So, seeing the flaw in my plan to avoid lining their pockets by buying yet more Bumblebee toys, Hasbro decided to take advantage of the only other terrestrial disguise taken by their protagonist in his solo movie... leading us to now take a look at the so-called Offroad Bumblebee.
Vehicle Mode:
Bumblebee probably spent only a few minutes of screen time with his first terrestrial disguise and, of that, probably only a handful of seconds actually in vehicle mode, but I have to admit I was pleased when images of a Jeep Bumblebee emerged online. The initial photos of his robot mode looked great, and sufficiently different from all the other Bumblebees that he'd be distictive on my shelves. Vehicle mode looked compact, well-designed... and like something Hasbro could quickly repurpose as either an alternate version of Hound or perhaps a movieverse interpretation of Swindle, depending on how many yellow Jeeps they feel the toyline can accommodate.
And it's actually a fairly accurate-looking Jeep compared to photos from the movie, also standing up well versus G1 Hound, and even his Binaltech alternate mode, despite the latter being a far more contemporary model. It looks like an older, even more bare-bones model than G1 Hound, but it's still pretty much instantly recognisable as a staple military vehicle. Being a fairly old vehicle, it doesn't have the most detailed sculpt in the world, but a reasonable attempt has been made to reproduce real-world details like the hinges that allow the windscreen to be folded forward onto the bonnet (though they aren't the actual, functional parts of the toy that do the job, just surface detail), the dashboard, and the various clips and handles around the vehicle's doors and tailgate. The spare tyre and petrol cannister are also there - a very nice nod to G1 Hound as much as the vehicle from the movie - though they're less than convincing due to the large hinges that stick out of them. They do feature sculpted detail designed to resemble the bare-bones 'seatbacks' on their reverse, but I'd taken them for structural plastic rather than intentional car parts until I looked up photos of the vehicle used in the movie. Being an open-top car, there was no excuse for not including seats and a steering wheel and, if you ignore the visible robot hips and the gaping hole in between them, it could even be said that they included legroom in the vehicle.
Where it falls down is fairly typical of the line - what little paintwork there is has been used to cover translucent plastic in opaque yellow, which isn't a particularly good match for the yellow plastic, and while the robot's legs are very well hidden, the arms are quite visible under the sides of the car, extending back from inside the front wheels. The hubcaps are unpainted and, with this toy's secondary colour being brown rather than black or grey (I'm assuming to suggest he's dirty/dusty from all that off-road driving), the clip-on wheels in particular seem very cheap-looking. He also feels quite flimsy in-hand, which has been becoming increasingly common in the Studio Series line - I'd hate to think how Blackout would feel if he was made now...
This version of Bumblebee only comes with one weapon, and it tabs neatly on the underside of vehicle mode, acting as an additional means of keeping the legs connected at the back. All things considered, I'm a little surprised there's no 5mm port on the back of the vehicle, even though it would serve no purpose with this particular weapon. That it's absent almost seems to suggest that Hasbro actually have no intention of repurposing this mold... but, given WWII Bumblebee became WWII Hot Rod, I have a sneaking suspicion we'll be seeing this mold again. The ability to mount an alternate weapon on the back would make for a further unique selling point, along with a new colourscheme and headsculpt.
On the whole, this is an excellent vehicle mode but, much like the Bumblebee movie Optimus Prime, there's a strange feel to the plastic - matte to the point of being grainy - that, coupled with the flimsiness of some parts and the lack of detail paintwork, makes him feel quite cheap.
Robot Mode:
There is, admittedly, something a little underwhelming about this version of Bumblebee at first glance. It's immediately apparent that the arms are lacking any paint applications, and the faux-split-grille on his chest looks extremely faux, while the lower legs just look untidy. Additionally, his secondary plastic colour is the same weird brown as his vehicle mode wheels - perhaps intended to give him a battle-weathered look, but it just looks wrong and cheap.
