One such character was Dark of the Moon's distinctly non-traditional interpretation of Shockwave. Gone was the logically-minded custodian of the remnants of Decepticon Cybertron and, in his place, we got a fairly generic, virtually mute metal monster with a honkin' great cannon on one arm (and the wrong arm, at that) and an enormous, city-munching robo-phallic tentacle monster for a 'pet'. Pretty much the only things the production artists got right were the head (cyclopean, albeit heavily embellished versus the G1 character) and the power cable for his gun arm.
Not that I'd expect a movie bot to transform into an enormous space gun but, given that Shockwave's appearance in the game of the very first movie had him transform into both a helicopter and a howitzer, there's already precedent for something out of the ordinary... And yet the original toy just had him turn into a spiky tank... Now, about five years later, Shockwave has been granted a Studio Series makeover - packaged as a Leader class figure, no less - so let's see what sort of improvements Hasbro have made...
'Vehicle' Mode:
Where Revenge of the Fallen Megatron looked kind of like a tank, albeit an alien one, Shockwave's previous bodged-together 'tank' form looked like an ugly jumble of sharp things on treads, with ramming prongs and a honking great gun sticking out to the front. This looks broadly similar to the original toy, mainly because it keeps the asymmetrical arrangement of his arms laid over the top of the vehicle, along with a similar arrangement of treads at the sides. However, where the Dark of the Moon toy erred in favour of a more coherent vehicle form, with squared-off armour panels lending him a more traditional sci-fi tank look, this version is clearly designed with robot mode in mind, and pretty much sacrifices just about everything that makes a convincing tank in favour of arranging all the robot mode parts according to the simplest efficient transformation. The engineering is based on the Studio Series RotF Megatron toy, though you'd be hard pressed to make the connection because Shockwave manages to present an even less coherent vehicle mode due to the lack of any of the shell parts that disguised Megatron's arms. It reminds me almost of the perfunctory tank form given to the TransFormers Prime version of Shockwave, albeit even more extreme in design, as opposed to TFPrime's smooth, minimalist style, and with a bunch of three possibly-afterburners on the back.
Nevertheless, the basic silhouette of SS RotF Megatron remains, particularly in the legs, making up the sides of the vehicle, despite them being almost entirely resculpted. As far as I can see, beyond the fuctional, internal parts for transformation, the only parts he has in common with Megatron are the armour forks in front of his robot head and the smaller thruster parts right at the back of the treads. Without the large, segmented shell that covered Megatron's arms in vehicle mode, Shockwave's enormous cannon arm and his normal, clawed arm are just stuck next to each other on the top of the vehicle. Where the hands on the DotM toy folded back agains the wrists, SS Shockwave's only complete hand is just sitting behind his head, plain as day, as if poised to scratch his head in confusion over this weird robo-yoga pose of a vehicle mode.
To be fair, the cannon is angled slightly upward so, even though it can't rotate, it looks reasonably functional. The other arm is disguised only by its dark colourscheme and complex detailing. Where the DotM toy had wheeled spiky protrusions from the front, SS Shockwave has his feet at the front of the tank - again, much like the TFPrime version - such that it looks as though he has a pair of Cybertronian Triceratops heads as ornaments. It doesn't help that the original Age of Extinction 'Slug' toy was purple as the discrepancy in colour between both their onscreen counterparts makes it look almost as though Shockwave somehow encountered the Dinobot and used him for parts, despite having been unceremoniously offed in the preceding movie. The treads themselves are nicely scuplted, with the inner workings - cogs, wheels and belts - further highlighted with a dull, bronze-ish paint, but so little of them is actually visible, one has to wonder why Hasbro didn't just call Shockwave a hover tank and do away with the tread detail entirely. The very back of the vehicle features the previously mentioned afterburner-like details, which can be independently angled via embedded hinges. The outer casing of each is painted with a fairly flat silver colour, while the inner details are picked out in the same bronze paint as the workings of the treads. This area of the vehicle looks like an enlarged face - very Skids/Mudflap/Wheelie-style - but features no paintwork of its own.
