Studio Series #40 Shatter (Car)

(Femme-Bot Friday #68)

When the villains in the Bumblebee solo movie were first announced, the fan reaction was a little muted... Who were Shatter and Dropkick? Sure, they looked interesting and distinct enough, but why not use existing characters from the vast stable of Decepticons from G1 onwards?

Well, in the grand tradition of Hollywood action movie villains, they turned out to be wholly disposeable, existing only as temporary adversaries to the titular hero, and a source of threat to all the humans. Even so, screenwriter Christina Hodson dared to do what Michael Bay's team balked at: she made one of the lead characters a Femme-Bot. Shatter was also probably the first movie Decepticons to truly live up to that title - deceiving and manipulating the humans to get what she and Dropkick wanted, yet not averse to getting into a fight when the situation required.

Add to that, she was voiced by the sublime Angela Bassett, and so instantly joined the cross-continuity ranks of TransFormers Femme-Bots whose velvet tones belie a vicious, deadly nature... Perhaps rivalling even Airachnid in those stakes.

Vehicle Mode:
While lots of fans have described both Shatter and Dropkick from the Bumblebee movie as 'Triple-Changers', it seemed to me that their ability to switch between car and aircraft disguises is simply an extension of a logical point made by the very first live action movie: if all Cybertronians have the ability to scan in their own new disguises, what's to stop them switching between several? Let us not forget that, in the original G1 story, the Autobots and Decepticons were repaired and brought back online by Teletraan-1, with a drone travelling around towns and cities near the crashed Ark to source disguises. It's also worth noting that, in Marvel's comic book version of the story - written by Ralph Macchio under the editorship of Bob Budiansky - it's explicitly stated that the Ark's probe wasn't built to identify organic life, which is why it took vehicles and electronic devices to be the dominant lifeform of Earth, rather than humans. Individual robots weren't able to alter their disguise, so giving that ability to all the movie 'bots from the outset was the simplest thing to do, but caused a huge divergence from established canon.

All of which to say, Shatter and Dropkick aren't 'Triple-Changers' any more than Bumblebee is - let's not forget that he first takes the form of a Jeep when trying to escape from Sector 7, switching to his iconic VW Beetle form just before going into stasis lock and, at the end of the movie, adopts the Chevrolet Camaro form seen in the original live action movie. Nowhere is it even suggested that he couldn't revert to a previous disguise, he simply chooses not to. Perhaps there's a limit to the number of forms they can keep in memory, and some can handle more than others, but the movieverse has effectively made all TransFormers into multi-changers.

So... Here we have the first Deluxe class Shatter toy, and she transforms into Chrysler's 1971 Plymouth GTX with extra headlights, roof-mounted lights, a rollcage over the front windscreen, a souped up engine, and suspension cranked up high. I'm really not a car afficionado, but there's something particularly compelling about these old-style muscle cars and street racers. The Plymouth is a simple and elegant car, fairly typical of of the time but for the upgrades. The sculpted detail appears to be excellent, though the paintwork is a touch basic, with the colourless translucent and opaque red plastics of the vehicle's shell painted a gorgeous glossy black toward the back and on the roof. The red triangular design on Shatter's sides is reproduced, painted on top of the black (though the colour matching is a little off), as are the stripes of black on either side of the bonnet. What's missing is the number 722 stamped on the front of her bonnet, though it's not a massive loss. The headlights and their frame are painted silver, but the roof lights and the small section of grille below the headlights are bare. Similarly, the bars below the side doors have been painted silver, but the hubcaps are not. There's a splodge of silver on the bonnet representing the car's badge, while the protruding engine is covered in gunmetal paint. Toward the back, the number 722 is stamped in white on either side of the vehicle, and the tail light frames and rear bumper are painted silver. Rather cleverly, the use of red plastic at the back means the tail lights themselves didn't need painting, but the paint job overall still looks rather more extensive than it actually is, certainly in comparison to some other Deluxe class vehicular Studio Series releases.

