He was then, sadly, one of those characters who didn't get an updated toy - probably because he was killed off in the first movie and Grindor was killed off in the second - meaning he rapidly became quite archaic in comparison to later movies' toys.
Cut to 2018, and the Studio Series line reveals a new, Leader class Blackout figure, which came out in the same wave as Grimlock. Large, super-detailed, and vastly more accurate to the CGI, it seemed to be everything we've wanted from a new interpretation of Blackout... but is it all it's cracked up to be?
Vehicle Mode:
I noted, when I wrote about the original Blackout toy, that he was one of the smallest Voyagers in his vehicle mode. Hasbro weren't really keeping to any sense of scale back then and, to be honest, I'm not overly fussed by that as long as the mold itself is fun... which it was... but it just didn't do Blackout justice. This new version is surprisingly imposing. The first time I transformed him into vehicle mode, I felt like I was holding something properly 'Leader class'. OK, it's possibly not as massive as Revenge of the Fallen Jetfire, and definitely doesn't compare well with older Leader class vehicles, but it was very tricky to fit it into my (50cm²) light tent in such a way that I could get decent photos - most of those below include some of the sides of the tent, even with the toy pushed right to the back.
Like the original toy, SS Blackout is molded mostly in a sober bluish-grey plastic and, sadly, has very little in the way of detail paintwork. He has the USAF logo stamped on each side - not even adulterated with Decepticon insignias instead of stars - and small text markings on the tail. Only one of the side windows is painted in but, on the upside, the cockpit windows are all transparent, colourless plastic... Though, given the lack of cockpit detail within, perhaps this was unnecessary, and a tinted plastic could have been more effective. The nose of the helicopter features a painted radar dome, a Decepticon insignia just below the main window, and the '4500X' helicopter ID mentioned in the movie is stamped on just below. The engines feature coats of black paint over what may be the sand filters, toward the front, as well as a dark gunmetal paint inside the back ends, while the tail features a red and white stripe running around the upright part, with a protrusion on top painted white. The stripe on the tail is a bit of a sore point for me - it's a bit too large and it has the word 'BLACKOUT' tampographed into the white stripe, rather than having some sort of serial number written in... this just reminds me of the bad old days of G2 and Beast Wars Transmetals toys that had the characters' names stamped somewhere prominent.
The paint that's missing is on the extra three windows (or possibly gunports) on either side of the helicopter and the vent details below the rotor blades (some of which aren't actually molded in). The countermeasure units on the wings don't really need paint, but it would have helped indicate what they are. The windows on the sides of the cockpit are sometimes seen as coppery or yellow and were painted as such on the original Premium Edition Blackout toy, where this one leaves them plain. One possible explanation for the apparent lack of paint is the fact that a good portion of the cockpit area, being molded in transparent plastic, had to be painted to match the bluish-grey plastic over the rest of the chopper.
For the most part, Blackout looks incredible... but, being a TransFormers toy - even a comparatively large one - certain shortcuts have been taken. The main one is that the entire underside is open, revealing the robot's arms and legs, as well as revealing that the tail is basically going to fold up onto his back. Much like the original Blackout toy, a miniature Scorponok folds up and plugs into the underside of the tail, but this version does away with the floppy, unreliable cage that (barely) held the original, rubbery minion in place. There's also the strange omission of the doors... Granted, the area they appear on a real MH-53 Pave Low is taken up with an angled transformation hinge, but it leaves him with no obvious means of entry or exit for the crew, which is surely a bit of a warning sign that this isn't a normal helicopter.
This version of Blackout doesn't feature the nigh-ubiquitous plunger-operated, geared rotor blades - instead, they spin freely, just a little stiffly - you can't just whack it and watch it spin until inertia slows it down again, as with other non-geared helicopter toys, it actually has to be manually turned. The stabiliser on the tail is pinned in place and spins much more freely.
Aside from Scorponok, who simply plugs into the underside at the back, roughly where the cargo door should be, Studio Series Blackout comes with no accessories - no hidden weapons, nothing to plug in. Considering his size - not to mention his complexity versus Grimlock - it's not really surprising... but it tends to suggest (quite accurately) that robot mode will be similarly unarmed.
Robot Mode:
The funny thing about Studio Series Blackout is that, much like the original movie toy, he seems surprisingly small for his size class in robot mode. Depending on how his legs are arranged, he's approximately the same height as SS Grimlock only if you take the (fake) rotor assembly sticking up out of his back into account - his head only comes to about chest level, and stood next to an older Leader class figure, like RotF Starscream, he looks like a Voyager class toy. Going by size charts available online, Blackout's head should be only a little lower than Starscream's with the rotor engine/hub bumping his total height up by about a head.