While there's very little recognisably 'Shockwave' or traditionally tank-like to the shape and sculpt of the vehicle mode, Hasbro have been reasonably clever with the paint job. Following on from their inspired use of drybrushing on dark plastic for SS Grimlock, they've taken much the same tack with Shockwave... but, where the use of metallic green on the former was reasonably accurate to the CGI, they've strangely gone for full-on G1 homage with this one. Metallic purple highlights actually look fantastic on the dark grey plastic, but I can't help but think screen accuracy - in the sense of using either silver or gunmetal paint - would have made for an equally striking look. Curiously, the bands of armour on his feet, at the front of the vehicle, are painted completely rather than dry-brushed, meaning what's effectively two sets of ramming spikes on the front of the tank are showing less wear than the rest of the vehicle.
Aside from the overall tenuously tank-like appearance of the vehicle, there are a few other things working against it. First and foremost, there's the simple fact that the gun is completely immobile, which is ridiculous on a tank toy of this size, however alien and sci-fi it's meant to be. I can sort-of understand the use of soft rubber for the spikes on the front of the vehicle, but it's also used for the gun barrel and the large, curved mêlée weapon stuck in the top, which is consequently very wobbly. Both the spikes and the blade-thing feature some nice silver dry-brushing, but the latter remains very unconvincing. The cannon's power cable is made of the same rubber, but the cable is so thick it ends up fairly stiff, and gets in the way of his treads. There's a way around this - feeding the tube round the inside of the right leg, wedged between the hip extension joint and the robot mode's inner back plate - but it feels as though the hinged part it connects into at the back ought to be able to lock into a position that keeps the cable up off the ground.
Robot Mode:
One thing that's always bugged me about the movie version of Shockwave is the pronounced ribcage. As references go, it's more D'Compose from Inhumanoids than any kind of robot. Striking and imposing, it certainly is... but not necessarily the way to deal with a character so iconic as Shockwave. The cyclopean one's iconic G1 toy, with its electronics visible through its wide boob-window, really deserved something a bit more traditionally robotic, I think, and there's a suspicion with this mold that they might retool a few parts and turn him into a new version of movie Bludgeon, or perhaps even a non-Pretender Skullgrin.
While I don't feel the movie did the character justice, either in terms of his appearance or his portrayal, and particularly in the way that he was killed off (getting a great chunk of his torso punched out by Optimus after a bunch of human soldiers somehow manage to pop his eye out of its socket - all too quick and easy, and after only about 2 minutes of screen time), there is something compelling about this design. His armour looks almost organic and, with a different paint job, this toy could fit just as well into some horror-themed toyline. In a way, Shockwave was a foreshadowing of The Last Knight Megatron's redesign, in that it just doesn't look like a TransFormer, even within the very flexible aesthetic of the movies.
On the upside, where the DotM figure was very flat, and the ribcage was basically just a plate that swung into place to cover the armoured sections housing his rear treads in vehicle mode, this one is very much more three-dimensional, with the ribcage bulging out slightly from the chest, the line of the legs sweeping back slightly, and the massive bulk of backpack. The depth of the sculpt on all parts is incredible, even if the bulk of it is rigid detail representing more mobile plates, etc. The bulky chest tapers in to a narrow waist and a very slender groin, with large hips and even bulkier shins, while the upper arms are small compared to the left arm, let alone the enormous gun on his right. It all looks quite natural except in some of the more extreme poses, where the position of the joints can leave large empty spaces exposed between parts.
