoy and Beast Convoy team up for the "Convoy Tornaaaaaaaado!" finishing move against Beast Megatron. The whole thing is about 4 minutes. Finally, several clips of fight scenes from season 1 Beast Wars (dubbed in Japanese, but with the original background music) round out the disc. This includes most of the final fight from episode 2, the Primal/Terrorsaur fight from Power Surge, and a couple scenes I couldn't place (Primal and Cheetor grab riot shields and run out of the Axalon to save Dinobot, Primal and Megatron duel with Megatron's arm being chopped off). No menu, it just auto-plays. And sorry, I have no plans to rip this and YouTube it or anything. [Update: someone already did, with fan-dubbing. Here's just the new CG from the disc I got: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERAD2lYB5-M; and part two is the next section, including Reverse Convoy and a much better quality of animation (plus this one has the still-shots intro with comic panels): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy4MpNSrkuQ (no guarantee the links will stay valid for very long, of course).] The robot mode is held in by four twist-ties. Two more hold the swords in place, and one holds the obligatory extra weapon that most Robotmasters toys come with (also, the scaled down shoulder missiles don't actually launch, so this compensates). The gun is packaged with the missile loaded, so I expect the spring has weakened somewhat. One rubber band keeps the chest from falling apart. It's not quite in robot mode, by the way, as the shoulderpads are folded down. Background: Back when Beast Wars first started coming out in Japan, the march of the exclusive color variants began, with things like Clear Convoy (http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/Convoys). Burning Convoy was one of these variants, made of clear sparkly red plastic with gold accents. So, with the scaled down Robotmasters Beast Convoy out there, I suppose a Burning Beast Convoy variant was inevitable. As mentioned earlier, this mold is based on the Ultra Optimus Primal gorilla from Beast Wars, but scaled down to Deluxe size. But it's not a simple reduction in size. [Update: I managed to find the scan I did of Burning Convoy from the BWII movie promo stuff: http://www.dvandom.com/tv99/1convoys.GIF (it also has Flash Lioconvoy)] Robot Mode: 5" (12.5cm) tall at the head, and considerably stockier than the Ultra version. This is mainly because they wanted to keep the same plastic thickness, so a number of pieces got wider to accomodate this. All of the plastic seems to be clear bright red that glows strongly under UV. The antennae and the forearm guns might be gold plastic. There's silver paint on the faceplate and forehead tablet, dark blue paint on the eyes, and then gold paint on the upper arms, chest, fingers, kneecaps, swords and missile launchers. There's also some red paint on the chest, in the gold section. The hand-held launcher is also clear red plastic, with a muzzle that's either painted gold or made of gold plastic. All this clear red plastic means I think he's spending some time on my windowsill with the Shadow Recon Team. The neck is a ball joint, and the waist turns. Universal joint shoulders, swivels above the elbows, hinge elbows. The hips are ball joints, the knees are hinged (no swivels) and the toes have that pistoned hinge thing going on. There's no "mutant head" involved. Also, significantly, the hands are open rather than in fist pose. The swords store as with the Ultra version, but don't stay in as tightly as I'd like (take your pick: bad mold, change to clear plastic resulted in tolerances being of, poor QC). They also peg into the open palms. The missile launchers are not spring-loaded, they have to be manually pulled up. Each one is a single solid piece, with the missile part painted gold. There's no stowed melee weapons in the forearms. Rather, when you pull up the forearm panels, little double barreled cannons based on Primal's cartoon appearance pop up on weak springs. The new gun has several 5mm (well, 4.7mm) pegs that Convoy can't use at all, plus one long thin peg that plus into a hole in his palm. The instructions imply that this peg is held by the thumb, but it's not, and he holds his gun sideways. It doesn't fire very far, possibly because of being loaded in-package for a few years. Graaagh. I barely touch the figure and a sword pops off and falls in the trash. Third time so far. I'm putting a piece of cardboard over the top of the trashbin now. The problem is that the gorilla butt flap isn't stopped by anything before hitting the swords, and pressing down on it even a little will pop one or both swords out of their pegs. Transformation: Pretty much the same as on the Ultra version, plus chasing down swords as they pop out a few times. There's no flaps over the missile tips, and no place to store the external launcher. The toes do fold up and away, and the robot heel spurs rotate to reveal longer beast toes. Beast Mode: In the anatomically correct gorilla pose (on all fours, although most gorillas don't rest on their fingertips like this one does), it's 3.75" (9cm) tall. The ape face doesn't lock into position, and ends up sagging forward a bit. Not much color in this mode. The fingertips and chest are gold, the eyes are blue, and that's it, ignoring the robot bits that show through gaps. Most of the poseability is also either lost or made difficult in this mode. There's no chest-beating gimmick. More anatomically correct than BWX Primal's beast mode, but pretty boring and not very pretty, what with all the seams and gaps. Plus, the ape face mold is kinda odd. This is definitely a toy to leave in robot mode. Overall: Aside from a growing temptation to just glue the swords in place, it's a decent scaling-down of what these days would be a $30 design, and I certainly can't complain about the price. :) Mind you, even at full price, it wouldn't be a HORRIBLE deal, but I don't think the implementation was as successful as the Star Sabre scale-down, even allowing for the higher complexity of BW poseability versus late-G1 brickitude. CYBERTRON COMMANDER "CONVOY" Revoltech Series Number: 019 Background: Keeping this brief. Revoltech is a