I mention this because Bumblebee was one of the first figures that I added paintwork and stickers to straight out of the packaging because Hasbro's idea of a paint job was just terrible.
I'll also take this opportunity to apologise for the shite photography - I'll retake the photos at some point, using my light tent, and replace those currently included here, all of which were taken about seven years ago.
Vehicle Mode:
TFAnimated Bumblebee's vehicle mode is a puzzling little car. On the one hand, you can easily see its direct stylistic ancestor in Classics Bumblebee - it's a compact car, but sportier than the Volkswagen Beetle, and not dissimilar to a Suzuki Swift. On the other hand, it features a black stripe, directly referencing movie Bumblebee's paint job. He's also got a fixed emergency light on the roof which, in the TV show, was shown to be an attachment used within an unmarked police vehicle, such as the car driven by Captain Fanzone. But for that last part, the car looks like an ideal disguise for a traditional Bumblebee - or at least as good as the Classics and Alternity versions in that they're all essentially contemporary Beetle analogues - albeit more stylish and without the unfortunate connection to fascism.
For a three-dimentional representation of a cartoon car, Bumblebee is both pretty accurate and pretty convincing - there are real-life cars that resemble the exaggerated proportions on show here. Transformation seams are fairly obvious all over, and there are several points where concessions have been made to the requirements of the moving parts within - two squarish holes in the side window panels just above the rear wheel wells lead into either end of the pin of a transformation hinge, then a large slot cut out of the back of the car to allow the middle section of the bumper to move during transformation. These are nothing particularly unusual in a TransFormers toy, but they're particularly noticable as both are located on parts made of translucent blue plastic which has been painted yellow.
Which brings us to the only real problem here: the paint job. First and foremost, the colour matching is atrocious. It doesn't help that the yellow plastic appears almost translucent in some places, adding to the cheap feel of the toy, but the shade of yellow paint used is brighter than the plastic. It's also so shoddily applied that it varies in opacity across very small areas of the translucent blue plastic used for his windows. On mine, edges are fuzzy, there's overspray and splotching all over the place, and even some smearing on the rear windscreen, just below the spoiler. Similarly, the application of red paint to light on the roof is inconsistent, with the effect exacerbated by the fact that it's been applied on top of black paint. The tail lights actually look fine, but the headlights are a pale, translucent, pearlescent paint which is barely visible unless it catches the light just so.
Making matters worse, the shade of yellow plastic used, along with the semi-matte finish, utterly consumes what little sculpted detail there is - hence my highlighting of things like the door frames and the headlights/grille. Without panel lining, it doesn't look anything like the vehicle in the TV show because the bold lines are such a huge part of the aesthetic. Even with the sculpted lines drawn in (using an ink pen I happened to have lying around, so it's probably not permanent) something appears to be lacking because it's not that easy to add similar lines to all the relevant curves and angles. The stock figure looks terribly basic, and marking the few lines I've done was pretty much the minimal effort way of bringing it a bit more to life. On the upside, Hasbro were still painting hubcaps during the TFAnimated toyline and, while the application of paint is just as inaccurate as it is elsewhere, a nice shade of slightly bluish-silver has been used. The bold black stripe runs from the front of the car to the spoiler on the lefthand side of the car, and the only other decoration on the stock figure is the subtle silver Autobot insignia on the rear bumper - the black paint on the recessed ara of the front bumper is my addition.
Bumblebee comes with a couple of very retro-looking rocket boosters which peg loosely into the upper rear corner of the rear side windows - a surprisingly effective place for concealing sockets - and represent the boosters he used in only one or two episodes of the TV show. One might think that these were included to bulk up the toy to the Deluxe pricepoint, but he's actually quite a large Deluxe - certianly not in scale with the likes of Ratchet, Prowl or Sentinel Prime, but passable opposite, Rodimus, Jazz and the Voyager class Optimus Prime. It comes across as one of those situations where someone decided all the toys had to have some form of accessory and, frankly, the boosters were the most likely option... but they still seem a bit pointless, even if they did feature in the show.
Robot Mode:
Weird-looking though he may be when you focus on the details, I'd call Bumblebee one of the big successes of the TFAnimated line. Given the odd proportions and angular style of the animation model, not to mention the fact that the transformations were 100% cheated in the TV show, this figure is remarkably accurate, from his big, chunky feet and shins, to the chunky forearms and the wheels on his shoulders. Of course, there are compromises - the feet are probably the least animation-accurate part of the figure and the car doors bulk up his large forearms even further - and some outright cheating - the car roof ends up on his heels and back, while his chest is entirely faked - but it's faithful enough for a transforming action figure. I certainly wouldn't expect to see anything better than this Deluxe class version, and most other versions of TFAnimated Bumblebee were pretty terrible, even including the second take on a Deluxe class version, 'Jetpack Bumblebee' (aka 'Hydrodive Bumblebee'), which seems not to have been released outside of Japan.
What's interesting about the chest is that the upper 'window' is painted with a slightly blueish, dark gunmetal colour, while the wraparound windscreen/side windows (almost a suggestion of his Cybertronian form, perhaps?) are a separate piece of translucent blue plastic, clipped in place. Seems strange that they'd produce a whole extra piece of plastic to act as a windscreen that sits directly over yellow plastic, rather than just sculpt the yellow plastic section to include the windscreen and just paint it...
