Dave's Transformers Prime Rant: Weaponizers Wave 1 Optimus Prime (Truck) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/WOptimus The Weaponizers look to be what Prime has instead of the Leader Class, and are called Weaponizers Class on the package (unlike the Revealers, for instance, which are listed as Deluxe on the package). At $30 they correspond to the old Ultra class most closely, but are nearly as large as Leader class. After some weighing of options (and consideration of my likely status as unemployed come September), I decided to just get Optimus Prime and leave Bumblebee on the shelf. CAPSULE Optimus Prime: Both modes solid if a bit under-detailed in the paint apps, and the transformation is simplified. But since the Leader class toys of the same size have been overcomplicated of late, I approve of this direction. And the execution is decent. Recommended. $30 price point. RANT Packaging: In window boxes the same basic shape as Voyager boxes, with Try Me holes to show off the new weapon gimmicks. At 12" (30cm) tall, 9" (23cm) wide and 4.25" (11cm) deep, the box is only a little smaller than the TF:A Leader boxes (the last time I bought that size class). As with most of the larger toys, they're packaged in robot mode. The box front claims "4 MODES! WEAPONS SPIN INTO ACTION! LIGHTS!" but the first of those is a bit...iffy. It's more like two modes, with weapons that can be left in or spun out. Art of the vehicle mode with guns out is in the lower right. The right side panel shows off the four modes: Robot Command Mode, Robot Weaponized Mode (guns out), Truck Transport Mode, and Weaponized Truck Mode (guns out). The left side has the bio and techspecs, while the back has large photos of the two Weaponized modes and an inset about the light-up gimmick. The bottom panel has a co-sell of Weaponizer Bumblebee shown in both Weaponizer modes. The weaponizer gimmick is set up so that you can't lock the cannons in place via the Try Me function, they'll always pop back up. Inside, the figure is held to a mix of cardboard tray and plastic blister by rattan strings, and the instructions are loose underneath the cardboard tray. AUTOBOT: OPTIMUS PRIME Series 1: 001 Altmode: Truck (plus Weaponized versions of robot and truck) Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: Yes Previous Mold Use: None Gimmick: Spinning weapons Function: Autobot Leader Motto: "Ordinarily, I find this world too...fragile." Few AUTOBOTS carry as much raw firepower as OPTIMUS PRIME. He does not deploy the full measure of his strength often, but when the fight against the DECEPTICONS is at its worst, you can rely on the leader of the AUTOBOTS to rain fire down on the evil robots. STR 10 INT 8 SPD 7 END 10 RNK 10 COUR 10 FRB 9 SKL 8 Avg 9 Packaging: Four strings hold the robot to the plastic blister. A rubber band holds a secondary blister cover over the chest, another wraps around part of the waist to disable the weapon storage lock, and a third keeps the pistol in the figure's right hand. The truck side panels with the smokestacks are spread out like samurai armor banners, but for proper robot mode they're supposed to be folded against the backpack. That probably made the robot unacceptably thick for the packaging, though. Robot Mode: A bit under-painted, and the light gray plastics look fairly cheap, but it's definitely Optimus Prime and it's satisfyingly large. The shoulderpads can either lie flat against the upper arms, or be flipped up to get out of the way. You can tell they were pretty ruthless with economizing measures to let this come in at $30 while still meeting safety standards, with the result being a toy that looks vaguely unfinished. On the other hand, one of my biggest complaints about the Leader class in recent years has been their tendency to be overly fiddly, with too many details and pieces that require higher quality control than Hasbro can manage. This toy clearly represents stepping back to make something more within their abilities. A bit simpler, a bit more robust. And it still has a fairly impressive gimmick. (As an aside, the process doesn't look to have been as successful with Weaponizer Bumblebee, which is gorilla-armed and suffers more in aesthetic ways from the economizing...it's one of those I'm leaving on the shelf even if I see it on clearance for ten bucks.) 