The big surprise was that, during a couple of sequences of the movie, he transformed not into his much-publicised Bugatti Veyron vehicle mode, but a sci-fi (possibly even Cybertronian) helicopter. It wasn't mentioned, let alone referenced as being unusual in any way, it was just another throwaway bit of CGI trickery in a movie series that had already stopped giving a damn about consistency.
Hasbro's response was to release a separate One Step Changer for each vehicle mode, and repaint Dark of the Moon Skyhammer as a Voyager class companion to their Deluxe class Veyron Drift. I don't think anyone actually expected to see a Triple-Changer movie Drift toy, but none of the available options really looked a great deal like what was (briefly glimpsed) on screen...
Cue Studio Series, with a new take on helicopter Drift, derived from the (not especially well-received) helicopter Dropkick mold...
Vehicle Mode:
Given that the only clear images of Drift's helicopter mode have come from screenshots of the movie on DVD/Blu Ray, it's interesting to see that Hasbro actually seem to have gone to some effort to make the toy look like the CGI, even placing visible bit's of his blue-highlighted robot mode armour in more-or-less the right places. It's mostly black plastic, with a translucent blue making up three sections of the cockpit/nose, and glossy black paint to cover the necessary parts, with dark grey plastic rotor blades, frontmost guns, and landing skids. The overall effect is of a far more streamlined Blue Thunder-type steath/attack chopper. It's not the most extensively decorated mold out there, but Studio Series does seem to skimp on the paintwork when it wants to, and this one doesn't really need any more than it has. The odd silver and gold details evident in screenshots of the CGI would, I think, have detracted from the simple elegance of his sculpt.
Whereas a lot of TransFormers choppers over the last decade or so have used landing wheels - occasionally folding away, size and parts count allowing - Drift has landing skids, styled to match his futuristic design, yet molded in a fairly soft, grey plastic. To be fair, the soft feel of it could be more to do with how thin the skids are than the quality of the plastic - it's the same stuff used for his rotor blades - but, whatever the cause, they don't tend to stay in place very well and, straight out of the box, I had to cut off some mold flashing from one of them as it prevented one side folding into place at all. Even so, both are slightly warped due to the poor fit and the flexibility of the parts. The main problem with landing skids on a toy is that, when the toy is back-heavy - as Drift is - it ends up precariously balanced in the back end of the skids rather than putting its full weight on them. It appears that the tail fan is the straw that breaks Drift's balance, however, as he rests perfectly without that part, and only lifts a fraction of the ground with it installed. He's still leaning forward, since the skids are raised much higher at the back and the front, but it doesn't take much to unbalance him.
The back end is a bit of a jumble, made up of Drift's arms and leaving some of the robot mode detail visible, though there is a small amount of vehicle-specific detail that ends up folded inside the robot's torso. It's not really clear what some of it's supposed to represent, due to the aforementioned jumbly nature of all the details at the rear, but at least there are no huge voids with bands of structural plastic. There is a massive hole through the tail at the back, where the tail splits and joins the body of the helicopter in two places, and then a few smaller areas that are... shall we say "less than complete-looking", just below the rotor blades, made to accommodate vehicle parts folded away in robot mode, but the latter is the only feature that doesn't look intentional. The front end is clearly that of a sleek, deadly war machine, featuring sculpted gatling guns in the recesses below the cockpit on both sides as well as twin guns mounted right on the nose. Visually, it feels like a helicopter of this type could also be made to represent TF Prime Airachnid.
Accessories-wise, it's nice to see Drift has entirely unique weapons, rather than borrowing the rather disappointing-looking launchers packaged with SS #22 Dropkick. Aside from the two main rotor blades, which become the robot's swords, Drift comes with a pair of rocket launchers, made up of an array of 8 'tubes' and three side-mounted rockets. These are intended to plug in to the undersides of the wings, but they can equally well be attached via the 5mm sockets on the sides of the cockpit. These are reasonably well-sculpted, not massively detailed, but one has to wonder why the array of 8 launchers are hollow... aside from the obvious fact that using less plastic makes 'em cheaper to produce. They're molded in the same translucent blue plastic as the cockpit canopy, and then painted with the same glossy black, with only the pegs unpainted to ensure proper fit. The rotor blades are very nicely sculpted, with plenty of functional-looking sculpted details toward the hub end, and I really like the fact that they - and the shorter blades - are at a slight angle, where a lot of TransFormers helicopter toys have had them mounted entirely flat. They're able to spin freely but, due to a tab that holds the assemby in place for robot mode, they don't spin for long, as the tab catches in its slot with every revolution, making a clattering sound as it does. The fan-like tail rotor is removeable for robot mode, and I was a little disappointed to find that the two pairs of three blades are fixed in place, where I was hoping they might be able to spin freely...
