Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe Wave 2 Autobot Jazz (Pontiac Solstice) Lockdown (Lamborghini Aventador) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe2 I wasn't sure I was going to get any more Studio Series after some disappointing wave 1 stuff, but the track record of Studio Series is much better than Cyberverse, so I grabbed these two when I saw them. Assortment ships with more of Bumblebee (bleh) and Stinger (decent). It's worth noting that Jazz got a LOT of toys, including ones released for movies he wasn't even in, and I don't think they really got it right until the Human Alliance version (although the retooled battle damage version of the original mold did improve on some of the major shortcomings of that mold). Other than the Tiny Titans, we didn't get any Lockdowns for The Last Knight, although some of the Hot Rod exclusives were retools of Lockdown toys from Age of Extinction. CAPSULES $20 price point. Autobot Jazz: Really good design in both modes, looks good...except they got cocky on the manufacturing tolerances that they assumed, and there's a very good chance you'll get one that can't quite close all the panels in vehicle mode. So, only a qualified Recommended, when it could have been strongly recommended if only they'd tweaked the fit to better handle bad assembly. [Update: it turns out that there's an undocumented, not very obvious, and very hard to do even when you know it's there step in transformation that lets everything fit. Still standing on my knock-down from strongly recommended, because the peg actually hurts more than helps due to the difficulty in getting it in place.] Lockdown: Not as interesting a design, and hampered by being a shellmaster, but mostly executed in a competent fashion. Recommended, but I prefer Jazz. RANTS Packaging: Same style as wave 1. Cosells on the boxes include Bumblebee and Stinger in addition to whichever is the other new one in the wave. AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT JAZZ Assortment: 10 Altmode: Pontiac Solstice (licensed) Transformation Difficulty: 19 steps Previous Name Use: Yes Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Movie 1 Scene: Mission City Battle AUTOBOT JAZZ brings all he's got to defeat the DECEPTICONS! You might say he doesn't do anything...by half measures. (sunglasses, sunset, yyyyyyyyeah!) Packaging: 5 ties on the robot, one on the shield-gun. The instructions are taped to the backdrop, which isn't exactly good for them since they're not in a bag. The backdrop has another downtown skyscraper scene with burning cars and explosions. Maybe the same as on Ratchet, I didn't keep any of the packaging. Yes, sacrilege, but I wasn't impressed enough by the physical design of the backdrops to want to use or even keep them. Robot Mode: Definitely on the short side for a Deluxe, but nicely detailed and pretty on-model. Unfortunately, that means the weird spindly hands. Fortunately, the left hand has the fingers curled into two sides so that the left hand can hold 5mm pegs. There's a fair amount of vehicle folded up on the backpack, but a respectable amount still makes up parts of the robot mode as well. The chest really is the front end of the car, but the center part is spun around to be right side up even though the hood is on the underside tucked into the spine. Only 4.75" (12cm) tall, bigger than Legend or Scout classes but on the petite side for a Deluxe, in mostly silvery gray and dark gray with some accents in blue and gold. It's hard to be sure about some of the plastic colors, because several parts are totally coated in matte silver paint. The head's visor, the shoulders, and the main roof piece on the back are made of clear light blue plastic. Rigid dark gray plastic is used on the rest of the head, the torso top surface, the heel spurs, and the forearms. A softish but not rubbery dark gray plastic makes up a clip inside the abdomen, the shoulder struts, the elbow, the wheels (on shoulders and heels), the hands, the hips, the knees, the upper calves, and the grip end of the shield gun. (I may have guessed wrong on one or two gray parts in terms of which sort of gray plastic is in use.) I think the rest of the toy is silvery light gray plastic. Matte silver is the predominant paint, covering most of the shoulders, forearms, chest front, helmet front, and boot sides. There's dark gray paint on the chest grille and around-the-headlights parts, the abdomen, and some vents on the upper arms and forearms. There's some pale gold paint on the cannon barrels and the shing front details. The headlights are painted metallic blue, and the Pontiac symbol on the chest is painted red. There's a molded place for a license plate on the abdomen, but nothing printed there. Nor is there an Autobot symbol. A small Reprolabel on the belt buckle area would work, perhaps. The head is on a ball joint, the waist does not turn. The shoulders have swivels that are shared with the front wheel pins, and lift up to the side on hinges. The elbows are dual-joint struts, hinge on top and ball joint where they connect to the forearms. The wrists are on hinges that let them fold away and reveal rectangular pegs that go into a hole on the end of the shieldgun, so that the weapon can be a transformed arm rather than a handgun if you want. Ball joint hips with swivels right below them, hinge knees, and side to side hinge ankles that bend about 30 degrees so Jazz can stand in a Kirby Pose. The lower legs look a little weird when bent all the way sideways like this, but it definitely helps with stability. The long heel spurs also help offset the backpack. It's almost as if they put some thought into the engineering of this design...unlike a lot of Cyberverse toys. The left hand can hold a 5mm peg, either hand can turn into the rectangular peg for the shieldgun. The shieldgun has a 5mm peg grip in addition to the socket at the end. Jazz isn't quite flexible enough to have the gun on the right wrist and hold the peg in the left hand, the door panel gets in the way. Transformation: The legs refold at the calves so that the bottoms of the feet are now the sorta-shins, and the original shin plates cover up the thighs. They lock into the unfolded roof and trunk piece fairly solidly. The torso opens up at a hinge (you can't split him in two, but you can make the robot look like it's in the process of being torn in half) and then rotates around so that the hidden hood comes to the top. The arms snap into the sides (and are hard to get back out), and in theory are secured in some tabs under the windows. The shieldgun folds in two and snaps onto the spoiler. It ends up being a very tight fit for everything, and I can't get all the panels to join up tightly at once, even after double-checking all the internal tabs and slots. It might be as simple as a bit of mold flash that needs to be removed, or a pin driven in a few degrees off true. I tried following the instructions exactly, in case I was leaving out some tiny but important step, but still no help. There's definitely not enough room for all the parts to fit inside, so closing up the seams on one side pops them on the other. It's entirely possible that the thickness of the silver paint is the problem. I scraped off a bit of flash (which is how I know the forearms are dark gray plastic), but that wasn't the problem. I feel like I need to do the dentist "bite down and slide" trick with carbon paper to see where the parts are actually running into each other. (Several minutes pass with disassembling parts of the toy to get a better view.) Okay, it looks like the top of the forearm pushes up against the fronts of the hips, and there's enough play that ONE of them can be shoved in far enough, but that pushes the other out. After I removed enough (very carefully) from the upper-outer-front parts of the hips, it fit better. http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/SJazzHips.JPG shows the rough cuts, before I polished it down, so you can see where stuff needs to be removed. I suspect that this was an assembly issue, that the hips on mine are just a tiny bit too far forwards of how they're supposed to be connected. Warning, this is slippery joint plastic, and removing any of it is tricky, even with a Dremel and a wide variety of heads. And the results are not exactly pretty unless you're very good or very lucky. Still, it's pretty solid now, I put the vehicle mode in a plastic bag and then into my lunch sack to bring it to work to review some more, and it didn't even have any seams widen, much less pop open. (Twice a week I have morning, afternoon, and night classes, with a fair amount of potentially dead space, but not enough that I want to leave campus and run the risk of being late returning.) [Update: turns out that a peg inside the roof needs to go into the 3mm peg hole in the back of the pelvis, and doing so solves the fit problem. Unfortunately, not only is this point totally omitted by the instructions, it's also very hard to actually DO. The peg wants to go into a gap above the hole instead, which totally prevents transformation from finishing. http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/SJazzFix.JPG shows the peg, after I had shortened and rounded it on a second Jazz. MUCH easier to get things in place, and the shorter peg still holds things together solidly.] Vehicle Mode: So, it's a Pontiac Solstice. Around the time of the first movie, a regular visitor of one of my neighbors had a Solstice, so I got to see one up close, and the previous toys never really worked...they all felt too big. Often it was a little thing, like making the hood or the roof 10-20% longer. The Human Alliance one came closest in terms of proportions, but the actual toy was about the same size as the other HA cars. But a Solstice is a tiny little coupe, low to the ground and giving the impression that it could be carried by two reasonably fit people. This is the first movie Jazz toy to really capture that feeling, because while it's nearly the same scale as the other Deluxes (which tend to be around 1:36, and Jazz is closer to 1:39), it's barely bigger than a Legends class vehicle. You could put this next to Power of the Primes Tailgate and they'd look like they belong together. A nice silver coupe with a spoiler and very little ground clearance. Only 4" (10cm) long and mostly matte silver with clear blue windows, dark gray wheels, and a few bits of red and very dark gray. All of the car shell parts are covered in silver paint, some of them are clear blue plastic while others are dark gray plastic. The wheels are dark gray plastic. The headlights and windows are left unpainted clear light blue palstic, the taillights are painted red. There's dark gray vent details painted on the sides and in front, metallic blue headlights, and red Chevrolet symbol at the front. No Autobot symbol in this mode either. The shieldgun is clipped onto the trunk with the barrels pointed almost straight up, and the grip part pointed out the back. A larger figure could in principle pick up Jazz as a weapon, and another jazz could plug his wrist peg into the gun socket and push his clone's vehicle mode around, I guess? Once you have the panel problem solved, it rolls okay on very flat surfaces, but there's basically zero ground clearance. Overall: I really like the design in general, but it has a major flaw in how the forearms ram up against the hips in vehicle mode. If you're lucky enough to get one assembled as the designers intended, you've got a great little toy. Otherwise, you have a frustrating modification project. DECEPTICON: LOCKDOWN Assortment: 11 Altmode: Lamborghini Aventador (licensed) Transformation Difficulty: 14 steps Previous Name Use: TFA, RotF(RtS), AoE, TLK Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Age of Extinction Scene: Enemy Ship Infiltration LOCKDOWN proves why he is one of the most feared bounty hunters across the galaxies. Or maybe he's a freelance peacekeeper, yes? Packaging: Six ties on the robot (including one that's a little tricky to cut until you cut the others and pull