That's very nearly the only downside, though - aside from his size, he's vastly more accurate to the CGI than the earlier, Voyager class toy. The upper body is less blocky-looking as the chest and head are not contained within a box of vehicle mode panels, the shoulders are below the head rather than pretty much in line with it, he has digitigrade legs with interlocking armour panels over the shins, massive, clawed feet (albeit sitting on top of curved plates of helicopter shell), and his rotor blade 'cape' is far more effective (except when Scorponok is pegged into his back). The backpack is still much of the rear end of the helicopter, but it's folded up because there's no geared rotor gimmick to accommodate, so it's more compact and doesn't act as a third leg, the way the backpack did on the older Voyager. Where Blackout fails to impress is in his arms or, more specifically, his forearms... which are made up of huge chunks of the sides of the chopper. They look OK - if a little chunky - when viewed from the front, but half of each side's fuel tank is hanging off the bottoms, and the sides are made up of huge panels of vehicle shell folded back over themselves. Sure, there's tech detail molded on to the outermost parts, but it's all unpainted and the forearms end up massively oversized. It really feels as though a better way could have been found to deal with these chunks of the vehicle, though that would likely have required sacrifices elsewhere to keep the figure on budget.
The lack of paintwork all over is painfully apparent, too. Blackout is molded in three shades of plastic - the blue-grey of his vehicle mode, the mid-grey of his rotor blades and a pale grey used anywhere there's a joint. He almost gets away with it because he's supposed to be a giant alien robot with a drab terrestrial aircraft as his disguise. Most of the Decepticons had a very 'bare metal' appearance in the movies. However, a little bit more gunmetal paint could have been used to highlight details on the arms and legs, where it's only been applied to his cyber-sporran and - bizarrely - the areas around the Mini-Con port-like details on the insides of the rotor assembly shell that unfolds behind the engine parts on his shoulders. Any kind of paintwork - maybe just a black wash - would have brought out all kinds of detail on the legs, or the fake engine poking up behind his head, where there are only a few touches of the bluish-grey paint on the front face.
Despite the comparatively thin legs and upper arms, there's a phenomenal amount of sculpted detail. The designers have been incredibly clever in creating a structurally solid robot mode with surprisingly little plastic. The legs don't just look thin, they're actually surprisingly insubstantial up close. The shins, for example, are basically just panels on the insides, with mechanical detail extruded from them on the outsides, while the thighs have detail raised out of a central core, and are fairly hollow on the insides. He feels worryingly light in-hand but, nevertheless, Blackout is remarkably solid and stable, the only issue on mine being one loose knee joint, and even that doesn't affect him too seriously.
As mentioned above, Blackout doesn't come with any additional weapon accessories, and the only integrated weapon is the use of his stabiliser rotor as a 4-bladed substitute for the rotor weapon he used in the movie (which was meant to be his 6-bladed main rotors, albeit somehow smaller, I believe). Since the entire vertical section of his tail has to fold up and plug into either forearm, it makes whichever arm it's attached to even bulkier. It's a decent attempt at using the available parts, and infinitely preferable to leaving it attached to his backpack, but it's far from being an accurate representation of Blackout's melée weapon, not least because the blades themselves end up too far up his forearm. Awkwardly, his hands aren't even oriented in such a way as to be able to hold weapons from other characters. When I first saw images of SS Blackout, I assumed he'd been given wrist-mounted cannons instead of hands, in reference to his one-bot assault on the SOCCENT Forward Operations Base in the original movie... but, no, he has two wide, flat fingers with a jointed thumb on the underside. The biggest disappointment in his lack of weaponry is that he doesn't even have the weird cannon that flips up from his chest in the movie... because the central part of his chest is actually the back of his vehicle mode's front landing wheels! Very clever... but the lack of armament loses him a few points.
One of the areas where this version of Blackout really shines is the head sculpt - a nigh perfect rendition of the final CGI in the movie in all it's multilayered, intricate, insectoid glory, where the original Voyager class toy featured a head based on the wrong version of the concept art. With the head molded in the same blue-grey as most of the helicopter parts, most of the face is painted over with a gunmetal colour with just enough shine to really bring out all the fine details of the sculpt. The eyes are then painted in red, and look suitably beady and menacing.
Scorponok Mini-Figure:
I'm not sure why I was surprised by the inclusion of a mini-Scorponok figure with the Studio Series version of Blackout - their seemingly symbiotic relationship was one of the more interesting features of the original movie (apparently a holdover from a time when Blackout might have been Soundwave), and this really seems like Hasbro taking a complete mulligan on the now 11-year-old toy. This version isn't much larger than the original, but it's better sculpted, better articulated, better painted... basically all-round better. Rather than having a weakly spring-loaded tail, this one is just hinged in two places (ball joints may have worked better) and features a joint at the base of each claw.
He's molded in a mid-grey plastic, painted silver and gold, with the eyes picked out in red. For me, the most impressive thing is simply that he's instantly recognisable as Scorponok, where the original kind of reminded me more of a rudimentary 'face-hugger'-type thing - not even the black wash made it look anything other than creepily organic. This one isn't a perfect representation of the CGI by a long shot, but the level of detail in the sculpt is excellent for its size and the paintwork, while basic, does all it needs to do. The legs may not move, and the shoulders may be fixed, but he claws are articulated via a rudimentary (and rather loose) peg joint, and hinged tail has a decent range of movement and can hold a position well. It's a little angular, and barely reaches Scorponok's head, let alone beyond it, to strike a target.