I have to admit that I like Drift's helicopter mode a lot more than I thought I would... The gappiness doesn't make itself obvious for the most part, and the irregularity of the back half is basically explained away by this being a Cybertronian chopper. Amusingly, this also looks better than SS #22 Dropkick, on whom Drift's engineering is based, despite that having a real-world vehicle mode, simply because his sci-fi stylings mean the poor scaling of his vehicle mode versus other Studio Series Deluxes - the cars in particular - doesn't matter anywhere near as much.
Robot Mode:
The original, Deluxe class Drift from the Age of Extinction toyline wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't a particularly accurate rendition of the CGI in plastic, not just due to the poor choice of main plastic colour. Drift in the movie was lithe and quick, while the toy ended up being super-chunky with a massive folded-up car shell on its back, as well as two panels from the vehicle's sides folded up onto each shoulder, bulking out the appearance of his upper body. Subsequent versions of Drift-as-a-car haven't been significantly better, with the two Deluxe class variants of the Mercedes from The Last Knight (first released in the TLK toyline, then with the paint job tweaked for its Studio Series re-release) having at least as many problems as the original Bugatti toy. Helicopter Drift, then, is probably the first to get it anywhere near 'right'... though that comes with a few significant caveats.
Everything above the knee looks pretty good in terms of size, proportion, detail and even paintwork, minimal though it is, but the lower leg reuses several parts from Dropkick, which then don't quite match Drift's aesthetic. The feet are virtually nonexistant, and the inner part of the lower legs are comparatively flat, apart from the folded-in wings, which still protrude quite a way. The knee itself is also a bit of an ugly disaster, since the pinned joint is right at the back of an otherwise squared-off section, so it looks a lot like the leg is simple breaking at the knee. That said, there's a small amount of scuplted detail inside the grey part of the knee. It only amounts to a few angled ridges within a rectangular slot, but I guess it's the thought that counts.
Probably the biggest improvement in the upper body is the reduction of the shoulder mass, since it no longer has car doors folded up to reveal rudimentary sode. Here, instead, it's sculpted into the upper arm itself (similarly, the haidate is sculpted into the thigh, which connects to the body via a ball joint rather than a separate hip joint - rotation on this mold occurring above the knee rather than at the top of the thigh). The forearms retain their asymmetrical sculpting, with touches of gold paint to highlight the details and further emphasise the differences.
That said, the backpack also counts towards the improvements on this version of Drift. While I liked the way all his swords could be fanned out on his back on the AoE toy, this one is limited to having the shorter swords simulated by the shorter rotor blades. The larger ones have to tab into the thighs when not in use, as there's no means to attach them to his backpack. This does all make for a more compact backpack - little more than the shell of the cockpit canopy, unless the tail rotor is mounted on his back for storage. The chest and waist may be slightly narrower than on the older toy, and the sculpting of the chest is no longer at the mercy of the shape of the vehicle mode, so it references the Bugatti Veyron's characteristic nose, but maintains greater accuracy to the shape of the CGI. On a similar note, the sides of the chest feature sculpted internal workings of the chest and shoulder, which weren't possible on the original due to transformation. On the downside, the original had sculpted detail on the robot's back, even though it was disguised by the car shell - this one hasn't the space for such extravagance.
Paintwork is absolutely minimal in this figure and, just for a change, it looks all the better for it. Where both the AoE and the TLK figure used boldy-coloured plastic (blue and red, respectively) in place of the dark armour plates with bright edging, this figure benefits greatly by the use of mainly black plastic. The raised edges of his armour plates are highlighted with metallic blue on both the upper arms and the thighs, and the same blue has been applied to the boxy details on the upper shin, the 'belt' and the rim of the grille in the middle of his chest. The Bugatti logo's oval shape is present, but unpainted, while there's an application of very dark gunmetal to the details of the waist and the lower part of the shins, just above the feet. There are a few places where some additional touches of paint would have been appropriate - the edge of the raised collar, the bands of what would have been the car's bumper running round the top of the waist, just below the overhanging chest - and, of course, it could still be argued that he should have been dark blue rather than black, but I think he looks good as-is. Technically, I believe he should also have some Japanese script on his left thigh, but this would have been difficult to reproduce clearly, I think.
