Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe Wave 7 #45 Autobot Drift (helicopter) #46 Dropkick (AMC Javelin) #47 Constructicon Hightower (crane) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe7 In Age of Extinction, Drift showed himself to be a triple-changer, but we've never gotten an actual triple-changing toy of him. At the time, a retool of an existing attack helicopter toy was sold to represent the blink and you miss it appearance, but now we're getting a dedicated mold. Similarly, Dropkick is a triple-changer, and the helicopter version of him in an earlier wave was pretty good. The wave is rounded out by another Devastator component, which I mainly picked up for the sheer weirdness of the "robot" mode. Note, Drift shares a few mold pieces (mostly in the legs) and some engineering with Dropkick's helicopter toy, but it's different enough I'll review it as a new mold. (The "Drift with Baby Dinobots" release was a slight retool of the TLK Deluxe in more movie-accurate colors with a few extras, and was an online exclusive I didn't bother with.) CAPSULES $20 price point. Autobot Drift: Weird but cool helicopter mode, decent transformation without significant part-popping. And it looks right in robot mode. Recommended. Dropkick: A bit shell-massage-y of a transformation, but a lot more solid in both modes than Shatter's muscle car in Studio Series. Pretty good paint job too, really only missing hubcaps and gun detailing. Recommended. Constructicon Hightower: Very weird robot mode, so a lot of whether you'll like it depends on whether you find the concept to your liking. Good execution of the concept, though, and pretty solid. Recommended. (Rank-order: Drift, then Hightower, then Dropkick.) RANTS Packaging: Same as previous waves. Each has the other two as cosells on the back of the box. AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT DRIFT Assortment: #45 Altmode: Attack Helicopter Transformation Difficulty: 26 steps Previous Name Use: Gen, AoE, PRiD, TLK Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Age of Extinction Scene: Autobot Reunion At the sight of OPTIMUS PRIME, AUTOBOT DRIFT dives gracefully off a cliff, converting midair into his helicopter mode to meet him. Packaging: The backdrop is a section of Monument Valley, with West Mitten Butte in the center...and judging by the Wikipedia page, I think the artist shuffled some of the buttes around and rotated them. Five ties hold the robot into the blister, one on the tail rotor, one across both missile pods, two across the paired swords/rotor blades. Either they tweaked the mold after taking the pics for the back of the package, or they accidentally shopped out a bit on the tail boom. Either is plausible...the bit is more of a spike on the pic and that might have required a safety mod, but the removed part is also black and might have fallen afoul of the magic wand. Robot Mode: Well, there's a bit cockpit section backpack, landing skids on the boots, and the weird arm thing that Copter!Dropkick has going on, but otherwise quite recognizable as AoE-era Drift, down to the fake sportscar front end molded into his chest. Losing the requirement to make the altmode fit a licensed look let them emphasize more of the robot mode details, such as the samurai "kabuto" helmet and the armor padding on the shoulders and hips. 5" (12.cm) tall at the head (the sword-like rotor blades that are part of the backpack rise up another centimeter or so) and mostly black, with some blue and gold and other details. At first glance, it looks like all of the plastic is black except for the knee joints, the swords, the rotor bits on the back, and the landing skids. However, the backpack, the outer faces of the boots, and the rocket pods are clear blue plastic with a lot of gloss black paint. (Weirdly, the rocket pods look like mostly empty tubes, having fired their rockets, other than a trio of larger ones clipped on top.) The swords, the not-swords sticking out of the backpack, the knees, and the skids are dark gray plastic. There's a pale gold paint on the face, the helmet crest, and the tops of the forearms. Metallic blue paint is used for the edging on the shoulder and hip armor, the border of the "toilet bowl" car grille, belt details, some squares on the shins, and the eyes. Gunmetal paint is found on the lower shins and the abdomen. The neck is a ball joint, the waist does not turn. The shoulders are ball joints on shrugging struts, there's upper arm swivels and hinge elbows. The wrists can bend in on transformation joints, but it looks weird. Ball joint hips, thigh swivels just above the hinge knees. The knees just sort of crack open, they have to provide a flat surface when bent double in vehicle mode. No ankles. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, those are the only standard connection points in this mode. The rotor attaches using nonstandard tabs, and at its center is a 3mm socket. While technically the weapons and accessories can go a lot of places, they do have official placements. The tail rotor clips onto the backpack (so that a 3mm peg can go into the back for a Tamashii-style stand), the swords have details near the crosspieces that plug into the hip joint stress slots, and the rocket pods go on the outer faces of the boots, with the larger finned rockets on the top. If you put the tail rotor on his left elbow, he gains a turbo hurricane punch. Also, while the instructions don't mention it, you can fit the swords into the backpack reasonably well, to reproduce the "back full of swords" look the original AoE toy had. They stay in better than the official storage anyway. Transformation: Definitely see the engineering from Dropkick, although without the need for a realistic altmode I think they made some minor changes here and there for simplicity or aesthetics. The tail needs everything in the right spot and pressed in to keep it from wobbling, some of the tabs are on the loose side though. The sword hilts end in flattened tabs to insert into the rotor, with the slots at an angle to make sure that all the blades have the same angle of attack. Vehicle Mode: Okay, this isn't any real helicopter I've seen, but it does seem to be pretty close to what he turned into in Age of Extinction, including the weird pusher prop at the end of the tail rather than a proper tail rotor. You can sort of wedge it onto the side of the boom end, but there's clearly no intentional "regular tail rotor" configuration in the design. My first impression from pictures was that they were going for a sort of Cobra FANG look, but it's clearly a full-sized attack helicopter with a closed cockpit, and not a one-man open-cockpit deal. So...whatever the movie designers were going for in AoE, the toy designers nailed it here. There's a little low-detail nose cannon under the chin with two barrels. 7.25" (18.5cm) long with a 7.25" rotor circle diameter. Even more black than robot mode, although the blue paint bits are mostly visible from below. The chunk between the tail boom and fuselage is dominated by obvious robot bits, but making them black does help. All the intentional paint for this mode is gloss black over the clear blue bits (entire nose, rocket pods). The only useful articulation is that the rotor spins. There's 5mm sockets under the wing stubs, intended for mounting the rocket pods, plus another 5mm socket on either side of the nose. There's no 3mm socket on the underside, but the tail rotor's 3mm socket is still accessible, if a bit of a torque issue for using a flight base. The center of mass is BARELY ahead of the rear edge of the skids, so on a surface that's even slightly sloped upwards it'll fall backwards. Overall: They cheat a lot with the middle of the vehicle mode, and it has some staying-upright issues in both modes, but it's still pretty good despite that. Worth picking up. DECEPTICON: DROPKICK Assortment: #46 Altmode: AMC Javelin custom Transformation Difficulty: 26 steps Previous Name Use: Movie1, BB Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Bumblebee Scene: Decepticon Arrival Arriving on Earth in 1987, DROPKICK disguises himself as a 1974 AMC Javelin and begins his search for AUTOBOT criminals. Packaging: The backdrop is the highly doomed gas station from the arrival scene. (Okay, the station itself survived, IIRC, but plenty of damage around it.) Seven ties on the robot, one on the forearm weapon. Robot Mode: Unlike Shatter, whose Deluxe Studio Series car-mode toy retained a few hints of jetmode, or Dropkick's own helicopter toy, which had a few car bits in robot mode, this is purely a car-based bot...if there's any helicopter kibble here, I'm not seeing it. It does have the fake rear bumpers on the shins, meaning it has two sets of painted taillights, instead of the Hasbro-standard of no painted taillights. 4.75" (12cm) tall in mostly blue and black with some silver and gunmetal. The car door wings and backpack car roof are clear colorless plastic. The head, hood-chest, forearms, fists, thighs, outer halves of the boots, the feet, and some of the spine/back area are darkish blue plastic. The rest is black plastic. There's some dark blue paint (decent match) on the upper arms and much of each door panel. The face, tops of the forearms, shins, and some tech greebles on the tops of the feet are painted gunmetal. There's black on the center chest, front grille on the chest, the borders of the doors, the roof, and it looks like some black bits of body shell on the calves are either painted gloss black or are highly polished. The center of the chest top might be black plastic rather than painted black, actually. Silver paint on the headlights and grille boundary trim, and on the fake turn signal lights on the shins. The eyes and the fake taillights on the shins are painted metallic red. A white 13 is printed on each door, and a white skull and crossbones (with additional hourglass sort of symbol under it) on each calf armor piece. Ball joint head, the waist does not turn due to how it unfolds for transformation. Ball joint shoulders on wiggly bits where the front tires aren't completely locked into the torso. Swivels just above the elbow hinges, and the wrists can bend inwards. Ball joint hips, swivels just below them, hinge knees, double hinge ankles. The wings have a few degrees range in their hinges. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there's a 3mm socket in the back of the pelvis piece. His "human water balloon" gun does not have any standard connection points, instead requiring that a fist be folded back to expose a tab that fits snugly into a slot inside the housing. The gun is just a single piece of black plastic 1.5" (4cm) long, it could stand some drybrushing with gunmetal and some energy glow inside the business end. It looks vaguely like it's made from engine parts. Transformation: Well, I didn't need the instructions except to find that the arm cannon is NOT supposed to fit inside the underside of the vehicle (it will fit and hold securely, but it's too big and the car high-centers). I did need a knife to get some of the panels to align properly, although actually following the directions might help avoid that. The only thing that came off was one wheel while I was trying to force something in the wrong way, a far cry from Shatter's fragile mess. The forearms unfold to get the wheels that are on the elbows all the way to the back, while the shoulder wheels are the front wheels. Some fairly complicated folding on the legs as well, but like Shatter there's a big unfolding backpack that carries almost the entire top surface of the car. Vehicle Mode: A licensed 1974 AMC Javelin (trademark currently owned by Chrysler) with a supercharger and jacked up suspension. It has some panel-gap issues due to Hasbro QC being incapable of meeting the challenge set by the designers, but the dark color scheme helps damp down the visual impact of this. Amusingly, they picked the last year the Javelin was made, victim of both the gas crisis and the fact that it utterly failed to meet the new bumper safety standards and AMC decided it'd be too expensive to get a possible 1975 model in compliance. One of the aftermarket modifications on this is a sort of pushbar that kindasorta compensates for the lack of a bumper. 4.75" (12cm) long, about 1:40 scale. Mostly dark blue in front and gloss black in back. The front end is mostly blue plastic, the doors and non-hood top surface are clear plastic, the back end and wheels are black plastic. In this mode, it's clearer that the blue paint on the doors is *slightly* different from the plastic color, but you need pretty good lighting to tell. The supercharger intake is painted silver. The intake vents on the hood, the roof, the various window frame posts, the windshield wipers, and the underside of the front end are painted gloss black. The doors have gloss black on the top edge (including side mirrors), bottom edge, and the part of each door wing piece that is not actually part of the molded door are also painted gloss black. There's a white 13 printed on each door, and the skull and crossbones over each rear wheel. The front grille is matte black with silver border and lights. The rear has silver and metallic red lights painted in the same way as the fake ones on the shins. Good paint job overall, really just needs chrome on the wheel hubs. No standard connection ports, the weapon just clips onto the spoiler. It rolls indifferently, it's hard to simultaneously get the panels to look decent while also keeping the rear wheels free to move. Ground clearance is decent, at least. Overall: Some frustration in transformation, but the lack of obligatory part popping puts it ahead of most Studio Series Deluxes (sadly). WAY better than Shatter's muscle car toy, that's for sure. DECEPTICON: CONSTRUCTICON HIGHTOWER Assortment: #47 Altmode: Construction crane Transformation Difficulty: 19 steps Previous Name Use: None (previous uses were just "Hightower," RiD and RotF) Previous Mold Use: None Movie: Revenge of the Fallen Scene: Pyramid desert battle CONSTRUCTICON HIGHTOWER combines with his comrades to form CONSTRUCTICON DEVASTATOR. It's worth noting that this is based on concept art, and the individual robot mode did not appear in the movie, just the vehicle and combiner modes. Packaging: Same backdrop piece as Scrapmetal had, in the Sphinx's pit with the pyramids in the background. Due to the weirdness of the robot mode, it's only kinda in that mode in the package, with four ties holding the somewhat mangled main part of the robot, and two more holding the crane separately. The grabber claw on mine was on backwards, but it's easily popped off and turned around. (Opportunity there for third party wrecking ball attachments.) Robot Mode: Okay, this is one of the guys who didn't really get a separate toy at this scale originally. There was the Megazord version (just vehicle and combiner modes), and the Legion class combiner that did have a weird robot mode, but not until this one was it really clear how bizarre Hightower really is. The high concept seems to have been "crane T.rex," with tiny forelimbs and big legs. The treads are extended on struts and fold slightly to become feet (Legion version just had tread-feet that rolled), and the robot head pokes out of a rollcage on an extendable neck. It has a big cylindrical butt made from the Devastator shoulder...it's