The paint job is much the same as vehicle mode, with dry-brushed metallic purple highlights on most parts, but gunmetal accents on the belly/groin and small touches of the bronze paint in the middle of the chest. It looks incredibly effective but, again, a plainer, more screen-accurate dry-brushing of silver or gunmetal throughout may have been preferable. I'm really not sure why Hasbro insisted on using metallic purple here, in reference to G1 Shockwave's usual colourscheme, when they clearly had no significant objections to the more neutral look of the CGI (or, as now seems far more likely, they just had little or no say in what Paramount did with their intellectual property). In a way, though, I'm glad they did go with purple, as it makes for a far more striking counterpoint to the likes of SS Grimlock (even though they never faced off against each other in the movies). Versus the likes of the Prime1 Studios statue and even some of the publicity shots, there are some paint applications missing - the bronze on the chest should have extended further down the belly and, ideally, the bridges of the feet, bottoms of the shins and the ring around the middle of the gun barrel should have had some bronze paint.
Without all the Mechtech guff, Shockwave's main weapon doesn't seem significantly smaller, but the option to detach the cannon from the arm is no longer present, so he doesn't have a right hand hidden away in there. He does have a thumb - a small rubber part with a dedicated, pinned hinge at the base and with touches of dry-brushing - but everything else is just large, sharp chunks over intricate internal detail and, just like the body, the level and depth of detail is impressive. The one thing it's missing is the reloading/cocking slide that Shockwave manually operated a couple of times during battle scenes in the movie, which could have been quite a cool feature. Then again, the toy's left hand is a single rubber piece, so it's not as if he could have been posed making use of such a slide. As with the Mechtech toy, there's a rubber hose connecting the gun to a hinged socket on his back, though it's not especially flexible, and seems almost to be molded to a certain shape - that, or it gained a couple of kinks in its packaging. Weirdly, there are two sockets in the gun arm - one with a cross-shaped base which appears to be the only one actually used, then a second, more standard 5mm port a little closer to the elbow, but I've not seen anyone make use of that socket for anything in and photos or video reviews. Shockwave's mêlée weapon is supposed to plug into the 5mm port on the back of his forearm in robot mode, but it's a very loose fit there, and fits far better in its vehicle mode port. That said, the peg on the underside is hollow, and I've found that inserting a short length of narrow (2mm) dowelling improves the fit. Sadly, it doesn't do much for its overall wobbliness due to the peg coming out of a large void on the inside of the weapon, with only thin supports extending out to the side walls.
The head sculpt on the original toy was a bit of a disaster, with only a passing resemblance to the CGI - another issue arising due to the use of pre-production artwork as reference, no doubt - so it's good to see that Hasbro's Studio Series remake does a far better job in terms of its overall shape and, to a degree, the finer details. I don't think it's got his mandibles quite right - the sets on either side of his 'mouth' look more like single, ridged plates of armour rather than the disturbingly wibbly-wobbly, Dr. Zoidberg-style downwardly-curved tusklets that moved whenever Shockwave 'spoke' in the movie - but the 'mouth' itself looks pretty good. Additionally, the eye and its surroundings look excellent, and the coating of gunmetal paint brings the details out nicely. Despite its ball joint being mounted on a fairly long rod, the head does appear to be sunken a little too low into his shoulders, particularly considering the high position of the backpack. The neck joint's rod is itself mounted on a hinged flap that doesn't actually do anything during transformation, so it almost feels as if the flap was meant to clip into a higher position, or there's a part missing that was supposed to prop it up slightly.
Shockwave's transformation really does feel mostly like an afterthought - which has been the big problem with all of the more outlandish movie designs where they never took a terrestrial vehicle mode. I get the impression that this figure is an even more simplified version of the RotF Megatron scheme, since there's no folded-up cannon and vehicle surface plates stored inside the robot's torso, and the legs barely require any work to shift between forms. One curious feature is that there's detail sculpted into the the robot's back which is only seen during transformation - in vehicle mode, it's covered by the robot's arms, while in robot mode, it's covered by the backpack with the three afterburner/power cell things. A lot of unnecessary effort went into that, and all it's missing is paintwork. The power cable does present a bit of a problem when transforming, as it's not entirely clear where it's supposed to go and, as mentioned, it is inclined to drag on the ground unless it's wedged on the interior and pokes through between the right arm and leg in vehicle mode. Everything does peg together very securely in both modes, though. One holdover from the RotF Megatron figure that I don't undersand is the pieces that fold out of his feet and in front of his face in vehicle mode. They don't really disguise his head in vehicle mode, and they're too loose to be useful as heel spurs in robot mode.