As previously mentioned, the AoE toy and the TLK/SS remix in Mercedes form both had Drift's full complement of four swords - 2 longswords (tsurugi, perhaps, given that they're not curved like a Katana would be?) and 2 short swords (closest to tantÅ). This toy fakes the latter, fixed as part of his backpack, and lacks the option for storing the former on his back, instead having slots in the upper thigh which are barely able to accommodate miniscule tabs on the sides of the swords. The swords look fantastic - the use of the grey plastic, rather than the bizarre butterscotch colour of the AoE toy, making them far more convincing - with fairly CGI-accurate detailing at the base of the blade. There's no paint to highlight the cutting edges, the extra parts clamped over the 'back' edge toward the base (functioning as habaki, maybe?), or the helicopter gears just above the plain, oval tsuba, but that's very much par for the course with Studio Series. Alongside his swords, the missile pods can be plugged into the outsides of his lower legs or, if you're feeling particularly contrary, even into his hands, though I'm not overly keen on either option. They bulk out his legs considerably (not least because the helicopter's short wings don't fold in very snugly on the insides) and look utterly ridiculous as handguns. The tail rotor assembly can also be tabbed into pairs of slots on the outsides of the forearms, but it doesn't look like a particularly effective shield.
Considering Drift was such a cheesy stereotype in the movie, I'm still not entirely keen on the extravagant kabuto design of the head - it didn't even fit alongside the aesthetics of the other Autobots in Age of Extinction - but, by that point, they'd already thrown internal consistency out of the window. For what it is, it's certainly beautiful, with its three-pronged datemono and the fukigaeshi fully painted with the same gold as the wrist armour. The face is far more accurately detailed than that of the AoE toy, with a more stern expression, and the whole thing - aside from his goatee - is coated with gold paint, though the eyes - beady as they are - have been painted the standard Autobot blue.
I ended up not buying SS #22 Dropkick, since he didn't look much like the CGI and didn't seem to get especially favourable reviews at the time, so I can't easily compare Drift to his progenitor. Based on what little I know of helicopter Dropkick, I think the engineering here is an improvement - there are no floppy 'wing' parts and, while the robot's chest is entirely faked (it is, after all, based entirely on the robot's Bugatti Veyron vehicle mode) and the entire cockpit canopy just folds up onto his back, it's certainly not the worst backpack I've seen on a Studio Series toy, let alone a TransFormers toy generally. The way the legs unfold to form most of the lower half of the helicopter is pretty elegant, though the right leg doesn't peg together as well as the left, and the tiny, stubby feet look as if there are parts missing. It's also nice to see a TransFormers helicopter where the tail is formed out of the robot's arms rather than just folding up onto his back - a design shortcut that even affected the otherwise awesome SS Blackout. I do find the chest/shoulders part of the transformation a bit fussy, and rotating the torso from one mode to the other requires a lot of fiddling to keep the arms out of the way but, overall, the process is definitely more involving and fun than that of the AoE toy.
It's been interesting to see the way ball joints have been used - and avoided - within the Studio Series line. Drift almost feels like a toy from an older line as a result - ball jointed shoulders and hips being fairly standard but, as mentioned above, the hips aren't supplemented by a separate upper thigh rotation. This feels like it hinders the leg movement, even though there's a rotation joint above the knee... though I suspect it's as much to do with the immobile feet as the unusual jointing of the thighs. The knee itself offers something like 120° of bend, limited by the front edge of the helicopter's landing skids (remove them, and it's basically 180°!). Additionally, thanks to the small backpack, the movement of the legs is limited only by the sculpt of the thigh and a slight protrusion on his backside. The arms are a bit more standard, with the ball jointed shoulders supplemented by the pinned transformation hinge at the torso end. There's a rotation joint above each elbow (a little stiff on mine, due to warped plastic on the mushroom pegs) and the standard 90° elbow bend. The wrists are fixed except for transformation, but the range offered by the rest of the arm compensates for this pretty well. The head is also on a ball joint and, despite the goatee and expansive shikoro, is able to rotate a full 360°, as well as tilt slightly forward and back - side to side movement is barely worth acknowledging, as it's so slight.
AoE Drift - like much of that line - felt like a step backward in TransFormers toy engineering, but this one does a much better job in every respect. As with a lot of the Studio Series line, the paint job is a little lacking, but the sculpted detail is excellent throughout... I'd go so far as to say that this is the first really good toy of Drift... though it's a real shame it's taken this long to arrive, and is based on a vehicle mode he used only very briefly on screen.
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