Dave's Knockoff Rant Transformer Shaped USB 2.0 Flash/Jump Drive Keychain Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/USB2 This is a bootleg reproduction of the Ravage/Tigatron USB drives, reviewed here: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/USB1 CAPSULE Transformer Shaped USB: For a bootleg, the quality's not too bad, although there's some simplifications and distortions. Still, given the low price, it's definitely worth getting as a novelty, if nothing else. $11.84 at DealExtreme (free shipping). They have 4GB for $16.79 and 8GB for $27.25, but I don't recommend wasting money on larger drives, for reasons gone into below. RANT Purchased from: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.33904 The photos on the site are pretty honest, a lot more honest than Hasbro's official product photos, but I'll stick to my usual level of detail in case the photos go away in the future. Packaging: While there may be a nicer display version for places where this is available in stores, I got it in a bubblewrap mailer. The toy itself is in a metal tin with display window...but the window's covered by a thin piece of foam, oops. If you put the top foam sheet under the USB, the box doesn't quite want to stay closed, but if you remove it entirely the USB may rattle around a bit. If you don't mind a little off-centered-ness, you can roll up the top sheet and stick it next to the USB drive. Then the box will stay closed and the USB won't rattle. The tin is 9cm (3.5") tall, 6.3cm (2.5") wide and 1.7cm (0.75") thick. A clear plastic window 5.2cm (2") tall and 4cm (1.5") wide is in the lid, closer to the top than to the middle. A holofoil sticker with the drive's size (2GB in my case) is below the window. While not exactly a travel sleeve, it's small enough to easily go in your pocket and the USB won't be damaged. This is one place where the bootleg outdoes the original, as the original includes no way to safely transport it. While the product description at DealExtreme calls it a keychain, it does not actually include a keychain loop. "Keychain drive" has more or less come to mean portable, rather than actually having a keychain connection. I suppose you could thread something through one of the front shoulder holes, though. Dimensions: Bigger is bootleggier! In USB mode, it's 77mm (3") long with the plug retracted, 33mm (1.3") wide and 13mm (0.5") thick. As a jaguar, it measures 14cm (5.5") from snout to tail tip. Articulation: Almost the same as the original, but more limited and missing a joint in the neck. Details below. Colors: Mostly made of matte black plastic. The forelegs and the two middle segments of the hindlegs are a slightly off-white plastic. All the plastic feels like pretty good quality, especially for a bootleg. The eyes (well, the eyebrows, see below) are painted red, and there's a blue movie-style Decepticon symbol on the back. A sticker proclaiming the memory size ends up between the rear legs in beast mode, leading to all sorts of innuendo potential. Especially if you bought the 8GB model. Function: There's no software included on this, it's just a standard USB drive. It's probably possible to copy the software over from a real one, but the sheer size of it makes it rather clumsy to leave in a machine. If you want to copy the desktop program onto another drive, you're better off just putting it on a cheap small USB drive. I had to take several devices out of my USB hub to make enough room to plug this toy in and verify it was blank, for instance. In short, it's just too big to be a practical jumpdrive. So get the 2GB version for the novelty, maybe load it up with Transformers soundtrack MP3s or something, but don't waste money getting the 4GB or 8GB versions. Comparisons to the original: At first glance, it looks bizarrely distorted and smoothed out. And at closer look, both impressions are quite true. USB: 18% longer, 18% wider and 8% thicker. It's about as stable as the real thing, at least right out of the box...can't say if the joints might get looser faster. But while the original is kinda big for a USB device, it can still sit next to other plugs in most USB hubs. As noted above, this crosses that line. Jaguar Overall: 27% longer but still only 18% wider, so this is a Longcat version of Ravage. Long Ravage is Long. Head: only about 5% longer, but the snout is wider and there's no fangs. There's no "face fuzz" detail on the sides, the eyes are surface dots rather than sunken details, there's only one "block" for the nose rather than a nasal ridge leading back to the eyes. To be fair, the top of the head has the same general detail as on the real toy, but it's flattened down by about a third. The eyes are painted on the eyebrows, since the real eyes are too narrow to get a cheap factory-app paintbrush into. This has the effect of moving his eyes foreward a few millimeters, making the head look more wrong than it actually is. The