Given his weird shape, one could be forgiven for expecting SS Shockwave to have comparatively poor articulation, but I was very pleasantly surprised. The bizarre articulation of the original figure's arms has been corrected - meaning, most importantly, that his elbows bend the right way - and all the most common joints are present. Both shoulders can swing through a full 360° forward and back, and 90° out to the sides, the right arm only limited by the power cable connected to his back. There's no waist articulation, but the hips have very few restrictions and are able to swing a full 360° forward and back with only a little outward swing in concession to the upper body bulk. They can swing 90° out to the sides, then the thigh can rotate a full 360° if the leg is lifted out of the way of the groin. His knees have a range of a little over 90°, while the ankles can tilt up and down, as well as extending slightly on their double-hinge, thanks to transformation. They also have an inward tilt approaching 90°, which is purely for poseability, not part of transformation.
Accessories:
Alongside the Shockwave figure, this package contains tiny non-transforming mini-figures of Brains and Wheelie (each approx 1cm tall). Considering their size, they're remarkably intricately detailed and well painted... but they're made of soft rubber and don't like to stand without a lot of cajoling and, preferably, some sort of sticky base. They're not articulated beyond their rubbery nature, but they do seem to be (very loosely) to scale... though perhaps more in scale with the Masterpiece Movie line than Studio Series (I currently have mine stood next to MPM-07 Jazz and the accompanying Sam Witwicky figure, and they seem about right there).
The final accessory is a little paratrooper figure, referencing the NEST soldiers who joined the battle of Chicago and were the initial stage in Shockwave's embarassing demise. Molded in black rubber, here's a fair amount of sculpted detail on the figure, but it has no articulation and only one blob of skin tone paint over the bottom part of the face. It looks like the sort of rubbish you find packaged with all sorts of other random military toys in Pound Shop selections, his parachute is far too small to be particularly useful and the outer lines are rather too slack. That said, I did drop this thing to see how effective the small, surprisingly stiff nylon 'chute was, and have to admit it fell more slowly than I'd expected. Even so, I think the 'chute and its lines are probably heavier than the little rubber figure.
Let's address the elephant in the room first. SS Shockwave was packaged as a Leader class figure, but is based on the Voyager class SS RotF Megatron engineering, and very definitely has not been upsized (though one of the Third Parties is doing that, and incorporating all the existing upgrades, such as the LED for his gun arm and the more solid mêlée weapon). The accessories, therefore, are supposed to be enough to earn the price hike. In my books, two 1cm/0.4" rubber figures - regardless of how well sculpted and painted they may be - and a paratrooper figure (the likes of which you could certainly find in any Pound Shop you care to visit) do not present enough play value, let alone value for money, to cover the approx. £20 difference between a Voyager and a Leader class figure in the Studio Series toyline. Blackout definitely earned the Leader class price point despite ending up quite short in stature. Even Grimlock - simplistic as he was - earned the pricepoint through sheer size and detail, along with a fantastic paint job. With Shockwave's smaller size coupled with overuse (or overcautious use) of rubber on the main figure, calling this release Leader class is an absolute con, with or without these perfunctory and rather pointless accessories.
Nevertheless, I have to admit that I don't feel cheated. Even with his utterly half-arsed 'vehicle' mode and non-screen-accurate paint job, Studio Series Shockwave is a fantastic figure, vastly superior to the Megatron figure from which his engineering is derived, and a massive improvement on the 2011 Mechtech figure. I'm very much torn between acquiring the Shockwave Lab LED kit for his gun, and waiting for Zeus Toys' upscaled version of the mold with resculpted hips, an articulated right hand and LED features in both the gun and head.
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