And, as if there weren't already far too many Bumblebee figures in the live action movie toylines, Hasbro couldn't resist making that one toy yet another superfluous variant of their already ubiquitous flagship character.
...Sound like fun to you? Let's have a closer look...
Vehicle Mode:
To be honest, I think the idea of a Stealth Force Bumblebee is actually quite compelling. Weirdly, though, rather than attempting to integrate the complexities of Stealth Force into the main transforming toyline, perhaps as a variation on the Human Alliance concept, Hasbro decided to present some Deluxe class toys in their fully disguised form, and others in their Stealth Force form, (with Bumblebee appearing in both forms because of course he would) largely as cosmetic variations to the sculpt of the vehicle modes.
This toy might first appear to be basically a simplification and reshell of much the same Bumblebee figure, but there's both more and less to it than that, particularly in vehicle mode. At its core, the vehicle is just the standard Camaro form used by Bumblebee in Dark of the Moon but, by way of Stealth Force embellishment, Hasbro decided to give the vehicle mode some groovy carbon fibre panels, exposed cabling, reinforced windows... and a pair of massively oversized afterburners... It actually reminds me quite a bit of the DeLorean from Back to the Future, particularly after its future-tech upgrades. Of course, Bumblebee never actually appeared in the movie in this form, and the afterburners seem to be derived from Leadfoot more than any aspect of Bumblebee's actual segmented, floaty Camaro-tank Stealth Force look from the highway battle scene.
Contrary to just about every other toy, there's an awful lot of paint applied to the back end, but it's focused on the protruding Stealth Force gubbins, while the intricately sculpted numberplate (with raised lettering!) and the rear bumper have been left unpainted. At least there's an excuse for no painted tail lights: there aren't any visible. The downside to all this paint is that it's not applied with much regard for the sculpted detail. Sure, the cabling leading between each of the 5mm ports and the afterburners is painted quite precisely with gunmetal, but the afterburners themselves are blanket painted with gold on the rearmost section of the vehicle, and blanket painted with gunmetal on the rearmost section of the car's roof. Given that there are some elements of sculpted detail that carry over from one section to the other, it's disappointing to see those details aren't painted consistently. There's also the frankly bizarre choice of neon pink for the interior of the afterburners... Even weirder, while it's not apparent from all angles, there's actually a difference in the gold colour and the pink between the two afterburners - my photo from the rear exaggerates this - the left side unit is more brown, while the righthand one is more yellow, and the pink is simply bolder on the left, washed out on the right.
On the sides and front of the car, the gunmetal paint is applied to the carbon fibre panels on the doors and bonnet, as well as the structural reinforcements on the windows, while the windows themselves are mostly a super-dark translucent blue, with the exception of the smaller windows connected to the door frames, which are a very gloopily-applied metallic blue paint on opaque yellow plastic. The grille and headlight sections are all filled in with black paint - nothing different for the lights themselves - but, naturally, the Chevrolet badge is picked out in gold paint. Frustratingly, the raised port on the bonnet and its cabling have been left unpainted, which is more than a little ridiculous considering every other one has been painted, and its design is identical.
Nitro Bumblebee has a total of five Mechtech ports - all the bare, simple 5mm socket type, rather than the covered, spring-loaded type. His pack-in weapon can naturally be mounted in any of them, but it seems intended for the bonnet socket, as it resembles a supercharged engine. This may explain the lack of paint on that socket, but it still looks bad without the weapon attached. If you have any of the Deluxe class Wreckers - or a selection of otherwise unclaimed weapon accessories with the requisite 5mm peg - it's possible, not to say positively encouraged, to attach them to the other spare ports, both to fill up the unsightly holes and to ensure Bumblebee looks battle-ready.