Part of me is a little disappointed that Hasbro didn't work in some way of plugging the Deluxe class Scorponok figure into Studio Series Blackout, but the simple fact that this mini-figure can be stored easily in both vehicle and robot modes (the only side-effect to attaching him to Blackout in robot mode being that his rotor blades have to be swung aside to accommodate his minion) shows that they put a decent amount of thought into the interaction between the two.
Blackout's transformation is actually surprisingly similar to the original toy in a lot of ways - the arms are still stowed along the undersides of the wings, the legs still run long the underside of the helicopter. The specifics and intricacy of certain steps are the main change, along with the removal of the troublesome and unreliable Automorph gimmick. No more must you collapse his torso down onto his legs in a very specific way, now you simply stow the front landing wheel, then push the floor of the cockpit up to reveal Blackout's head. There are a few panels that don't peg together especially well in either mode - witness the massive gap in the front of the vehicle mode's rotor section in my photos as a fine example (I've done better since, but didn't fancy trying to take another set of photos) - and transformation involves an awful lot of fitting panels around other panels in either direction. More frustrating than that, however, is the way the free-spinning rotor blades will always swing into position just where you don't want them at every stage of transformation - if only they could have been pushed in or pulled out to lock their position. My main bugbear is that the shoulders don't peg in very securely in robot mode, but I'm not certain this isn't intentional to some degree, as the main transformation hinge involved also serves to increase the range of his shoulder's movement. One thing I find a little curious is that the instructions suggest folding down his in-air refuelling pipe for robot mode, but that just looks weird and would obstruct the movement of his legs if the cyber-sporran wasn't already doing that - the larger part of that is supposed to clip to his groin, the smaller part folds down over the front as an additional means of preventing its movement, so his thighs already have precious little forward range - so I prefer to leave it sticking out. As an alternative, I wish there was a way of simply detaching it and then plugging it into his chest to act as the retractable gun seen in the movie, but it's probably rather too long for that, and making it collapsible would unnecessarily increase the parts count of the figure.
Whether Blackout's articulation has been improved over the previous mold is open to debate. The arms - with their huge, bulky forearms - have a better arrangement of joints, but less effective range due to the clashing vehicle mode parts. The legs (being properly digitigrade) and the feet (with a great range of forward/backward tilt due to transformation and more than adequate left/right tilt purely for poseability) are able to keep him upright in a variety of poses, though the curved soles of his feet are something of a double-edged sword. He's gained two articulated, intersecting panels on his shins in the name of CGI accuracy, but lost his waist articulation because the groin pegs in underneath the cockpit (behind the cyber-sporran) in robot mode, and the head is fairly limited in its range due to being essentially sunk inside the torso. The hands are disappointing - to have an articulated thumb, but no wrist articulation, seems very wasteful - and the lack of weapon accessories is baffling - the Voyager class version at least had sets of sculpted, non-firing missiles up near the rotor assembly in robot mode, even if it didn't have any of his guns. I believe options are already available on Shapeways, for those who feel the same as me.
I'm honestly very, very impressed with Studio Series Blackout. That he's somehow conspired to be huge, and yet still too small compared to other figures in the line is baffling, and the lack of robot mode paintwork is disappointing, but the amount of care, attention and effort that's gone into him is abundantly clear. This mold is the closest thing Studio Series thusfar has to Revenge of the Fallen's level of intricacy and screen accuracy. The fact that the underside of the vehicle mode is missing is - and always has been - par for the course in TransFormers toys (with very few exceptions), but this does allow for his diminutive partner to be accommodated easily into the tail. The panel-tastic nature of his vehicle mode does lead to some unsightly chunks ending up in awkward places on the robot, but it's still a remarkable achievement. It's also refreshing to have a helicopter toy of this scale that doesn't feature the geared rotor gimmick, though I'm in two minds about whether or not it spins too freely - for convenience in transformation, it certainly does... but for play in vehicle mode, it feels rather too stiff to me.
It is worth noting that, like Nitro, there's an upscaled knockoff on the way... or two, in fact. One, from Black Mamba, will feature significant improvements including a small diorama that transforms out of a newly-constructed underside for vehicle mode. The other, from WeiJiang, is being billed as a straight upscaling, but some photos suggest improvements to the feet. I'm likely to be tempted by one or the other, which may result in me disposing of Studio Series Blackout. However good they turn out to be, though, it's worth noting that neither would exist without this figure... It may have taken them about ten years too long, but Hasbro have delivered an excellent interpretation of the movie's impossible CGI.
Like Grimlock, I picked up Blackout from the Nottingham Robot Company for £50, a good £10-15 less than most other outlets, and think he's well worth the price. With a bit more paint, he'd have been worth the slightly higher price tag elsewhere... but, given more paintwork, some weapon accessories and a slightly longer period of development, this could easily have become Masterpiece Blackout. Along with Revenge of the Fallen's Leader class Optimus Prime, I think this is going to go down as one of the best movie toys ever.
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