like a super oversized winch in vehicle mode, with not-present-on-the-toy cables running from it over a truss before going to the end of the crane boom. Officially, the crane sticks out over the head, but if you want to emphasize the dino-nature of the design you can pull the crane out of its peg, put it in behind the truss top, and fold the truss down, like so: http://www.dvandom.com/images/hightowerrex.JPG Describing height is difficult given its weird shape and how arbitrary the leg positioning is. It's comparable to other Deluxes, but capable of taking up space almost like a Voyager, especially with the crane boom raised and the legs straightened. The colors are mostly black, dark gray, and construction vehicle yellow (Turner's yellow is close). The leg parts, neck, truss, crane claw, under-tread wheels, and combiner shoulder connector are dark gray plastic. The treads, boom, tiny forelimbs, and some of the rollcage are black plastic. Not sure what plastic is used for the head, it's totally covered in paint and I can't get it to pop off its joint to check inside, but it's probably gray. The majority of the torso is dull yellow plastic, as is the winch butt. Gloss black paint on part of the connection between thorax and butt. Gunmetal paint is used on the face and much of the chest area under the rollcage, plus on the core of each tread on both sides (no cheaping out and leaving the "insteps" unpainted). The tops of the hips and the helmet part of the head are painted dull yellow, clearly different from the plastic color. There's silver details on the torso at the hip connections, and on the top joint of the hips themselves. The neck has base and "elbow" hinges and ends in a hinged ball joint. The elbow hinge pops out really easily, especially if the lowest section of the neck gets a little stuck inside the rollcage. Each forearm has just a swivel at the shoulder. The shoulders are a mess of joints. From torso down: swivel, hinge, swivel, elbow hinge, two side to side hinges, ankle hinge. Also, the feet can fold as sharply as 90 degrees to give him spike heels. The boom pegs into place and if you pull the truss back it can swivel on that peg. There's a hinge at its root, and the claw is clipped on so it can swing forwards and back, but it's a single piece of plastic and can't close. No 5mm sockets, although the claw snaps onto a 5mm rod. There's a 3mm socket in the shoulder joint piece in the butt, if you want to use a Tamashii-style base to support a more ambitious pose. Transformation: Not too hard once you get the hang of it. The plethora of joints in the legs are a bit of an issue until you see how some tabs on the hips need to go into a common slot in the small of the back, and that lines almost everything else up. It's easy to accidentally peg the treads into the wrong place (combiner mode), but they're reasonably solid in the right place too. The hips are on panels that fold back to let those tabs go into place and fill the gap between the torso and the butt pieces. One tricky bit is that the post used to attach Scrapmetal-hand needs to be folded forwards so that the neck and head can retract enough to not be scraping on the ground. Vehicle Mode: A truss crane with a grabber claw (unlike the previous Legion class version, which had a simple hook, or the movie which assumed it had a wrecking ball to become one of Devastator's sight gags). It's not licensed, and it's something of a chimera (the big truss section is generally not seen on the shorter boom cranes like this, or ones that are this small). The driver's compartment is a pretty clear gauge of the scale, about 1:100 scale, give or take. Still, the truss does make it stand out from other crane Transformers. The chassis plus treads is 4.25" (11cm) long, the boom itself is equally long, and with the boom lowered to horizontal and the claw reaching out it maxes out at 8.75" (22cm) long. Same colors as robot mode, but less gunmetal. There's no red paint in this mode, and the windows of the driver's compartment are painted metallic blue-gray, and there's gloss black paint details on the front end and on the side ladders. The boom raises and lowers, but unlike in robot mode you can't free it up to rotate. The vehicle rolls okay on the tiny wheels under the treads. Again, no real connectors save for the 3mm socket on the shoulder piece. Combiner Mode: He becomes the left arm, with Scrapmetal forming the left hand, so even though I'm not picking up most of the Studio Constructicons, I can at least connect the two pieces I did buy together. :) It mostly just involves moving the treads up a bit, folding out the shoulder joint attachment, and turning the robot neck into a weird dangly bit by attaching the crane claw at the end joint...I think it's supposed to be the thumb. Overall: It is a very weird concept, but pretty well executed. I mean, there's been so many crane Transformers over the years, but this is pretty unique. Granted, unique isn't always good, but this one is. I do prefer my alternate robot mode, though. Dave Van Domelen, really having trouble keeping up with his review stack lately....