jaw lacks detail on the underside, giving him a weaker jawline. On the plus side, at least the jaw still opens, a feature a knockoff would normally omit. The teeth on the upper and lower jaws have been replaced by a triangular ridge running across where the teeth should be...the result looks like teeth in profile, but otherwise looks like he's gumming his prey. [Later note: once I removed the big blobs of paint from the eyes, I could see that they aren't brows after all. The eyes are molded as "outies" but the paint on them obscures their sharp shape.] Chest: 70% longer, and fused to the head. Loss of joints is pretty common in knockoffs, of course. The molded details are about the same, if proportionally smaller, but the collarbone details are missing. The action on sliding the USB plug in and out is designed the same (press in and slide), but it's a little balkier. Abdomen/front flanks: This is the roughly U-shaped piece that the chest swivels around in. It's about 45% longer, vastly simplified and missing the rear spine detail that stops the USB plug from swinging up. This is in part because the front jointing is put together differently and that blocking piece would get in the way of the head. On the real deal, the chest swings around on a hinge at the neck position. In fact, the neck joint uses the same swivels. The front hips are connected to the chest but not to the flank fork, and their joint is behind the chest swivel. But on the bootleg, the front legs are connected to the flank fork and the chest swivel is behind that joint. As a result, a larger percentage of the chest/head piece must be able to fit into the back during transformation, and the section is much emptier in beast mode. Extending the USB plug won't lock it in place, but it does at least fill most of the hole. Removing most of the actual material also took most of the detail, but the nicely detailed panel lines of the original are also just replaced by three grooves that widen towards the front in "parallel" (to abuse the mathematical term). Front Legs: About 20% longer in total, but the paws are a bit more lengthened than that. The details are similar, including the gap a the top of the shoulder, but they're just changed enough to avoid charges of mold- copying. Unlike the real thing, however, the joints are connected by screws. The real thing uses unremovable rivets. On the plus side, that means this can be more easily disassembled for customizing. None of the joints bends quite as far as on the real thing, meaning the toy can't *quite* make it into some of the sneakier or pouncier poses the real thing can manage. This may be fixable with some judicious cutting, though. Rear Legs: Also 20% longer, so at least the legs are in proportion with each other, if not with the body. The hip piece is a significantly different shape, in part to accomodate the fact that the beast head has to get between them in USB mode. Like the forelegs, they're held together with screws and lack a few crucial degrees of range on the joints. The inner thighs do not have a notch to trap the USB plug, because the plug no longer comes anywhere near the pelvis. Tail: Only about 8% longer than on the original, it comes across as feeling a little stubby, especially attached to the stretch limo torso. The molding looks like they took the original's tail and then attached it backwards, so the thicker end is at the base. Once again, the attachment is a screw rather than a rivet, and the tail can't flatten down all the way. [Later note: it's necessary to remove a fairly large amount of plastic from both the tail and its attachment point to get that last few degrees of flattening out.] Kitbashing Thoughts: The very simplest mod you can make is to remove the eye paint and repaint the eyes in their proper slots. This will make the head look a lot better. The next thing is to shave a little bit off from the various joints to improve the range of motion, but you need to be careful to avoid removing so much that it's obvious. As an advanced project, consider chroming the off-white plastic. The fundamentally messed up proportions of Long Ravage can't really be fixed short of a complete rebuild, though, so it's not really worth a whole lot of effort. Get it as a novelty, fix the eyes and a few joints, and leave it at that. Now, if they had a white version, I might get that to make a Shattered Glass Long Ravage.... [Later note: eBay has a bunch of the white ones as well, for $12 and free shipping. But I've put enough effort into trying to fix my black one that I don't think it'd be worth it to get a white one for kitbashing.] [Later note: Here's my finished alterations: http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/KOravage1.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/KOravage2.JPG] Dave Van Domelen, was just going to take some measurement comparisons at the office today, and ended up writing the whole review.