What's interesting here is that the windscreen, roof, boot and back end provide much of the structural integrity of vehicle mode, but the actual connections are very slight - the rear end connects via one tab on each side, the roof/windows section doesn't peg into anything directly, but the front end is secured by tabs inside the front wings and the small, squarish panels which each form a corner of the front wheel wells. It stays together very firmly, and her arms don't droop in the undercarriage despite not pegging into anything. Vehicle mode overall looks pretty slick and fairly well-designed, apart from the gaps around the window and Shatter's toes sticking out at the back, somewhat reminiscent of a similar issue on SS Ironhide.

Shatter's weapons peg into her arms, on the underside of the vehicle but, strangely, require the use of additional sockets on the insides of her forearms, rather than remaining on the outsides. They have less visual impact on the car than her toes, and I'm a little surprised there aren't any sockets on the outside of the vehicle shell so the weapons can be used in this mode.


Robot Mode:
I first saw Shatter's robot mode at the MCM London Comic Con back in October '18, and she immediately went onto my Want List. The test model had captured both her femininity and the overall alien-ness of her appearance almost perfectly. Due to the way she was displayed, I didn't get a clear impression of her articulation, and there were a few points I didn't get a good look at, so having her in-hand is a very different matter... and, unfortunately, there's a lot of disappointment involved.

First of all, though, it has to be said that the designers and engineers have actually done a remarkable job in turning Shatter's CGI into a working, transforming robot action figure and, ignoring the roof and windows hanging off her back and the door panels bulking up her thighs, she still looks very much like the lithe and feminine robot from the movie... Though this toy clearly represents her appearance upon arrival on Earth, and before she scans the jet as a new alternate mode, as none of the jet parts (such as the landing gear in the middle of her torso, or the wings and turbines of her shoulders) are present here, and her lower legs don't match her appearance in later scenes in terms of detail or colouring. While a lot of the torso is cheated by way of a chest plate, hinged at the groin and fitting over the central section of the front of the vehicle, it's sculpted to sit flush with the curves of the car and the structural parts it connects to, so it almost looks as if a small miracle has been achieved. She's lacking the car's roof lights on the top of her chest, but that's a small price to pay... and I suspect only a Voyager class toy (or a Human Alliance analogue/Masterpiece figure) would have been able to more accurately reproduce certain elements of her CGI.

The chest plate is painted in a gunmetal colour, so it does look a little awkward against the silver of her vehicle mode's headlights, but it works well enough. The tops of her hips are framed in silver, with gold paint on the 'vent' details, while more silver is applied to the raised details above her knee joints. Gunmetal paint has been applied to her shins, and a darker gunmetal paint covers her hands and most of her forearms. Details on her outer thighs have been left unpainted, and the recessed details in the silver sections above her knees should either have been left unpainted or, had the budget stretched that far, painted another colour. The red panels on her shoulders don't feature the black stripe which appears on the CGI, but they're also a slightly different shape, so she gets away with it.

To be honest, I barely remember Shatter even using guns in the Bumblebee movie - more often than not, she deployed her silver tongue rather than even using threats, and fought the eponymous protagonist mainly hand-to-hand. Aside from one or two instances of her using guns in jet mode, it seemed to be Dropkick doing most of the shooting. I was almost surprised to find that she's packaged with two forearm-mounted guns as Hasbro has occasionally had a habit of skimping on these accessories. The sculpted detail is very good, albeit a little oversized to ensure the weapons' durability in plastic. They plug in to her foreams firmly and fit well over her hands but, as usual, feature no paintwork of their own, so they stand out as accessories in ways that SS Beetle Bumblebee's gun and blade don't.

The head sculpt is a major disappointment. Not that Shatter's face in the movie was anything special, but the toy's head is based on a battlemasked version of Shatter glimpsed only briefly in the Cybetron flashback scenes of the film. What's all the more strange is that all the toys, bar one of the two Energon Igniters, feature this same 'wrong' head sculpt. It's not a bad sculpt by any means, it's just another rather dull battlemask rather than the full face we saw on Shatter throughout most of the movie. A dark gunmetal paint has been used around the lower jaw area and 'ears', with a blob of silver on the chin and three further strips of gunmetal over the top of the head. The sculpt is asymmetrical, with Shatter's 'feather' on the righthand side of her head, though it's far thicker than it should have been to ensure it doesn't break.