The faux-chest is rendered substantially less convincing by the mismatch between the yellow paint on the outer flaps and the yellow plastic on the central plate, though I do appreciate that, as with the vehicle mode's real front, the flaps were molded in translucent plastic, just so the headlights could remain clear. It's not as if they function as light piping, but it does at least mean that some enterprising kitbasher could add a lighting kit which could work for both modes. Furthermore, there is robot detailing sculpted on the inner face of the vehicle mode's front, but the fact that it wasn't painted means it's essentially lost in this mode.
In fact, it's the decisions made about paintwork that really let this figure down. In terms of sculpted detail, and given the size of the figure, Offroad Bumblebee is as phenomenal in robot mode as he was in vehicle mode. Not only is there sculpted detail where you'd expect to see it - on the prominent robot parts - the designers who worked on this toy even added details to the framework of his hinges and onto parts that are hidden in vehicle mode and only barely visible in robot mode. The upper body is essentially made up of three levels of detailing, with the faux-chest at the front, the detail on the inside of the vehicle grille in the middle, and the detail on the structural parts and transformation joints of the shoulders and the insides of the vehicle's wheel wells at the back. It's incredibly well thought out, and could have looked fantastic with the appropriate paintwork.
The arms are very well sculpted, with the traditional armour wrapping around the shoulders and biceps, but the exposed inner workings have been left as bare yellow plastic. The forearms only fare a little better because they're molded in both the yellow and brown plastics, but the intricate detailing has been left unpainted. The legs seem to have received the lion's share of the paint budget, with the feet coated almost entirely in a dark gunmetal paint which has also been applied to the shins, knees, and those parts of the thighs not covered over with the curved yellow armour. This paintwork really brings the mechanical detailing to life and almost convinces the eye that the hip joints and groin aren't just bare brown plastic. Still, even the legs aren't perfect, as the exposed inner workings on the outer faces of the calves remain unpainted yellow plastic, sculpted onto the inside of the door panels.
Bumblebee's weapon is sculpted such that it only plugs into his right hand, via its 5mm grip, and covers over a portion of the forearm. It's styled differently to the one packaged with SS20 Bumblebee (whose weapon accessory simply replaced the entire forearm!) and, while it features sculpted details that sort of resemble his fingers, they're a little too far back, giving the weapon a somewhat compressed appearance. Naturally there's no paintwork on this version so, while its brown plastic blends well with the insides of Bumblebee's forearm, it looks really bland and lifeless, despite some intricately sculpted detail. When not in use, a slot in the base of its 5mm peg can be used to plug it onto the Jeep's bonnet, folded up onto his back, though it remains fully visible behind his head.
The head sculpt is - somewhat surprisingly - different to that of the SS20 toy. It's noticeably larger overall, and the proportions of the face to the rest of the head are far better, but it's lost the battlemask feature - more likely down to the toy's parts count than the practicalities of giving him and alternate face plate. In fact, the way the head is constructed suggests that a replacement face plate may have been on the cards at one point, as - like with SS20 - everything from the crown of his head down to his chin is a separate piece from the back, which accommodates the neck joint. The eyes act as pegs keeping the front of the head in place, but it's actually glued together. As one would expect from a Studio Series toy at this point, it's a detailed, accurate head sculpt... but somewhat lacking in paint. The entire face is painted silver, the fronts of his 'ears' also received a perfunctory coating, his eyes are painted the standard Autobot blue, but none of the details on the top or the back of the head are painted in.
While it does fake a few parts, Offroad Bumblebee also presents a few significant differences in engineering compared to any previous Bumblebee figure, meaning the end result feels fresh, and is a lot more fun than it might otherwise have been. Just taking the front grille/robot chest as an example, the robot's chest uses no parts common to the vehicle's grille, but the two unique features basically swap places during transformation via a cleverly engineered section at the front of the car. While it could possible have been done more efficiently on a larger figure, what they've done here is surprisingly elegant. Similarly, the way the rear wheels fold into the backs of his legs is pretty clever, though it does leave some large and unsightly extra panels bulking out his lower legs.