relatively new line of super-poseable high-detail figures, mainly focused on mecha but also including some organics. As with Microman, there's some standard aspects (like the "revolver joints") and a lot of licensed properties (such as Evangelions, Getter Robo 1 through 3, Mazinkaiser, etc). The revolver joints bend on ratchets, 22.5 degrees per click. However, a friend with a (now-broken) Getter 3 warned me that the force required to bend them one click the right way is about the same as the force that will break them entirely if you bend them the wrong way. Packaging: A mostly solid box 7.5" (19cm) tall, 5.5" (14cm) wide and 3.5" (9cm) deep with a partial window on the front showing the figure inside. There's a dark blue band around it with white writing, mostly seeming to talk about the product itself, but also including the URL http://www.organic-f.net/revoltech/ (which seems to be about their "second generation" organic figures...although "Organic" is actually the distributor name, it's just that the webpage shows a human figure). The right panel shows off the details of the revolver joints, which are reminiscent of the joints Lego introduced on the Knight's Kingdom figures. The left panel has a grayscale image of the figure on red, with the logo and name of the figure. The top has logo and name, the bottom has all the legalese. The back panel shows the figure in various poses from static to extreme, and has a lot of text I can't read. :) [Later note: a reader with more Lego-fu than I have pointed out that the Technic Destroyer Droid and the Galidor figures had click-joints before Knight's Kingdom did. They weren't quite the same as the KK joints that have gone on to be used extensively in other Lego products, but they are certainly predecessors.] The box opens on the side, with circular clear stickers sealing each side. Inside is...a lot of empty space. The box is bigger than it has to be, presumably to look more impressive on the shelf. A bagged single sheet full of Japanese text is loose inside, the rest of the stuff is all taped to or inside the blister shell. The lower tray is black plastic and as deep as the whole box, while the top tray is clear and only about an inch deep. It's molded to keep the stuff inside in place, and snaps on rather than using tape. Taped to the bottom inside of the lower tray is a baggie full of spare stuf (Matrix, two pointing hands, one gun-holding hand). There are no instructions or techspecs or anything like that. Nor are there spare joints to replace any that might break (I'd heard that this toy came with extra joints for more extreme poses, but that does not seem to be the case). Figure: Sadly, this is the Pat lee design, with pinhead, overly large neck, and weird chest windows. It looks like he's wearing a turtleneck sweater or something. At least the smokestacks are long. ;) The figure is 4.5" (11.5cm) tall while standing straight up, and is a bit on the leggy side. I'm not totally sure what's plastic color and what's paint color in some cases, but it seems that there's plastic in red, silver and somewhat metallic blue. The head, fists (and spare hands), shins and feet are metallic blue. I think the pelvis piece is also metallic blue plastic, just almost completely painted over. The neck, upper arms, smokestacks, abdomen, thighs, wrists and the bits between shoulder and torso are silver plastic. The shoulders, chest, and forearms are red plastic. The revolver joints are all made of black plastic, and part of the ones used at the elbows poke out the bottom of the forearms. The pegs on the hands are also black plastic, but I don't think the hands themselves are black with paint, it looks like the two pieces (blue and black) were glued together on each hand. The rifle is gunmetal plastic, so the pelvis may also be gunmetal with blue paint rather than the other way around. Gunmetal paint covers most of the pelvis, the leg fuel tanks, the faceplate, the forehead tablet and the trim on the chest windows. There's white trim on the shoulders and forearms, and white outline Autobot symbols on the shoulders. There's red paint on the abdomen flanks, yellow on the belt light details and light blue eyes. The windows are light blue on top fading down to white. Aside from an unfortunate choice of designs to model the figure after, the sculptors did a good job, including how they made cuts in the shoulder armor to let the arms have full poseability while still letting things look smooth-faced in some positions. The following joints are definitely revolver joints, with a combination of swivel and ratcheting hinge: mid-torso (upper torso can swivel around or tilt back and forth a couple of clicks), hips, knees, ankles, elbows (the ratcheting on the elbows is pretty soft). Other joints may use revolver joint pieces in more limited ways, I can't tell short of breaking the thing apart. The head has some ball joint motion, and the base of the neck can turn and wiggle a little too (this is basically a double ball joint thing, not a revolver joint). The shoulders are swivels with a little wiggle room, as are the upper arm joints. The wrists are peg swivels. The Matrix accessory is gunmetal plastic with orange-gold paint on the sphere housing and light blue fading to lighter blue at the center paint on the openings. There is no place to store the Matrix, nor hands capable of holding it. Well, you can hang it off a pointing finger, but that doesn't really count. In package, the figure has fists plugged in. Of the three spare hands, one is a right hand molded to hold the rifle. A right hand points "cleanly" (just the finger and thumb out), while a left hand points more loosely (middle finger slightly extended next to the pointing index finger). Swapping hands takes a fair amount of force. And often, teeth. Overall: Decent design, mechanically speaking, if not aesthetically speaking. The Revoltech concept is nice, but I don't really see myself seeking out any other toys from the line unless I can get them dirt cheap. Frankly, for the price point, Classics Prime was a better deal in terms of poseability, durability and play value. Dave Van Domelen, notes that it's April 5 in Kansas, and it's been snowing for a couple hours now.