There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Shatter's transformation, though it's not without its fiddly bits, and she has more than her fair share of QC issue impacting on the process. The front wings of the car aren't very firmly affixed below the windscreen, the arms are more likely to pop off than actually move into place as their ball joints are ridiculously loose compared to the hinge that moves the shoulders between their vehicle and robot mode positions. On the upside, I'm somewhat impressed by the use of a small block of the vehicle's wing, hinged and rotated round onto the front of the robot's shoulder - it's not perfect CGI-accuracy, but it's a decent nod toward it. The worst thing for me was that it's not immediately obvious which direction to rotate the chunk of bonnet in which her head sits, and the joint on mine is so tight that the top of her supercharged engine popped off the first time I transformed her. I've never been a fan of the massive vehicle shell backpacks that often appear on movie TransFormers, and Shatter's is one of the most conspicuous I've seen in the Studio Series. Not only does this backpack hinder her movement, but the large car door panels on the backs of her thighs exacerbate things... And leaving them untransformed is no better. Her lower legs are also a bit fussy, and getting them to sit flush with the side panels on her thighs can be tricky due to a very stiff double knee joint. It also looks as though the car wing panels on her lower legs should be able to compress, thus concealing the ugly space and structural posts inside them, but they're completely immobile.

Given the issues with her arms during transformation, it should come as no surprise to find her shoulder joints are a little loose - not to the point that she can't hold a pose, but I'm certainly glad she wasn't packaged with a large, heavy handgun. Given the extent of her backpack and the wheels on the backs of her shoulders, it's strange to see that it's the panels of car side on her thighs that get in the way of her arm movement rather than the backpack. Large as it is, it's actually folded up quite neatly, and pegs in leaving quite a space between it and the robot's torso, so it really doesn't cause any problems in and of itself. Those thigh panels naturally have a huge impact on her legs, limiting both backward and forward movement by clashing with her torso or the backpack, but the hip joints aren't that great to begin with. Where most toys over the last few years have had a hip joints and then separate upper thigh swivel, Shatter has very tight ball-jointed hips with little useful range, and a rotation joint just above the knee for transformation. The knees are double-jointed, but are very awkward to pose, don't seem to like staying straight and, with the car wing panels on the insides of her lower legs, they're inclined to butt up against the door panels hanging off the backs of her thighs. The head is on a ball joint, but it's sunk a little too deeply into her chest, so it feels as though the body has to be tilted forward and the head tilted up for her to look straight ahead, while turning the head means having to tilt it back so the chin clears the collar.

Never in the history of the TransFormers brand has a toy been so aptly named than with Shatter. One of the front wings of the car - part of the robot's backpack - popped off as I was removing her from the packaging, and the plastic of the outer part of the joint - such as it is - displays clear signs of plastic stress after only a few transformations. Both of her arms have popped off at one time or another during transformation or posing. Even the chest plate has a tendency to come dislodged from its joint, though it hasn't yet popped out completely. Plastic tolerance issues abound here, and I'm really not sure why considering Shatter's design is really nothing out of the ordinary, particularly for a movie toy, and much of the more complicted stuff - like the chest plate - is cheated. It's simply a massive failure of plastic tolerances and quality control. Vehicle mode holds together very well, with only a few minor misalignment issues around the windows and the rear wings, but robot mode is another story.

Shatter can be made to look good in static poses, but I don't think this toy will hold up well to active play. With the limited leg articulation, a massive backpack and loose joints, much as I like the character, it's not easy to recommend this toy... Given that Dropkick has been released in his helicopter form before his car form, perhaps Hasbro will deign to give Shatter her jet form... if so, I can only hope it'll hold together better.