9" (23cm) tall at the head, add about an inch for the backpack. His rifle (more of a carbine) is about 3" (7.5cm) long. The usual mix of dark red, dark blue, and shades of gray and silver. Dark red plastic is used for the chest borders, shoulderpads, forearms, gimmick reset lever and much of the backpack. Dark blue is found on the head, lower legs, some of the rotary cannon barrels, and a trigger button on the left waist. Dark gunmetal gray plastic is on the upper arms, hands, lower torso, hip and knee ratchets, and some hinges. Cheap-looking light gray plastic is used for the collar area, thighs, geet, rifle, the other rotary cannon barrels, and more of the backpack. The eye lightpiping and chest windows are clear blue plastic, and the wheels are black. Silver paint is the most extensively used color here, being on the face/helmet crest, chest window borders, mechy details behind the windows, smokestacks on the backpack, and shins. The trigger button on the left waist has the front of it painted yellow, while the belt below it is painted dark blue. The kneecaps are painted gunmetal. There's also two yellow bits on the abdomen. The total lack of paint on the rifle only emphasizes its cheap appearance, making it black or gunmetal plastic would have gone along a lot better with being unpainted. Unfortunately, it's a kind of plastic that takes dye poorly if at all...I stopped well short of boiling water because it seemed too soft to survive that, and I only got a very slight tinge to it. There's some other painted bits visible on the backpack, but they're vehicle colors and I'll cover those later. The head turns a little and can tip up and down some on a very restricted ball joint, the waist doesn't turn. Shoulders are smooth universal joints, there's upper arm swivels, single-hinge elbows and swivel wrists. (The forearms look like they should open up to stow the hands, but they don't.) Ratcheting universal joint hips, swivels just above the ratcheting hinge knees. The toes are hinged for transformation, but don't have the range to be useful in posing. The fixed heel spurs are long enough to support the backpack. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm peg holes on the shoulderpads as well as on the back corners of the torso top. There's two more 5mm peg holes on each boot. There's no 3mm compatibility in this mode. Weaponizer: The tab at belt level (with the yellow tip) needs to be tapped outward to release the weapons, which will automatically rise up and spin once this is done. Normally, a spring makes it snap back into place so that pulling down the central chest tab lets the weapons stay stowed, but a simple rubber band kept it pulled out in the package. To stow the weapons, pull down on a dark red lever that runs in a channel down the center of the torso until things click into place. When triggered, part of the backpack rises up on stored spring energy, gears making a pair of rotary six-barrelled cannons spin as they rise. Once the cannons have emerged entirely, they leave the gear teeth and can fall over to point forward, as long as the figure isn't leaning back even a little. The barrels are alternating dark blue and light gray plastic, with the base of the unit being dark blue plastic connected to a gunmetal plastic "shoulder" piece that doesn't spin. The barrels also spin while the weapon is being stowed. Amusingly, the figure can reach the lever and hook a thumb onto it, thereby pulling the lever down with the figure's own hand. It can also, just barely, trip the blue trigger to release the lever. When the guns are in the middle third or so of their travels either way, a red LED inside the chest lights up. The LED is pointed backwards inside the hollow chest cavity, lighting up the dark red plastic at the back. The way this is set up makes me think that the original design included a removable Matrix of Leadership onto which the light was supposed to shine, but that it was eliminated to cut costs (although it could well have been eliminated before the prototype phase). The light bounces off the back wall and up into the light gray plastic under the robot head, making it look like he should have applied sunscreen. The head isn't engineered to allow the light to go up through the eyes, though. The guns spin freely when deployed, for what it's worth. The barrels just barely poke out past the chest, and when they're deployed they don't actually cover the 5mm peg holes on the torso top corners, but there's not a lot of weapons that would fit in against them. Transformation: It's worth noting that this is one of those designs that cheats and has the chest windows not end up as the actual cab windows. Instead, they're stuck together in the headache rack area, along with a bunch of other "kindly ignore the kibble back here" stuff. Additionally, the leg transformation is particularly lazy, just