As a Steath Force vehicle mode, Nitro Bumblebee looks rather half-arsed - as if Chevrolet were OK with the concept, but didn't want their sweeping lines and precise curves interrupted too much on the toys. It's not bad, just a little too samey with so many other iterations of Bumblebee available at the time, and so it feels like a huge missed opportunity. I also find that the front end doesn't like to align properly and the three sections don't clip together, making the front end look untidy... It also feels as though this car - more than any of the others - should have been provided with more accessories. Maybe not the extent of additional guns as the Deluxe class Wreckers, but something more than the single Mechtech weapon.
Robot Mode:
Considering the way previous Deluxe class Bumblebees have looked - particularly the comparatively svelte and lanky Battle Blade version - Nitro Bumblebee's robot mode looks excessively chunky, as weirdly proportioned in its own way as the Leader class version, but with stubbier-looking legs. The chunkiness of the chest, the carbon fibre-look shoulder pads, the massive backpack and the large vehicle panels on his legs make it looks as though this is Bumblebee cosplaying as Bumblebee... and not doing a very good job of it. The weirdest part of the overall look is that either the head is sunken into the shoulders or the shoulder joints end up too high on the body, and the way the massive chest narrows down to the tiny waist and groin looks dafter here than on any other version of Bumblebee produced at this point.
It's also remarkably sparse when it comes to paintwork. Most of what's on view here is on the vehicle mode panels, with the only robot-specific paint applications being the usual patches of yellow on his shoulders and the gold on his shin details - the upper legs, grey torso parts and forearms are utterly untouched by paint... further signs that the paint budget was pretty much blown on vehicle mode.
The sculpted detail is, for the most part, nothing special - the belly panel features some, but not all of the embellishments that were added to the CGI model for the third movie, and the groin is much the same as it's always been, albeit smaller. The usual vehicle panel is attached to his thighs, but it's only jointed to rotate for transformation, and sticks out rather too far from the thigh to work as the piece of thigh armour it's intended to represent. Probably the most interesting detail is on the forearms - where Bumblebee figures would normally just have armour panels - usually either yellow plastic or paint - perhaps featuring some interpretation of his CGI arm cannon, this one features a sort of hybrid, a much smaller gun barrel sprouting from a shrunken version of his usual armour. It looks OK, but really could have used some paintwork either to highlight the gun directly, or to better differentiate it from the surrounding armour and mechanical arm detail.
No surprise, the Mechtech weapon is oversized for the figure, almost as long as his arm in its closed state, let alone when it's deployed. On the upside, with the mounting port on the outside of the forearm, it doesn't restrict his elbow movement. It's not even painted to match the figure especially well - it's nice to see paint on it, but the shade of yellow is far more orange than that of the plastic.
Bumblebee toys had already been getting the head sculpt right for quite some time before this figure came along, so it's no surprise that the details are pretty much spot on. It lacks the deployable battlemask of the Battle Blade version, and I suspect the dark blue plastic used for his light piping would be too dark to be functional even if it hadn't been painted over. Aside from that, it's one of the least well-decorated iterations, with no paintwork on the helmet and no Autobot insignia on the central crest.
Mechtech:
The Mechtech weapon accompanying the figure is one of the few decent matches the toyline offered as, in its basic form, it looks like an oversized, supercharged engine protruding from the bonnet, with what could be a titchy gun sticking out of the front. The illusion of 'engine' is naturally shattered by pulling the handle on the back to deploy its true weapon form, whereby the uppermost panel shifts forward and a couple of droopy gunbarrels swing out from inside. It probably works better in vehicle mode than robot mode but, unlike the spring-loaded weapons packaged with some Deluxes (including the original iteration of this one, packaged with DotM Skids), it's possible to lock it in its deployed state by pushing the slots at the back of the top plate into a pair of raised runners on the top of the weapon's main body. Trying to trigger it while it's attached to Bumblebee's arm is fiddly, and the saggy barrels are disappointing wherever it's attached, but the fact that it's not spring loaded nevertheless works in its favour. What's strange with this toy is that Bumblebee's hands aren't molded into a 5mm grip, so the sockets on the forearms are the only way for him to properly wield the gun. While the weapon fits, it reminds me a lot of the weapon packaged with TFAnimated Lockdown, which was actually supposed to be Ratchet's EMP Generator, though DotM Mechtech Ratchet was packaged with the equally appropriate combination gun/circular saw. It is also possible to mount the weapon on his backpack, via the car mode's bonnet socket, but his head is pretty much in the way and, since the panel is only very loosely tabbed into place behind the head, it's inclined to dislodge whenever the weapon is moved or deployed.