But the strangest thing about his paint job - apart from how little of it there is on the stock figure - is that it has been flipped from left to right. In the cartoon, Bumblebee has a black stripe down the lefthand side of the vehicle, and the stripe stays on his left in robot mode. For the toy, the legs are reversed between modes, so the stripe moves to the righthand side of his torso. Note that the stripe down the left shin was my own addition - it's not on the stock figure, which actually seemed ridiculous to me. The yellow paint on the kneecaps and the black stripes on his forearms are also mine, while the red Autobot insignia on his chest is a Reprolabels sticker, conveniently exactly the same size as the silver tampograph beneath. I also had to touch up the stripe down his chest, as it had a couple of bubbles, and, aside from the front of the waist, the inner torso section was unpainted yellow plastic on the stock figure, so I painted it black to better resemble the animation model. Weirdly, the linework on the groin and the thighs is part of the stock paint job... I don't understand how they reached the decision that those paint applications were important but, for example, the black stripe on the shin wasn't... but that's how things were with the TFAnimated line.
Bumblebee's accessory boosters are all but useless in robot mode. Sure, they can stay plugged into his backpack, but they're almost invisible from most angles, and they don't plug in anywhere else. It's strange for an accessesory to apply so specifically to one mode only unless it's a robot mode weapon... and I think Bumblebee may be the only TFAnimated figure to have been packaged with accessories designed primarily for vehicle mode. Granted, he does seem to have used his boosters in robot mode in the TV show, but they didn't appear regularly after they were first introduced. They're molded in translucent blue plastic with silver paint on the framework, but this matches neither their appearance on the show nor the Hasbro stock photography - the former were black and yellow, to better blend with his robot mode, while the latter seemed to use a darker shade of translucent blue and featured red tips.
In robot mode, the boosters aren't his only accessory: his actual weapons are integrated into his forearms, and flip out from the insides of his wrists once the hands are rotated back into their vehicle mode position. They can be used individually, but each wrist technically only contains half a stinger, so the idea is that they peg together to make a single weapon. They might have worked quite well as individual stingers had they been sculpted with that in mind - as it is, there's a defined kink in the base of each one, which is there purely to ensure that one combines with the other easily. This seems like an odd choice, given the way the stingers deployed in the TV show, but I guess it can be called a 'play feature'...
The head sculpt is very reminiscent of the G1 animation model, run through the standard TFAnimated chin-distortion filter. It's a very simple sculpt, with the traditional central crest and dinky horns, a large silver-painted face with a cocky smirk and large, brilliantly light-piped blue eyes. The stock figure has the face outlined in black, but all the other black marking - the 'ear slots' and around the forehead crest - are my additions.
Bumblebee's transformation is cleverly designed - particularly the way the front of the car turns into his feet - but does suffer from the QC issues that plagued a lot of the TFAnimated line. Most of it is really smooth and easy - albeit with surprisingly few parts that actually tab into place in vehicle mode - but the back of the car sometimes gets stuck when going back and forth between vehicle and robot modes. I'm not sure what's actually getting caught, but it doesn't happen consistently, which makes it all the more puzzling. Also, much as I like the transformation of the feet, the use of the roof of the car as a heel spur doesn't seem ideal, especially as it's on a ball joint at the end of a spring-loaded, hinged part - it doesn't feel very stable. On the upside, basic as it is, I really appreciate the way his stingers actually transform (well, swing) out of his forearms, even if both have to be plugged together to make a single stinger looking anything like the two individual stingers in the TV show.
The articulation on this figure is pretty good, but not quite outstanding. Part of the issue is that the shoulders, while ball-jointed, are hindered both by their own bulk and a tab of bumper which protrudes inward very close to his backpack. The bicep and wrist joints are for transformation rather than articulation, giving him very little more than 90° of elbow bend. His neck is hinged at the base, with a ball joint at the back of the skull and, since the neck is basically upright, it's one of the very few heads mounted this way where the rotation of the head is barely affected by its surroundings (there's a small notch at the back of the neck piece that causes the head to raise very slightly as it's turned to either side). The 'waist' joint - primarily for transformation - is concealed behind his fake vehicle chest and does butt up against it, but the amount of rotation still on offer to robot mode is pretty natural. The legs look like a mess, but the ball-jointed hips offer excellent range, the knees offer about 90°, there's a rotation joint just below the knee, and the very bitty feet can be arranged to support a good range of poses.
Bumblebee is definitely one of the better TFAnimated figures in my estimation. He is far too big - slightly taller than Arcee, Soundwave and Swindle, and not much shorter than Prowl, Rodimus or Jazz, so he makes Leader class figures look too small - but making him the right size would have made him far too small for the Deluxe pricepoint, and probably made some of his engineering even less reliable.
This figure was repainted as an 'Elite Guard' version of Bumblebee that bordered on being a Goldbug reference, albeit with rather too much black. The Takara Tomy version went even further, substituting all the yellow for gold, but keeping the head the same colour rather than turning it blue.
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