the figure partially out), one each on the sword and hook. The backdrop scene is inside Lockdown's cavernous ship, with another ship either taking off or landingin the background inside. Robot Mode: Interestingly, they eschew the head cannon in favor of a hook based on the TFA version of Lockdown's weapon, plus a short jagged sword. Or the Reveal the Shield version, if you prefer. He has a visible face rather than the target screen visor that a lot of Lockdown toys got. I get a sort of "Robocop without his faceplate" feel from Lockdown's head. Otherwise, it's very much in line with the movie design...dark with some silvery bits, lots of random metal shards, a few places with a passing reference to vehicle bits (the chest design is a warped version of the vehicle front end, for instance), and slightly digitigrade feet (there's heels, but they're made of vehicle shell pieces, and they don't seem to be intended as 'real' in this case). He can't really stand well in a straight- legged pose, the knees need to be bent slightly since the ankles don't unbend enough for flat-footedness. About 5.5" (14cm) tall and mostly dark gray (slightly darker than Jazz's version) with some accents in silver, pale gold, and blue. Other than the clear window plastic on the backpack, it's all some type of dark gray plastic, although there's some that's metalflake, some that's regular gloss, and some that's more matte (like the weapons and tires). It may be that there's no metalflake dark gray, but instead that the parts that become vehicle shell bits are painted that color, it's hard to say. The face and some tech greebles in the upper torso are painted silver, while pale gold is used on some bits on the abdomen and pistons in the elgs. The eyes are painted gloss green, and there's little bits of medium blue paint on the chest that I suspect are supposed to be headlights. The head is on a ball joint, but the collar built up around it severely restricts the range of motion. Similarly, the waist is a smooth swivel, but belt details prevent it from easily turning more than a little each way. The shoulders are ball joints on shrugging struts, there's upper arm swivels just below the shoulders, and ball joint elbows. There's a greebly detail on each bicep that's on a strut that lets it swing out of the way for transformation. The hips are ball joints with very stiff swivels just below them, the knees are hinges that can bend to about 90 degrees. No meaninful articulation on the ankles. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there is a 3mm port in the back of the pelvis. The hook weapon comes in two pieces, and comes apart kinda easily at the hinge. It's molded to look like it has a thumb that opens up, but that detail is fused in place. There's a sort of hilt guard that seems intended to make it look like his hand has turned into the hook. Fully extended (but not hyper-extended so that it's popping apart), it's about 2.5" (6.5cm) long. The sword looks like two blades spliced together and wrapped in greebles, it's more of a gladius in proportional length, a short stabbing weapon. It's 2.5" (6.5cm) long. Both are made of slightly sparkly dark gray plastic, and both have thin tabs near the hilts that go into slots on the forearms, which is how they are stored in vehicle mode. The hook is made to go on the right arm in both modes, the sword can work fine on either. Transformation: Lots and lots and lots of panel-massaging and collapsing bits and using the sword to push the roof back up after it collapses yet again while trying to get the panels together. There's little swinging panels on the upper arms that don't lock into any position, and they're easy to accidentally push into the way of where the arms need to go. Most of the car shell starts out folded up into the backpack, and while several of the joints are pinned, not all of them are. This seems to be an anti-breakage feature rather than cheapness, though. Unfortunately, one of the shoulder mini-missile panels on mine popped off during transformation, and that's a glued on piece. While it's hard to get all the panels in just the right spots, once there it's equally hard to get them apart. Vehicle Mode: The Aventador is a somewhat mode angular and sinister looking Lamborghini, making it appropriate for a villain. Other than the smoky tinted windows, the body shell is all metalflake dark gray, although it's not all the same shade, suggesting a mix of plastic and paint, or different paint batches. It has angular lines that seem to be inspired by stealth jet technology. At 5.5" (13.5cm) long, it's about 1:36 scale. For it to be the same scale as Jazz would require it only be a little shorter, about 5" (12.5cm) long. It's simply a bigger car. All of the windows, including the louvred one in back, are clear smoky plastic, and a lot of the upper part of the car shell seems to be made of that plastic. There's no paint on the hubs, but the wheels are all pinned, so they at least have that flash of chrome in the middle. The taillights are red, the headlights are smoky clear plastic, and the Lamborghini shield is painted gold (but no attempt at printing any of the smaller details on it). Ground clearance is minimal, but nonzero, so it rolls nicely on a flat enough surface. No connection points other than the slots dedicated to the weapons. Once all the panels are in the right places, it holds together sturdily. When the weapons are attached, they don't reach out to attack anything, they function more as shields or aerodynamic hindrances. But I appreciate them not trying to make them fit inside, because that could have gotten ugly fast. Overall: It's a decent design for a shellmaster with a Bay aesthetic. A bit frustrating to transform, and prone to breakage in the process. On the lower end of recommended. Dave Van Domelen, spent part of his weeks off getting ahead on prep so he could have flexibility in the case of emergency during the first week of classes, but since no emergencies came up he was able to finish this review at the office.