peg the boots together and point the toes down. About all that separates that from the G1 Optimus transformation is that the robot forearms nestle into gapes in the backs of the boots and peg down there. It still just looks like robot bits, but at least it's secure. The heel spurs don't fold away, they're just a big chunk at the back...although I could see an earlier design having them unfold into covers for the gappy rear calves. That aside, there's really only one complicated part of the transformation (getting the arms folded up behind the torso) and one fiddly part (getting the side panels of the front end aligned behind the grille). It pegs together pretty solidly in both modes. Truck Mode: It's the same longnose semitractor that's been the standard truck mode for Optimus Prime for quite some time now, in the simpler color scheme used in Prime. Cab almost entirely red, with a little paint on the sides swooshing up to meet the blue rear section, and trim in silver and gray. Behind the smokestacks it gets increasingly kibbly, though, with the robot hands just resting between the rear fenders, the robot toes sticking out the back and the heels forming a big chunk. If you ignore the toes, it's 8.5" (22cm) long, about 50% bigger than the Voyager version. This puts it around 1:36 scale, give or take. The front grille and bumper pieces are made of the light gray plastic, with a gunmetal gray snap at the top. The only other gunmetal plastic visible in this mode are some hinge bits by the doors and the robot hands resting in the back. The center of the windshield visors and the diamondplate step sections under the doors are also very light gray plastic. The windows (front and side) are clear blue plastic. Silver paint is used on the flanks of the visor, the windshield trim, the smokestacks and the continuation of the lower edge of the sides (not a good match to the light gray plastic it's supposed to continue). Gloss dark blue paint is used on the sides to swoosh up into the blue legs. The lights on the visor are painted yellow, as are the headlights. The raised Autobot symbol on the grille is printed red with white border. There's no paint on the wheel hubs or side mirrors, but unless you want to get down to all the fine details like rivets, that's really the only sorely missing paint. If you have the legs aligned correctly, all six wheels roll well, and everything holds together solidly. The four 5mm peg holes on the legs are still usable now that they're on the rear fenders, and there's a grip on the front bumper (it acts as a locking tab to hold the backpack together in robot mode) that can hold a 3mm C-clip reasonably well. It's got a D-shaped cross- section, though, so the clips can only stay on in one position. The slot on the roof where this tab goes in robot mode can hold 3mm pegs reasonably well. The rifle stores in one of the hands, covering up one of the legs' big gaps. Weaponizer: Unlike robot mode, this one isn't completely automatic. The front grille snaps in place very firmly, so you have to pull it down yourself before triggering the cannons. This was a good move, in my opinion, because toys that have to leave parts loose for automatic gimmicks almost always suffer in terms of stability. The trigger button sticks up through the roof, and is essentially the other end of the robot mode trigger, but it's made of gunmetal plastic (there's a joining in the middle). You still have to use the chest-slider lever to reset it, though. I don't know if this was intentional or a happy accident, but when the LED lights up it shines through the bumper just below the headlights, being split by the robot head. The cannons droop a bit when deployed. Finishing off weaponizer mode involves plugging the rifle into one of the rear fender peg holes. With the cannons out, the full length of the toy is 11.5" (29cm). Overall: Yes, it's simplified to the point of being kinda cheap. But this helps reverse an unpleasant tend in overcomplicating the Leader class, and gives us a welcome intermediate between Voyagers and Leaders (which I presume will still exist in some lines). Of course, there's going to be growing pains on a new size class (Bumblebee looks pretty bad), but I support this direction. Dave Van Domelen, has been buying deeply clearanced Kre-O sets lately as well, including the big Optimus Prime, not sure if he'll review any of them. P.S. Did some repainting: http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/woptv1.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/woptv2.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/woptv3.JPG