By and large, Hasbro kept to a tried and tested formula with their Bumblebee figures, but this was the first to attempt to aim for a slightly more accurate transformation of the feet. These now wrap around the wheel, which then ends up on the inside of the ankle, rather than the outside. The piston-like protrusion from the top of the feet ends up higher than usual on the ankle, and sticks out at a weird angle but, aside from the lack of supporting paintwork it's well-handled. The legs, arms and torso are very much simplified, leaving the robot quite gappy-looking from the sides, while the headlight sections of the car's front tab into place rather better in robot mode than in vehicle mode. The only problems I have with the way this one transforms is that the door wings are clumsy, frustrating and very stiff in their movement and, while the backpack folds up pretty well, it still ends up sticking out further than that of just about any other Bumblebee figure, plus, he ends up with the vehicle's afterburners hanging off his calves. Also, there's a peg on the hinged part connecting the two sections of the roof that looks as though it's supposed to connect into a slot on the 'spine'... but it doesn't fit. That doesn't leave the backpack loose, but it bothers me nonetheless. Considering that, at his core, Nitro Bumblebee is a stick figure with car parts slapped on, he's still fairly fun to transform.
The alterations to Bumblebee's transformation mostly don't have a detrimental effect on his articulation - the shoulders are ball joints that are well clear of any vehicle shell (apart from the ubiquitous door wings and front wheels), and the elbow, while set up to bend inward rather than forward, at least has a rotation joint just above it, even though that only lets Bumblebee adopt a sort of 'beckoning' or 'shrugging' pose. There's no waist swivel due to the jointing of his backpack, but the hips are ball joints supplemented by separate upper thigh swivel joints. The knees are double-jointed, but the huge chunk of vehicle shell on the backs of the calves means the second joint offers no improvement on the slightly-over-90° bend offered by the primary joint. It's worth noting, though, that the orientation of the thigh armour panel can restrict the range of the knee, so it's a shame it can't fold over the front of the leg, out of the way. The feet can tilt upward from the ankle a few degrees, and the 'toe' section is hinged with its range of movement limited only by the presence of the wheel. The head, as is pretty standard, is on a ball joint which offers only the smallest amounts of tilt in any direction, but full 360° rotation.
I was given this figure as a gift by a friend who, for a time, felt sufficiently impressed with the movies - and sufficiently moved by Bumblebee as a character - that she would buy pretty much any Bumblebee product she laid eyes on. She'd bought two of this one specifically so she could add one to her collection and give the other to me as a gift... and, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I graciously (if a little reluctantly) accepted it. I already knew it wasn't a great figure and was only vaguely interested in his Mechtech weapon because it's one of the better-looking efforts from the Deluxe class range, since its default form is a reasonable approximation of an engine, and its gun mode does actually resemble a gun.
Looking back on the toylines for the first three movies, it's interesting to see how the gimmicks progressed. The first movie's toys featured varying degrees of 'Automorph', which generally didn't work as well as it should have due to the limits of the plastics used. For Revenge of the Fallen that was swapped out for purely cosmetic 'Mech Alive' features that added nothing to the play value of the toys, and Dark of the Moon's Mechtech was a nice idea let down by forcing oversized accessories on undersized toys and, again, the plastics used didn't allow the precision necessary for these sorts of things to really work. It's no surprise that the later movie lines - and even Studio Series - have eshewed such gimmickery in favour of a focus on the transforming action figure aspect of the toys.
Nitro Bumblebee is not something I would ever have bought myself - Bumblebee fatigue having hit me quite early in the movie toylines - but I can't deny it's a fun little figure, even if it's not one of the best versions of the character.
No comments:
Post a Comment