The first few times I transformed him, I had some difficulty getting the bonnet to tab down in vehicle mode, and it seemed to just need to be strongarmed into place - once it clicked, it stayed in place very well and now sits nice and flush every time. The door panels don't always look or feel as if they're tabbed properly into place, but they do attach quite firmly. The legs aren't so lucky in robot mode, where the same panels either don't tab in at all, or only very loosely. Similarly, the chest doesn't really peg together, yet it does actually hold reasonably well. My main concern is the jointed parts the head is mounted on, since they include a very thin, cross-shaped section that also accommodates the shoulders' transformation joints via similarly slender protrusions. It's all flexible enough that it seems unlikely to break, but that flexibility feels like a weakness of its own. With such clever engineering on display, it would be a shame if poor choice of materials led to early breakages...
With a more streamlined backpack, it's sad to see that Jeep Bumblebee's arm articulation is still hampered by the car's front wheels behind his shoulders. Were it not for those, he'd have full 360° rotation via the shoulder ball joints but, as it stands, he has not much more than 180°, because the arms can't really move beyond the vertical, either up or down, and there's barely 90° range of swing out to the sides. There's an unrestricted rotation joint just below the bicep, the elbow has a range of nearly 180° (slightly over 90° forward, slightly less backward), but there's no wrist articulation to this figure. His waist joint - not actually needed for trainsformation - is limited to about 45° due to the backpack's transformation hinge, but the legs have fantastic range. Ball-jointed hips that can swing forward till they butt up against his chest, and back till they hit the car bonnet (or the steering wheel for the left leg) meaning a range of about 180°, heavily weighted in favour of forward motion. They can swing out well past the 45° point, but not quite fully out to the sides, and the upper thigh rotation joint can twist through about 180° before Bumblebee's thigh armour bumps up against his groin. The knees manage well over the requisite 90° but, with the joint right at the back of the leg sharing a hinge with the vehicle mode's seats, it looks as if they could have gone further had the seats been sacrificed. Bumblebee's ankles are a combination of a pinned joint at the base of the leg and a ball joint set within the foot. These grant full 360° rotation for the foot (required for transformation) as well as a decent range of tilt in all directions, limited mainly by the bulky bridge of his feet and the vehicle mode's rear bumper at the top of his heels. With quite a large, fairly square footprint, he has an incredibly stable base for a wide variety of poses, and all the joints are sufficiently tight to support them. Additionally, the head is handled in a very impressive way: the neck is mounted on a ball joint (which, in practice, only really allows for rotation, but is wobbly enough to allow a little tilt), but then has a dedicated hinge at the back of the head to allow Bumblebee to look directly upward.
My main gripe about the myriad Deluxe class movie Bumblebee toys is that they pretty much stopped doing anything innovative after the Revenge of the Fallen Battle Blade figure became the pinnacle ten years ago. In fact, both of the Studio Series Camaro Bumblebees - vintage and modern - as well as the VW Beetle version have, in some respects, taken a backward step in their engineering, with just as many faked parts as some of the older toys, and huge amounts of car shell getting folded up into backpacks. I'd be very keen to see Hasbro's designers take on the Age of Extinction version of Bumbleblee using SS Stinger's transformation, but with the relevant Camaro alternate mode - since we've already had Takara Tomy make a Stinger out of the AoE Bumblebee figure - if only because that would present something truly new for the character's transformation.
Aside from the wobbly construction, the only real problem with Offroad Bumblebee is that he shows how underwhelming the SS Beetle Bumblebee actually is, both in terms of his awkward transformation and the lack of screen accuracy. Putting them side by side, you can see that the earlier figure's head is undersized,
too. It's no surprise that a figure that hit retail well over a year before - and based upon pre-production artwork - turned out inaccurate, but it also did virtually nothing new in terms of transformation. The only thing that
version has over this one is that it came with a battlemask and a blade accessory, and this figure was even designed to accommodate the latter.
Offroad Bumblebee, meanwhile, has fewer accessories, feels like he's been put together with some very dodgy materials, and has a mediocre paint job, but it's detailed, poseable, innovative, tidy and a lot of fun to transform, not least because its backpack is far more streamlined and the overall process is less wasteful of its vehicle parts. In fact, had it been slightly larger, sturdier, better painted, and packaged with his wrist blade and a battlemask option, I would have said this figure - finally - may have presented a viable option for the best movie Bumblebee figure at the Deluxe class pricepoint, in the entire history of the toyline.
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